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V. Conclusion

In December 1999, at the height of the controversy surrounding Elian González, the six-year-old prevented by his Miami relatives from returning to his father in Cuba, President Fidel Castro stood before a group of school children who had been protesting outside the U.S. Interests Section in Havana and declared:

The policy pursued by the Revolution is that anyone who wants to leave our country and go somewhere else can do so if they are given permission to enter the other country.  Our country does not prevent any family from emigrating, because the construction of a revolutionary and just society in socialism is a voluntary and free decision.²⁰³

It was a sound rationale for a sound policy.  But, as this report has shown, it was pure fiction.  Cuba routinely denies its citizens the right to leave their country.  It also prevents many from returning.  The result is the forced separation of families.  Given the hardship that this separation can cause, Cuba’s true travel policy provides the government a powerful tool for punishing defectors and silencing critics.  And it offers stark evidence that Castro’s brand of “socialism” is, for large numbers of Cubans, neither “voluntary” nor based on “free decision.”  

The Bush administration, meanwhile, has committed itself to promoting a “free Cuba.”  Yet it insists on doing so through an embargo policy that has already accumulated a four-decade track record of failure.   Rather than seek a new, more effective approach to advancing democracy on the island, the administration has reinforced a fundamentally inhumane feature of the old one.  In the name of promoting freedom in Cuba, the United States has undermined a basic freedom of hundreds of thousands of Cuban Americans.  And, in so doing, it has inflicted profound—and in some cases irreparable—harm on countless Cuban families.

The challenge of constructing a more open and just society in Cuba is an urgent one.  The solution, however, cannot be based on the disregard for the rights of individuals or the welfare of families.  It is time for both the Cuban and the U.S. governments to end their inhumane travel policies.