Friday, October 31, 2008

I was heartened as I began reading Jorge Mas Santos's Oct. 25 op-ed column, "How to Win the Cuban American Vote," calling for a change in U.S. policy toward Cuba.

Unfortunately, by the time I finished the article, I realized that the head of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) was offering nothing more than the same old bromides.

Essentially, Mr. Mas Santos's argument was this: The United States should maintain the ineffective sanctions that have been in place against Cuba for nearly 50 years but should permit an ethnically based exception for Cuban Americans, and no other Americans, to travel to the island at will. As long as CANF insists on maintaining an embargo that is opposed by most Americans, Cuban Americans ought to be barred from visiting the island just as the rest of us are.

But the really right answer, to borrow a phrase from Colin Powell, is that it's time to end a mindless and ineffective embargo against a regime that poses no threat to the United States.

IDRIS M. DIAZ

Washington

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Jorge Mas Santos had at least one good suggestion for a new American administration's policy toward Cuba: It should lift the restrictions on travel to Cuba by Cuban Americans and on the remittances that they can send to their families on the island. Tightening the embargo against Cuba was a grievous mistake by the Bush administration.

But why limit the lifting of restrictions to Cuban Americans? What about other Americans? We don't want to get into opening up for tourism, of course, but surely we should go back to the situation that existed under the last years of the Clinton administration, with People-to-People travel and academic exchanges. Those were certainly helpful in getting America's message across and could be resumed, as travel to Cuba could be, with the stroke of a pen.

WAYNE S. SMITH

Washington

The writer was chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana from 1979 to 1982.