Obama's Historic Opportunity

Dear Friend:

President-elect Barack Obama will enter the White House on January 20, 2009 with a historic opportunity to do something that no president has been able to do in nearly fifty years.

He can govern and make policy toward Cuba and Latin America owing no debt of political obligation to the hard-liners in the Cuban-American exile community.

His victory demolished the self-justifying political logic that a candidate could not win Florida or the White House without signing up for the harshest possible policy against Cuba. In fact, he did exactly that.

Freed from this onerous political burden, he can rethink the failed and futile premise of this policy - regime change - and offer a new approach that advances the interests of the United States and the people of Cuba.

During the campaign, Mr. Obama promised to roll back restrictions imposed by President Bush that severely limited the ability of Cuban-American families to visit their relatives on Cuba and provide them financial support.

These rules were put into place to satisfy the hardest edge of the Cuban-American community five months before the 2004 election; those who continued to believe that economic sanctions would finally squeeze the Cuban people so badly, that they would rise up and challenge their government.

Just as Hurricane Katrina laid bare the ineffectiveness of the Bush domestic policy, Hurricanes Gustav and Ike revealed the cruelty and futility of the increasingly tightened sanctions policy.

After these storms walloped the island and devastated Cuban homes and food supplies, Cuban-Americans could do little to help their families. The U.S. embargo prevented the government of Cuba from buying needed supplies to reconstruct housing. And the very leaders who were supposed to be driven from office by our sanctions demonstrated before the storms the effectiveness of their civil defense strategy and then led the Cuban population's efforts at recovery and relief.

Obviously, these rules are inhumane and unjust and should be repealed at once. But the historic dimensions of the Obama victory should empower him to do more.

He should restore the constitutional right to travel so that every American can enjoy the right that Americans of Cuban descent have to visit Cuba.

He should get the Treasury Department out of the travel business, so that the faith community, the business community, artists and academics, cultural leaders and, yes, tourists, no longer have to apply to a government bureaucracy in the United States of America for permission to travel to Cuba - permission that is routinely denied.

He should remove restrictions on trade so that the American economy and the Cuban economy can enjoy the benefits that freer commerce can bestow - an increase in jobs and living standards, and the opportunity to learn and share ideas about innovation, management, environmental standards, working conditions, and the like.

Most of all, he should engage the government of Cuba in a manner that respects its sovereignty, just as our allies across the world do every day, especially if he believes - as he stressed in the campaign - in the kind of diplomacy that emphasizes negotiation as the means for settling disputes and differences. It is time to talk - without preconditions.

Were he to take these steps, he would lift an emotional burden from the Cuban-American community and give long-needed support to the moderates who have worked so hard and in difficult circumstances to reconcile Cuban families on both sides of the Florida Straits.

Were he to take these decisions, the impact on Cuba would be extraordinary, and he would give all Latin Americans, the leaders and the people, a new reason to engage with the United States.

The benefits of a broader agenda, and a sharp departure from the past, would be significant. However, this is a very ambitious agenda at a difficult time in our national life.

The new president has a financial crisis, two wars, and a great deal more on his plate. A fundamental change in Cuba policy will be hard to accomplish with so many other issues commanding his attention. But this is where the path should lead him after the courage Barack Obama exhibited this year in Miami and after the American people rewarded him so well for the history-making campaign that he ran.

Many of these issues and ideas are encompassed in the news summary that follows.

We cover the election results in Florida; the hopeful and optimistic reactions of the Cuban people; the statements of Latin American leaders urging a change in our policy; the threat of more hurricane damage to the island; the opportunity for increased trade, and more.

To read the entire November 7 Newsblast, click here.