Cuba is the only country on Earth to which Americans cannot freely travel.
Absorb that inconvenient truth just for a moment.
Don't forget the Castro regime's terrible human rights abuses that have continued even after the death of longtime dictator Fidel Castro. Please do not forgive the injustices either-especially those that still take place.
The topic of Cuba is, for many, an intensely personal and painful topic as friends, relatives and loved ones have truly been harmed by a government that cares far more about consolidating its power and making its rulers wealthy than providing for its citizens.
No one is asking you to forget. No one is asking you to forgive.
Instead, just think.
Think for a moment about how Cuba is not the only country on Earth where those injustices take place. Yet, Cuba is the only place on Earth where the U.S. government tells its citizens that they can't visit.
Other countries like North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Angola and others may make it extremely impossible for Americans to visit, but Cuba is the only place on the planet that the U.S. government will say no. Still more places may be extremely inadvisable, and the U.S. government will warn but they will still allow.
...only Cuba, nowhere else.
North Korea can torture and starve its people while saber rattling their weapons program at American allies, but the U.S. government will not tell you that you cannot go there. Saudi Arabia can continue to have one of the worst human rights records on the planet, and the U.S. government will not stop you from visiting.
One section of the American government could decide to carpet bomb a hostile power tomorrow in any number of flare-up spots on the globe from the Middle East to Africa, but the U.S. State Department will not stop its citizens from being tourists to those same spots no matter how dangerous they are nor how hideous their human rights history might be.
It's just Cuba.
Why Cuba?
Don't forget that Cuba has done terrible things to its people or that they once held a nuclear arsenal at the faces of American citizens, many of whom remember all too well. Don't forgive them if you, like many, have a personal stake in seeing the current government lose even a modicum of its power.
Yet, at the same time, don't pretend it makes sense that only Cuba and no one else is off limits to American tourism. Don't pretend it's logical.
It's politics.
The Cuban Americans who hurt the most deeply from a solid red voting bloc in South Florida that offsets any purple or blue leanings the swing state might ever endure every four years? Trump made them a promise, and he's keeping it.
He made promises too, to power brokers in the GOP-Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Mario Diaz-Balart-courting votes for his healthcare proposal for assurances he would change course on America-to-Cuban travel.
This is politics, not logic, and it has the potential to severely harm the American travel industry while continuing a longstanding history of having no actual policy about the other nation other than pretending they don't exist just miles off our shores.
Robbing our citizens of the freedom to travel to Cuba has not made Cubans any freer. Embargos and sanctions have not moved the needle one iota in decades of foreign relations mismanagement.
Billions of dollars, thousands of jobs and American leadership-actual leadership-is at stake. Much of that is now in danger for no good reason.
It's just politics as usual.
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