On the eve of a presidential forum targeting Hispanic voters, Democratic candidate Chris Dodd seeks to one-up his more popular rivals by coming to Miami today to demand an end to the trade embargo with Cuba.[..]
In a statement given Friday to The Miami Herald, Dodd favors opening a U.S. embassy in Havana, allowing Americans to do business there, and nixing TV Martí, the U.S.-funded broadcast routinely blocked by Cuba.
''I believe the time has come to say publicly what many Americans believe -- our Cuba policy has neither served America's interests nor brought democracy to Cuba,'' reads the speech Dodd plans to give in Miami today. ``It has only served to strengthen the current regime. It has been an abject failure.''
While this stance is clearly not going to popular with some of the hardliners of the Miami Cuban community, Steve Clemons of the Washington Note praised it as "adult foreign policy":
Dodd set the gold standard in my view in articulating a policy that wasn't all warm and fuzzy about Castro but that spoke to America's 21st century economic and national security interests with Cuba in contrast to those who want to keep US-Cuba relations cocooned in an anachronistic Cold War era framework that has little relevancy today.
Dodd wants to end the many decades old embargo. He wants to remove all travel restrictions -- and he wants to see commerce and trade begin to flow. He wants American people to meet Cubans and wants to trigger an arbitrage between the norms of our society and theirs. That is the American way. That's what we did with China.
