Biden Is Right: We Shouldn’t Restrict Americans in the Name of Liberating Cuba

The White House on Monday announced welcome changes to America’s long-contentious policy toward Cuba. It will now be easier for Americans to travel and send money to the communist island, and easier for Cubans to escape to the United States.

The move reinstates the Cuban Family Reunification Parole Program, which from 2007 to 2016 allowed up to 20,000 Cubans per year to come and stay in the U.S. while applying for permanent legal resident status. It also removes the $1,000-per-quarter restriction on how much money Americans can send to family, friends, and private entities across the Florida Straits.

The liberalizations, which came after a lengthy policy review, came under attack not just from Republicans, for whom (with the exception of the occasional Jeff Flake) support of the six-decade U.S. embargo has become a litmus test, but also from the influential Cuban-American chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Mendendez (D–N.J.). Menendez’s arguments, versions of which are common to foreign policy discussions of countries like Russia and China, are worth considering at length.

“Today’s announcement risks sending the wrong message to the wrong people, at the wrong time and for all the wrong reasons,” the senator declared in a statement. “I am dismayed to learn the Biden administration will begin authorizing group travel to Cuba through visits akin to tourism. To be clear, those who still believe that increasing travel will breed democracy in Cuba are simply in a state of denial. For decades, the world has been traveling to Cuba and nothing has changed. For years, the United States foolishly eased travel restrictions arguing millions of American dollars would bring about freedom and nothing changed. And as I warned then, the regime ultimately laughed off any promises of loosening its iron grip on the Cuban people and we ended up helping fund the machinery behind their continued oppression.”

It is rare to stuff so many bad foreign policy arguments into one paragraph. Start with this notion—simultaneously a strawman, an unreasonable standard, and a bait-and-switch—of travel (or any other