• Submitted by: manso
• United States
• Politics and Government
• 08 / 24 / 2010

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After it looked a couple of months ago as if a bill lifting the ban on U.S. travel to Cuba had the momentum to pass Congress, it now appears stalled in the House of Representatives. The bill, which would also make food sales to Cuba easier, cleared the House Agriculture Committee but still needs a vote in two other committees - Financial Services and Foreign Affairs - and it may not even come up for a full vote this year.

So as reports surface that the Obama Administration plans on its own to expand legal travel opportunities to Cuba, the question is whether such a move will spur or spoil the House bill - whose passage would mark the biggest shift in U.S. Cuba policy since a trade embargo was issued against the communist island in 1962.

President Obama, according to Administration and congressional sources, intends before the year is out to loosen restrictions on visits to Cuba by U.S. students, entertainers and other goodwill ambassadors. Backers of increased American engagement with Cuba applaud the proposal, which is part of the President's executive prerogative under the embargo. In reality, the action would simply be taking U.S. policy back to the Clinton Administration, before former President George W. Bush all but froze that kind of people-to-people contact with Cuba. But it's less clear if Obama intends his new regulations to be a signal of support for eliminating the entire travel ban - which only Congress can do - or an unspoken message that this is as far as he wants to take the battle against the embargo's dogged supporters on Capitol Hill.

The bill's bipartisan backers, not surprisingly, see it as the former. House staffers say the White House Cuba regulations will be a shot in the arm for the broader travel legislation when Congress returns from its recess next month. Embargo foes agree. "This is the Administration essentially saying, 'We've done what we can, and now we want Congress to take the larger step,'" says Jake Colvin, vice president for global trade issues at the independent National Foreign Trade Council in Washington, D.C. "This bill still has a lot of hurdles, but this implicit White House support gives it momentum again."

Echoing the optimism is Patrick Kilbride, senior director for the Americas at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The organization represents a sizable bloc of farmers and businesspeople, many of them Republican-aligned, who want the Cuba embargo scrapped so they can reap the $1 billion in annual sales to the island that a recent Texas A&M University study says they're losing out on. "We think these new [travel] steps are a very positive signal that the [Administration] would like to move forward" to lift the full travel ban, says Kilbride. He also confirms that the chamber is considering scoring the votes of Representatives and Senators if and when the bill finally hits their floors.

The House bill seems slowed at this point by more serious opposition from the chamber's pro-embargo forces and especially the pro-embargo lobby, led by the US-Cuba Democracy PAC, a major contributor to congressional campaigns. The Senate version, which deals only with the travel ban, has yet to get a Foreign Relations Committee vote and most likely faces a filibuster from pro-embargo Senators if it can ever get to the full chamber.

But another reason to be confident, says Colvin, is that "this is the best diplomatic environment we've seen in a long time" for dismantling the embargo. Obama last year had left the ball in Havana's court when he reversed his predecessor's policy and let Cuban Americans travel and send remittances more freely to Cuba. RaÚl's prisoner release, say diplomats, now makes the next move Obama's, and many see his new travel regulations as part of that.

Proponents of doing just that insist there's more consensus than ever in the U.S. to ditch the Cuba embargo and its travel ban, which, after almost 50 years, have utterly failed. Opening Cuba to Americans, they believe, will do more to stimulate democratization there than isolating it has. Even a majority of Cuban Americans now agree.

Still, for all the good vibes the bill's backers feel from the White House right now, some note warily that Obama has been loath to spend political capital in Cuba, or the rest of Latin America for that matter. Critics, for example, point to his decision last year to stop applying pressure against coup leaders in Honduras, who'd ousted a leftist President, when conservative Republicans in Congress objected.

Embargo supporters, including Cuban-American Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, a Democrat, are already blasting Obama's plans to relax Cuba travel.

But Democratic Congressman Howard Berman of California, a co-sponsor of the bill, says tearing down the travel ban is about more than Cuban rights - it's also about the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens to travel freely abroad. "Letting U.S. citizens travel to Cuba." Berman said after the House committee vote this summer. "It's time to trust our own people and restore their right to travel." It's the sort of argument Obama usually agrees with. But now he may need to show how strongly he concurs when Congress returns next month.

Time.com

By TIM PADGETT / MIAMI Tim Padgett / Miami – Mon Aug 23, 8:50 am ET

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20100823/