Word: embargos
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...mediator whenever they need to talk. But maybe - finally - things might change. On April 13 President Barack Obama announced that he would lift some longstanding restrictions, allowing Cuban Americans to visit and send remittances to their families and easing - but not removing - the 47-year-old economic embargo on the island nation. (Read "Will Obama Open Up All U.S. Travel to Cuba...
Then came the Cuban Revolution and everything changed. It took multiple years and a few attempts but on Jan. 1, 1959 Fidel Castro and his band of guerillas successfully overthrew the government of President General Fulgencio Batista. The United States - which supported Castro by imposing a 1958 arms embargo against Batista's government - immediately recognized the new regime, although it expressed some misgivings over the revolutionaries' execution of over 500 pro-Batista supporters and Castro's increasingly obvious communist tendencies. Castro visited the U.S. just three months after coming to power, touring Washington monuments and meeting with Vice President Richard...
...that the embargo gives Obama and the U.S. as much leverage as they might think. What Obama will find in Trinidad is that the embargo is "the single most unpopular policy in the hemisphere," says Erikson. And with or without democratic reform, Cuba is being brought back into the Latin American fold; last year it was invited into the Rio Group, one of the region's major organizations. Still, Erikson adds, most of Latin America has a positive impression of Obama, which will make it harder for the Castros to ignore or even rebuff his overtures. "They recognize that Obama...
...staunch opposition of Cuban-American pols like New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez and Florida Senator Mel Martinez to the bill that would end the travel ban. But even they know momentum is building inside the Beltway, as prominent Senators like Indiana's Richard Lugar now argue that the Cuban embargo has been a failure. Obama didn't need the once indispensable Cuban-American vote to win Florida's critical electoral votes in last year's presidential race, and the Cuban-American Foundation - a once hard-line exile group in Miami - issued a white paper last week calling for engagement over...
More important, getting Cuba right could resonate for Obama well beyond the Florida Straits. "Obama has made it very clear to the world that he cares about how U.S. foreign policy is perceived around the globe," says Erikson. "Given that the embargo is one of the most unpopular policies the U.S. practices in the world, with the United Nations voting 185 to 3 last year to condemn it, he risks making his Administration look a lot like the Bush Administration if he hangs on to it." That may not be the conclusion Obama comes to this week...