MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Bipartisan support in US to lift travel restrictions to Cuba

United States senators from both parties, backed by activists and businessmen, began promoting a bill this week to lift travel restrictions to Cuba, and apparently have the necessary votes for approval.

At a Capitol press conference, four senators – two Democrats and two Republicans – said that the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act of 2009 seeks to begin to correct what North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan called a “failed policy that has failed for 50 years.”

The bill’s other co-sponsors are Sens. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and Chris Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut.

“Totalitarian regimes fear the light,” Dodd said, contending that the bill would permit a direct exchange between US citizens and the Cuban people.

Reps. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) plan to present a companion bill in the House of Representatives.

In 2003, Enzi headed a similar effort because he felt that the US policy of trying to economically strangle Cuba was only prolonging the misery of the totalitarian-family ruled island’s 11 million people.

The American Farm Bureau Federation and the US Chamber of Commerce support the inisitiave.

AFBF president Bob Stallman said that US farm exports to Cuba, which mainly consist of poultry, wheat, soybeans, rice and dairy products, have totalled an average of 400 million US dollars annually since 2000, and will expand even more without the restrictions.

Meanwhile, Jose Miguel Vivanco, director for Human Rights Watch, said that although human rights conditions in Cuba have not improved since Raul Castro assumed power from ailing older brother Fidel, the US economic embargo had strengthened, rather than weakened, the Havana regime.

This is not the first time that the US Congress has tried to implement a change in US policy toward Cuba, but supporters of the initiative feel the moment has arrived since both houses of Congress and the White House are under Democrat control.

In early March President Barack Obama signed a bill that eased travel restrictions on Cuban Americans that had been imposed by the Bush administration in 2004. However the changes to restrictions are set to expire September 30.

Not everything has been said yet on the subject, however, and legislators of Cuban origin, among them Senator Mel Martinez, have made clear that they oppose any unilateral change by Washington without demanding something in return from the Cuban “oppressors” in Havana.

“This is the time to support pro-democracy activists in Cuba, not provide the Castro regime with a resource windfall” the Florida Republican said in a statement.

He noted that 54 of the 75 Cuban dissidents arrested during the “Black Spring” in 2003 remain in prison.