4-25-09, 10:26 am

During his campaign and now in his first 100 days as president, Barack Obama has claimed a close affinity with the iconography and idealism of President John F. Kennedy and his family.

One portion of the Kennedy legacy that President Obama probably won't tie himself openly to is the Kennedy administration's treatment of Cuba. After the collapse of the Batista dictatorship and the rise of the Castro government in 1959, the subsequent failure of the CIA to overthrow the Castro government, the Kennedy administration put in place in 1962 the initial pieces of the US trade embargo against Cuba. One year later, President Kennedy imposed restrictions on travel to the island country by US citizens.

President Kennedy argued that the forced isolation of Cuba would cause the swift collapse of Castro's government.

Such a rationale has fueled US policy under successive administrations towards Cuba. Notably, Kennedy's executive orders became federal law in 1992 when passed by Congress. Four years later the Helms-Burton Act toughened the embargo, and in 2003 the Bush administration ordered restrictions on travel by Cuban Americans. Bush's Treasury Department also spent more staff power and resources on tracking down Americans who violated the embargo than on hunting down Al Qaeda assets.

Over those years, Cuban resistance to US power became an important symbol of sovereignty in the global non-aligned movement during the Cold War as well as for countries that were less than thrilled with US global influence ever since. This very year, in fact, US-Cuba relations moved to the center of inter-hemispheric politics as country after country in Latin America cited the issue as central to improving relations with the US.

The Kennedy administration's handling of the Cuba issue was not monolithic, however. A little-known disagreement between Robert F. Kennedy, then Attorney General, and President John F. Kennedy emerged on the specific question of restrictions on travel by US citizens to Cuba. Less than three weeks after President Kennedy's death in 1963, Attorney General Kennedy authored a memo to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, pressing him 'to withdraw the existing regulation prohibiting such trips.'

The memo, recently re-posted to the Web site of the National Security Archives (NSA), an academic organization that publishes declassified materials for research purposes, argued that the travel ban imposed by the Kennedy administration was a violation of 'American freedoms and impractical in terms of law enforcement,' the NSA noted.

Among the younger Kennedy's 'principal arguments' for removing the restrictions on travel to Cuba was notion that freedom to travel 'is more consistent with our views as a free society and would contrast with such things as the Berlin Wall and Communist controls on such travel.'

Of the two sides of this debate within the Kennedy administration, which too has persisted as a minority voice in Washington over the years, President Obama, this month, inclined toward Robert Kennedy's view when he signaled positive steps toward resolving hostile relations between the US and Cuba.

Prior to attending the Summit of the Americas this month, President Obama lifted the harshest restrictions imposed by the Bush administration in 2003 on travel by Cuban Americans to visit their families in Cuba. He furthered allowed Cuban Americans to send money to their families and opened the door for telecommunications companies to do business there. As the the Summit was set to open, one senior adminsitration official hinted that the president's opinion is that the US is 'on a path of changing the nature of our relationship with that country.'

At the conclusion of the Summit, President Obama told reporters that a change in policy towards Cuba is necessary. 'The policy that we've had in place for 50 years hasn’t worked the way we want it to,' he reasoned.

Of course, Obama added that 'the Cuban people are not free. And that's our lodestone, our North Star, when it come to our policy in Cuba.'

Still, 'it's important for us not to think that completely ignoring Cuba is somehow going to change policy,' Obama told reporters in Trinidad. 'The fact that you had Raul Castro say he's willing to have his government discuss with ours not just issues of lifting the embargo, but issues of human rights, political prisoners, that's a sign of progress.'

President Castro has since stated that an open a dialogue on human rights is a two-way street, pointing to the unfair trial of the Cuban Five and the use of torture on illegally occupied Cuban territory at Guantanamo. Castro further indicated that clemency for people the US government has labeled as political prisoners in Cuba might be forthcoming if the US offered to take those people in.

Despite the combative start, the signs show that a positive change in the US attitude and posture towards Cuba may be on the near horizon.

It is even possible that the next Summit of the Americas may include Cuba.

While it is easy to agree with the conclusions of both President Obama and former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy on a revised policy towards Cuba, it is worth expressing important differences with their shared rationale. It should be noted that, at 47 years, the US embargo and restrictions on travel to Cuba are the longest running impediments to freedoms enshrined as a basic human right in the UN's Declaration of Universal Human Rights. Thus, contrary to Kennedy's assertion, restrictions on the freedom of travel are obviously not an inherent characteristic of a communist government.

On the issue of human rights, the US government has a long way to go to reclaim a moral high ground. Just one recent example is the 2004 revelations of a systematic torture regime at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq along with the recent release of documents indicating that top Bush administration officials, including the president, signed off on a torture program. The beam in our eye, as Jesus might have suggested, has blinded us. Perhaps we should worry less about the speck in Cuba's eye.

The Obama administration's rhetorical gestures at and initial steps toward a changed relationship with Cuba should not be hampered by illogical and less than fully honest stances on human rights matters. Friendly relations with Cuba are what some in the political world call low-hanging fruit – easy to achieve and easy to reap rewards for all parties involved. So let's not waste the opportunity.