The White House announced today that President Obama has instructed his administration to take steps to ease travel restrictions for Americans who want to visit Cuba. Immediate action is being taken to allow unlimited travel and money transfers by Cuban Americans to families on the island.
The professed reason for making the changes is, of course, to bring pressure on Castro's regime by letting everyday Cubans see how wonderful Americans and their money really are, thus they'll want more freedom and the government will fall, blahblahblahblah. Whatever. Cuba isn't exactly a threat to the United States, so the trade embargo hasn't made sense in decades, a forgotten leftover of the Cold War, especially ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Here's how little sense the embargo of Cuba makes: we're supposedly "punishing" Cuba for having a communist government, but our largest trading partner is China, which is also the largest communist country on the planet. Does not compute.
What I want to know now is when the trade restrictions will be lifted. I've always heard that Cuban rum is by far the best in the world, so here's hoping for a taste test within the next year.