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Obama lifts restrictions in Cuba
Cubans applauded the passage of a bill today by U.S. Congress that would ease some travel and trade restrictions against the communist island. They hope for more changes under President Barack Obama.
The bill, which appropriates $410 billion to fund the U.S. government, includes provisions allowing Cuban-Americans to visit their families in Cuba more frequently and makes it easier to sell agricultural and medical goods to Cuba.
It undoes some Bush administration rules that toughened the 47-year-old U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, a Cold War policy which Havana blames for the perennial economic woes afflicting the island just 90 miles (145 km) from Florida.
In Miami, there were mixed reactions from the Cuban exile community, which is split between those who favor greater contact and opening between Washington and Havana and some anti-communist hard-liners who oppose any easing of U.S. sanctions on Cuba under the rule of Fidel and Raul Castro.
The bill, which Obama still must sign into law, would allow Cuban-Americans to visit the island annually instead of once every three years as the Bush government mandated. They could also stay longer than the current two weeks.
"People-to-people contact is the number one factor of change in a closed society like the one in Cuba. It’s also the right of a Cuban to be able to return to his country," Ramon Saul Sanchez, head of the Democracy Movement, said in Miami.
He urged President Obama to use his authority to completely lift restrictions on travel. "He can do it with the stroke of a pen," he said.
Source: Reuters
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