Let's Let Americans Travel to Cuba Again

During the presidential campaign, now President-elect Barack Obama pledged to lift current U.S. rules restricting travel to Cuba. "The primary means we have of encouraging positive change in Cuba today is to help the Cuban people become less dependent on the Castro regime in fundamental ways," Obama wrote in a Miami Herald opinion piece back in August.

Obama was primarily addressing restrictions on Cuban-Americans visiting their relatives and sending money back to their families, but as the Los Angeles Times opined this summer, Obama should be even bolder and let ALL Americans travel to Cuba.

Make no mistake: Cuba's government is politically repressive of its citizens and no friend of the United States, but the same can be said of many nations in the world that Americans are nonetheless free to visit. Decades of embargoes have done nothing but entrench the Castros, and it's time to try a different approach.

Travel writer David Appell makes a strong case for opening Cuba back up to travel from the U.S. in the Huffington Post, and you can learn more about travel to Havana and beyond in my Cuba Travel Guide.