I joust when the Obama government announces the raising of the restrictions on trips and mailing of money to Cuba, this article of Maria Helen Salinas receives enormous actuality

The administration Obama is in the process of analyzing the complex relation that the United States has had with Cuba during the last five decades, and there are signs in the horizon of a change of politics.

An American congressional delegation traveled to the island last week and supported conversations with the Cuban president Raúl Castro. Three members of the delegation met the convalescent ex-leader Fidel Castro, who according to them turns out to be quite healthy and lucid. Will it be that in fact he is alive?

The proper President Barack Obama gave the first steps to raise the restrictions to Cuban-American families of traveling and sending remittances to the island. There has interfered a legislation that, between other things, would raise the restrictions of trip to Cuba for all the Americans.

But the prop of the North American politics towards Cuba takes root principally in the sequestration imposed from 1962. Since then the powerful Cuban community in the exile, across effective lobbying efforts, has managed to influence the politics of Washington.

Nevertheless, the feelings have changed with regard to the sequestration. While the majority of Cuban - American keeps on repudiating to the communist diet in the island, an increasing number seems to have realized that the sequestration will not bring such wished changes to his dear homeland. The last opinion poll realized by the International university of the Florida, in Miami, shows that 55 per cent of Cuban - American favor the completion of the sequestration, more than the 42-year ago-old per cent; and 65 per cent they are in favor of formalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba.

A Cuban-American woman, who came to the United States with his family at the age of 2, he wrote a letter to senator Mel Martínez in which it expresses a vision shared by a high number of exiles but rarely expressed by fear to be excluded by the “old guard”.
“ My father and our family were deprived of his business and of his property before we were going away of Cuba. The feeling anticastrista has been predominant and strong in our family, and it it is still”, she wrote. His father, now of 81 years, and she of almost 50, they have not returned to Cuba and do not hope to see his homeland again. Nevertheless, he keeps on saying in the letter: "The sequestration has not made the democracy possible in Cuba and it will not do it”.

A mother of two daughters in his 20 years, who belongs to a generation who thinks that the sequestration “does not serve for anything”, urges the senator to vote to raise the sequestration. In words of this younger generation, she says: "Leave it behind”.

The General Secretary of the OEA, José Miguel Insulza, highlights that 32 of 34 countries in the hemisphere have diplomatic relations with Cuba. The newly elect president of El Salvador, Mauricio Funes, has promised to restore relations with Cuba after assuming the charge, so in June there will only be a country in the continent that does not have them: The United States.

One does not hope that the United States goes very far in normalizing the relations with Cuba without demanding any democratic changes in the country or asking at least for the political prisoners liberation. And other countries in the continent should not of demanding it also.

The truth is that Cuba is now the only country in the continent that does not have a government chosen democratically. Castro has been headed by the dictatorship during five decades. It keeps on having to hundreds of political prisoners. He denies fundamental rights to his citizens, restricts the trips inside the country and towards the foreigner, allows freedom of expression neither to the citizens, nor freedom of the press, nor freedom of meeting, nor even free access to Internet.

Till now the Cuban government blames to the called North American "blockade" for the scarcity. The day that the "blockade" does not exist any more, the Cuban people perhaps realizes that it is not the “capitalist monster” the one that has been his “executioner,” but a totalitarian government that his yoke refuses to slacken for the sake of its own people.

S Ì, the United States needs that the sequestration “stays behind” and must analyze well it it has worked or has not worked of the sequestration, but it is an hour also that Cuba releases the reins of his dictatorship if he wants to be a part of the family of democratic countries in the western hemisphere.


(c) 2008 by Maria Helen Salinas.