A New Opportunity for the Cuba Reconciliation Act

For the last several years, U.S. Representative Jose Serrano (D, NY-16) has brought the Cuba Reconciliation Act before the House and urged its passing without success. Its intent? “To lift the trade embargo on Cuba, and for other purposes.” This year it was slated under H.R. 188 and introduced on January 6, 2009—the first day of the 111^th Congress.

This is no small bill. If it passes, a number of long-standing laws on trade with Cuba will be repealed (including the well-known Helms-Burton Act), and the “other purposes” left unexplained in the bill’s summary line are no less momentous. One is to open travel to and from Cuba by U.S. citizens and residents, an initiative supported by and detailed more explicitly in the recently introduced H.R. 874, the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act—a bill put forward by a coalition of four Democrats and four Republicans a few days ago. 

Table for a moment any distrust of the Castro regime, outrage at human rights abuses by the government or discomfort that the last non-democratic state in the Western Hemisphere may elicit. These matters, though important, are irrelevant to the issues of the embargo and of U.S.-Cuba travel. Policy analysts, businesses, academics, and increasingly, the Cuban-American community and the general U.S. public recognize that the embargo was a failure of a policy, and support its lifting. As to travel: the United States allows its citizens to travel to and from every country in the world except Cuba, a country 90 miles from our shores. If the U.S. Government has a problem with the Castros, let it be sure that the search for a solution does not restrict the rights of U.S. citizens.

H.R. 188 seems to be sitting tight in several committees for now, but stay posted on its movement here. This is a year of transition, after all, and one with an administration that looks far more likely to open up lines of communication between the United States and Cuba. This could be the year for Serrano’s Act.