Cancel the prohibition against US residents traveling to Cuba, Robert Kennedy's daughter asks

[Translated from http://www.aporrea.org/]

Cancel the prohibition against US residents traveling to Cuba, Robert Kennedy's daughter asks
By David Brooks in La Jornada 24/04/09


New York, April 23: At the end of 1963, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy sought to cancel the prohibition on travel to Cuba, and now his daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, has said that President Barack Obama should consider this and support legislative initiatives to permit everyone in the US freely to travel to Cuba.

In official documents declassified by the National Security Archive research center, it is recorded that on December 12, 1963, less than a month after the assassaination of John F. Kennedy, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy sent a message to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, urging that regulations prohibiting travel by US residents to Cuba, be withdrawn.... He was trying to reverse the prohibition on travel imposed by his brother's administration.

Robert Kennedy argued that the prohibition violated US freedoms. According to the document, he asserted that the current restrictions on travel are inconsistent with traditional freedoms in the US.

But that position did not win the argument inside the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson; the State Department expressed the opinion that suspending the restrictions would be perceived as a weakening of the policy towards Cuba that formed part of a common effort by the United States and other republics of the Americas to isolate Cuba. The official documents can be consulted at http://www.nsarchive.org/

In an opinion piece by Kathleen Kennedy published today in the Washington Post, Robert Kennedy's daughter expresses her wish that her father's position should be adopted by Barack Obama's administration, and that it should be the position promoted by Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr., while the Obama administration considers its next step with Cuba, which should be to move beyond allowing only Cuban-Americans to travel freely to the island and should deal with the rights of all US residents, most of whom are not allowed to go to Cuba.

Kathleen Kennedy writes that, as Obama learned at last weekend's Summit, Latin American leaders adopted a common message on Cuba: now is the moment to normalize relations with Havana ... By continuing to try to isolate Cuba, they essentially said to Obama, Washington has only succeeded in isolating itself.

Thus, the niece of the President who tried to invade and overthrow the Cuban revolutionary government and impose the blockade, is joining a constantly growing chorus in favor of reversing those policies established fifty years ago.