William M. LeoGrande [Dean, School of Public Affairs at American University]: “President Obama’s new regulations liberalizing travel to Cuba represent a key step forward in his policy of engagement. The new regulations eliminate the barriers to academic, educational, and cultural exchange imposed by President George W. Bush in 2003 and 2004. Those barriers eliminated most contact with Cuban civil society, which had expanded significantly under President Bill Clinton.

President Obama came to office having criticized U.S. policy toward Cuba for fifty years of failure, and promising to try something different. His goal was to improve inter-government relations by engaging in dialogue on issues of mutual interest, expanding people-to-people contacts, and creating conditions to encourage political and economic reform on the island. As first steps, in April 2009, he effectively eliminated all restrictions on Cuban-Americans’ right to travel to Cuba and to send remittances to family members. In May, he invited the Cuban government to resume regular diplomatic dialogue on immigration and other issues, an offer which Cuba accepted.

To the dismay of many supporters, however, the president did not roll back the Bush restrictions on people-to-people engagement at the same time he did it for Cuban-Americans. This created an anomalous situation in which Cuban-Americans could travel to Cuba freely, but other U.S. citizens and residents could not. As has so often been the case, domestic politics and opposition from Cuban-American members of Congress seemed to present an insurmountable obstacle to the president’s own prescription to try a new approach to Cuba. To minimize the political costs, President Obama quietly expanded academic and cultural exchanges during his first two years in office by simply granting licenses more liberally than his predecessor, rather than by changing the regulations. But the Bush regulations were so onerous that few U.S. academic institutions could operate in Cuba, and no educational travel at all was allowed outside of colleges and universities.

The new travel regulations announced this month essentially reinstate the Clinton era regulations on educational and cultural exchange, allowing non-governmental organizations like National Geographic to conduct educational trips to Cuba. If the experience of the Clinton years is any indicator, tens of thousands of U.S. citizens will take advantage of these opportunities annually. For colleges and universities, the new regulations go even farther, granting a general license for academic programs in Cuba and eliminating the logistical obstacles that the Bush regulations had imposed to suppress these programs. Only a handful of universities — including my own American University — managed to maintain study abroad programs in Cuba during the Bush years. Now, dozens of new programs will spring up and hundreds or even thousands more students will have an opportunity to study in Cuba.

Promulgating the new regulations required a degree of political courage in the face of opposition from Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), to whom Obama has looked for advice on policy toward Latin America in general and Cuba in particular. In the House of Representatives, the president faces a Republican majority that puts Cuban-American Ileana Ros Lehtinen (R-Fl) in the chair of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, where she can cause no end of mischief for the president’s foreign policy. The inability of Congressional Democrats to change the law on tourist travel to Cuba — which they tried to do in 2010 when they were in the majority — signals that even among Democrats, a more open policy toward Cuba has its critics. Finally, the ongoing imprisonment of U.S. AID contractor Alan Gross for entering Cuba illegally to distribute satellite cell phones to dissidents, makes any policy opening vulnerable to accusations of being “soft.”

On the other hand, momentous changes are underway in Cuba, and the lack of response from the Obama administration during 2010 gave the impression that the United States really had no policy at all other than to continue, by dint of inertia, the policies of the past. In July 2010, the Cuban government engaged in a dialogue with the Catholic Church that resulted in the release of 52 political prisoners — almost everyone identified by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience. In September, President Raúl Castro announced that the state sector of the economy would shrink almost immediately by 10 percent, and that most of the resulting unemployment would have to be absorbed by growth in the private sector. The Cubans also announced plans for a Congress of the Cuban Communist Party in April 2011 which will dramatically restructure Cuba’s economy– changes that reminded many observers of the early stages of China’s economic transformation.

Most specialists on Cuba believe that the island has embarked on a path of fundamental change. Washington risks becoming irrelevant to that process unless President Obama is willing to engage with Cuba more deeply than he has so far. The new travel regulations show that the president still believes engagement is the right strategy, and that he is willing to pay at least some political price in order to pursue it. Change in Cuba will be determined first and foremost by conditions on the island, but the international environment Cuba faces will also shape that process. The United States can play a positive role through deeper engagement, or it can stand on the sidelines. “We’ve been engaged in a failed policy with Cuba for the last 50 years, and we need to change it,” Barack Obama declared during the presidential campaign. He was right, and now he needs to get on with it.”