Will Obama ease travel restrictions to Cuba?

Omar Gonzalez's grandfather is ill and his condition is getting worse. The Perris, Calif. man doesn't know how much time his grandfather has to live.
He traveled to Cuba in August to visit him. But U.S. law prohibits another visit until 2011. Cuban-Americans can only visit family members once every three years.
Gonzalez, 30, and other Cuban-Americans are buoyed by President-elect Barack Obama's campaign promise to lift travel restrictions for family members and to end the $100 monthly limit on remittances that U.S. residents can send to family in Cuba. He hopes it allows him to see his sick grandfather at least one more time.
"The United States is trying to suffocate Castro and his government, but the United States is not suffocating Castro," Gonzalez's wife, Zaima, said. "They're suffocating the people who have family members in Cuba. The government will survive."
The United States has been trying for almost a half century to topple Cuba's government through embargoes, travel bans, an invasion and other measures. Nothing has worked.
President George W. Bush hardened restrictions in 2004, when he reduced family travel from once a year to once every three years and limited visits to immediate family members. The Bush administration also restricted Cuban-Americans from sending remittances outside their immediate family.
Sergio Montoto, of Riverside, Calif., supports the restrictions.
"If the government hasn't really changed," Montoto said, referring to Raul Castro assuming the presidency from his brother Fidel last year, "why should I travel there and leave money for the government to hurt Cubans? The money helps keep them in power."
Montoto, 56, who emigrated to the United States in 1979, is so strongly opposed to travel to Cuba that he did not attend his parents' 2004 funerals and won't visit his brother and nephew.
A decade or two ago, Montoto's hard-line position represented the opinions of a clear majority of Cuban-Americans, said Benjamin Bishin, an associate professor of political science at UC Riverside.
But when Bishin and a University of Miami counterpart conducted a recent poll of Cuban-American citizen voters in Miami-Dade County, half supported easing or eliminating travel and remittance restrictions. Almost as many want to end or limit the U.S. economic embargo that bars most U.S. trade and investment with Cuba, the poll found.
Miami-area Cubans -- especially earlier immigrants who are citizens and vote -- tend to be more conservative than Cuban-Americans elsewhere, meaning that, nationally, most Cubans now probably support a loosening of restrictions, Bishin said.
The shift in opinion reflects the less hard-line positions generally taken by younger Cuban-Americans and more recent immigrants, he said. Fidel Castro's resignation as president may also play a role, he said.
The Gonzalezes, who lived in Miami before moving to California, said people with close family members still on the island are more likely to support greater travel.
A few months after Omar Gonzalez visited Cuba in 2005, his mother had breast-cancer surgery. U.S. law prevented Gonzalez from visiting her. Gonzalez said it was wrenching for him to be in Perris instead of by his mother's side.
Gonzalez doesn't understand arguments that travel to Cuba strengthens the government there. Companies from around the world invest there, and tourists -- including some Americans who travel to Cuba illegally, through Canada or Mexico -- already spend money there, he said.
"The law is pointless," Gonzalez said.
Rudy Ruibal, 81, said he hoped that after Obama eases travel and remittance restrictions, he'll lift the embargo.
The Castros have long used the embargo to blame the United States for problems Cuba suffers, said the Riverside man, who emigrated from Cuba in 1959. Cubans have always distrusted the United States because of U.S. military intervention in Cuba and U.S. support for dictators like Fulgencio Batista, whom Castro overthrew in 1959, he said. So it was easy for Castro to point to the embargo as yet another U.S. intervention.
"I always thought the embargo was the stupidest thing the United States could do," Ruibal said.
E-mail David Olson at dolson(at)PE.com

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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