'Why Cuba and Why Now'

Um artigo de Elise Labott, em CNNpolitics.com:

«Just days before traveling to Trinidad and Tobago for the Summit of the Americas, President Obama has lifted some travel and financial restrictions on Cuban Americans with family back in Cuba.

Now Cuban Americans will be able to visit their family back home and send them money, which many Cubans on the island depend on in the face of a stiff economic embargo.

Many in the U.S. Cuban American community went along with the Bush administration crackdown on those remittances and travel, because they believed it would squeeze the regime, which skims from the payments and tourist revenue.

But countries like oil-rich Venezuela were making up the difference with cash payments to the Castro regime. Cuban Americans were prepared to sacrifice seeing their families and sending money for a greater purpose, but that wasn’t working. So now they have been pushing for an end to the restrictions.

Lifting restrictions will be a step-by-step process. This issue is a political hot button, so administration officials say President Obama is going to start with what is most palatable politically. The administration doesn’t see the narrow lifting of restrictions as very contentious with Congress. A full lifting of the travel embargo would be a “natural next step,” one senior official said, but the administration wants to see how this initial move goes first.

The administration is not planning to make Cuba a big issue at the Summit of the Americas. It expects countries like Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua to raise the issue, because they are trying to bring Cuba back to the summit and into the Organization of American States.

The US is not prepared to do that yet, because Cuba does not exactly fit the description of a democracy. But officials said the US will be looking to see the message Cuba will be sending through these countries. The Cubans have been meeting with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and others before the summit — and the US expects that Cuba is preaching to these nations that they should be less aggressive than in the past about pushing the US to change the way it responds to Cuba.»