Next Year in Havana? Ending the U.S. Travel Ban

Next Year in Havana? Ending the U.S. Travel Ban Should Be First Step in Normalizing Relations with Cuba

Next year will mark a half-century since the Bay of Pigs, the failed assault on Fidel Castro’s young regime in Cuba that helped ignite the long cold war across the Straits of Florida. Although Castro himself has largely disappeared from the public stage, replaced at the helm by his brother Raúl, most Americans still think of Cuba as the dictatorship that time forgot – a poor, sweltering island of rusted 1950s-era automobiles that clings against all sense to the decaying vestiges of Communist orthodoxy.

Maybe once, but no longer. As the U.S. Congress considers legislation that would lift the 50-year-old travel ban to Cuba – permitting all Americans, not just those of Cuban descent, unrestricted travel to the island – Cuba is positioning itself for a Vietnam- or China-style economic leap forward.

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This analysis was prepared by COHA Visiting Scholar Timothy Ashby

ENDS

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