Cuba and cash

Re “It’s a start,” editorial, Aug. 25

Why lift any of the travel and economic bans on Cuba, as your editorial recommends, if the increased economic infusion will only be received and controlled by the very oppressive regime you acknowledge “only” threatens its own people?

If the stated purpose of these bans is to topple the Fidel Castro dictatorship, they have clearly failed. But so have 50 years of Canadian, European and Latin American engagement and tourism.

Change in Cuba will come from within, from those on the island. It will not be fostered either by external embargoes or nurtured by hordes of pale tourists basking on the beach.

Lifting these restrictions will only help maintain a dictatorship in power and remove one of the few American foreign policies resting on any moral foundation.

Alberto F.

Montero Valdes

Miami

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You are right that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) doesn’t go far enough. Everyone should be able to visit Cuba and see it for themselves. We can freely visit China and Vietnam, which have the same kind of political system as Cuba. The best way to bring freedom to Cuba is by practicing what we preach: allowing everyone from the U.S. to freely visit Cuba, and also allowing Cubans from the island to freely visit the U.S.

Walter Lippmann

Los Angeles