I don’t believe I’ve ever mentioned this subject before, so it probably appears to be coming out of the blue, but I really liked what Kevin Drum had to say earlier this week about Cuba, and thought it warranted repeating:

I’m opposed to the Cuba embargo because I think it’s foolish policy. But I’m really, really opposed to travel restrictions to Cuba. If the Cuban government wants to keep us out of Cuba, that’s one thing. Cuba is a dictatorship, after all. But the United States isn’t, and my government has no right to restrict where I go. Period. The travel embargo is a policy that fits the old Soviet Union better than it does the United States. America is a free country and American citizens should be allowed to travel anywhere they want.

Hear, hear! I’ve never understood our policies toward Cuba, going all the way back to a tenth-grade social studies course where I shocked my conservative, old-school, red-baiting teacher by questioning why we needed to be afraid of this tiny, impoverished country just because they had a different system of government from ourselves. Maybe the embargo and travel restrictions made sense during the dark days immediately after the revolution and the Missile Crisis, but the Cold War ended 20 years ago. Castro’s Soviet sponsors are long gone, we’ve been trading freely with Communist China since the 1970s, and American tourists are taking pictures of themselves in the Cu Chi tunnels of Vietnam. Vietnam, for God’s sake. So why is Cuba quarantined as if the whole island is radioactive? It’s not like the embargo has even accomplished anything — Fidel and his brother remain firmly in charge after decades. They’re down there laughing at the impotent giant to the north. And maybe that’s the real reason we stubbornly carry on with a policy that was formulated in the Mad Men era: pride. We don’t want to concede defeat to the hairy little revolutionary who put a stop to the hedonistic party zone we previously enjoyed just 90 miles from our shores. Either that or our politicians are too afraid of angering the Cuban-American voters in Florida, which is probably more the case. Either way, I think it’s stupid to prolong these policies. I hope it’ll be possible before too much longer for me to visit Hemingway’s old house, enjoy a legendary Cuban cigar and a mojito, and marvel at the ancient Detroit steel that supposedly still roams the frozen-in-time streets of Havana.

As for Drum’s comment about Americans traveling anywhere they like without a hassle, I say hell yes! I don’t even like the fact that we now need passports to visit Canada and Mexico. We’re supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave, but I think we’ve let our post-9/11 fears push us uncomfortably down the road to becoming a “papers, please” society like the ones that were always the bad places in the movies I grew up on…