Baby Step in Easing Cuba Policy

Any relaxation of Washington’s rigid, 40-year-old Cuban policy is welcome, and the latest example, although it might seem insignificant, is to be commended. This week the Clinton administration authorized charter flights to Cuba from New York and Los Angeles.

The development, a potential benefit to the approximately 60,000 Cuban Americans who live in Southern California, illustrates again that the Cuba policy is in dire need of overhaul. Air travel to Cuba is severely restricted for U.S. citizens. Only journalists, government officials and U.S. residents with relatives in Cuba have automatic permission to go there.

Ever since 1982, when the Treasury Department reimposed travel restrictions in a move designed to tighten the 1960 economic embargo, Americans who want to do business on the island have had to break the law. Executives often travel to Cuba via Mexico but find this to be of limited usefulness since any face-to-face follow-up requires that the circuitous process be repeated.

The problem in terms of policy is that Congress, influenced by Florida’s vocal anti-Castro population, cannot come to see that the aging dictator’s time is over and that the United States, with its embargo and the trade-restrictive Helms-Burton Act, is losing political influence there while making the lives of Cubans miserable. Money sent by Cuban Americans to their families across the Florida straits is the main source of income. Coming this way, small-scale embargo-busting is rampant--witness the Cuban cigars in the smart shops in Beverly Hills.

Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) and others are right in calling for an end to the embargo. This is the time to move. Communism and Fidel Castro will be judged by history.