Monday, October 27, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: End Cuban travel ban

House, Senate agree to lift restrictions

The regime of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro Ruz is brutal and repressive. On top of everything else, it's racist -- Cuba is now a majority Afro-Cuban nation, but the lighter-skinned ruling regime reserves the harshest penalties for black political dissidents, who clog the island's jails.

Yes, we've all seen the regime's cynical efforts at duping gullible foreign visitors into believing the aging partisan presides over a happy land with no prostitution and "free medical care."

The truth is, although Cuba was the wealthiest and most "first world" country in Latin America in 1959, the death rate for children aged 1 to 4 is now 34 percent higher than in the United States, while the island's maternal mortality rate is "almost four times higher" than in the United States, according to Cuban-born physician Miguel Faria Jr., a retired clinical professor of neurosurgery who was lucky enough to be spirited out of that island nation by his father -- also a physician -- 37 years ago.

But the question at hand is whether the United States should maintain a theoretical ban on travel to the island nation, now in place some 40 years, on the theory that by boycotting Castro's economy and depriving him of foreign tourist income we will soon bring him to his knees and restore freedom, capitalism and drive-through sports betting.

Brushing aside veto threats from the White House, the U.S. Senate last Thursday joined the House in voting to end the long-standing travel restrictions.

Foes of the restrictions, many of whom represent states that want to sell agricultural and other products to Cuba, argued that the constraints hurt the United States more than Cuba and help Castro by enabling him to blame the United States for his country's problems.

In fact, the "Cuban embargo" now leaks like a sieve, anyway. An estimated 160,000 Americans, many of them with relatives in Cuba, traveled legally to Cuba last year under exceptions to the travel restrictions; thousands more are believed to have "illegally" routed there through third countries.

The best way to give the lie to Castro's malarkey and free the Cuban people is to allow them to see the affluence which capitalism and relative freedom have brought to their former countrymen here. Far from cutting them off, we should smuggle them radios and little pocket televisions on which they can finally get a glimpse of how far the free world has progressed in 40 years.

Not only will the tyrant Castro no longer be able to keep them down on the farm -- he'll be lucky not to end up an embalmed tourist attraction, like the yellowing cadaver of his buddy Lenin in Red Square.