Subject: Cato Daily Dispatch: Obama, Cuba, and Student Loans
Date: Wed, 21 May 2008 09:27:37 -0700
From: "Cato Institute"

Bush Allows Cell Phones to Cuba

"President George W. Bush will announce a policy change on Wednesday to allow Americans to send mobile phones to family members in Cuba, the White House said," Reuters reports. "Bush, who was making remarks on Cuba, will announce 'we are modifying our regulations to allow Americans to send mobile phones to family members in Cuba,' said Dan Fisk, National Security Council senior director for Western hemisphere affairs."

In "Four Decades of Failure: The U. S. Embargo Against Cuba," Daniel Griswold, director of Cato's Center for Trade Policy Studies, writes: "If the goal of U.S. policy toward Cuba is to help its people achieve freedom and a better life, the economic embargo has completely failed. Its economic effect is to make the people of Cuba worse off by depriving them of lower-cost food and other goods that could be bought from the United States. It means less independence for Cuban workers and entrepreneurs, who could be earning dollars from American tourists and fueling private-sector growth. Meanwhile, Castro and his ruling elite enjoy a comfortable, insulated lifestyle by extracting any meager surplus produced by their captive subjects."