The New America Foundation launched its US-Cuba Policy Initiative at an event headlined by former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson and Congressman Jeff Flake (R-AZ). The event was moderated by U.S. foreign policy expert Steven Clemons, who directs the American Strategy Program at New America. The event follows the return of Colonel Wilkerson and Mr. Clemons from a trip to Cuba.

Colonel Wilkerson expressed dissatisfaction with the current U.S. policy toward the island, which he described as “the dumbest policy on the face of the earth.” Col. Wilkerson, a longtime assistant to General and Secretary of State Colin Powell, argued that the U.S. should engage Cuba in part to improve its standing in Latin America. People in Latin America are “beginning to like Cuba’s public diplomacy and despise ours,” he said. Moveover, Cuba offers “big bucks signs” as a market for U.S. agricultural goods and “possibly huge bucks signs” as a source of oil for U.S. energy firms, he said.

At the event, Congressman Flake laid out his argument for deregulating travel to and from Cuba by U.S. citizens or legal residents. The Congressman recently introduced a bill, the 'Export Freedom to Cuba Act of 2007,' that calls for this reform. He said travel by U.S. citizens to Cuba is “a matter of freedom.” U.S. citizens should be free to travel anywhere they want, unless there is a national security reason why they shouldn’t, something there isn’t in the case of Cuba. He pointed out that, if anything, it would be a Communist government, not the U.S. government, which restricts travel of its citizens. To read Congressman Flake’s recent op-ed on US-Cuba relations in The Washington Post (4/14/2007), please click here.

The New America Foundation’s 21st Century US-Cuba Policy Initiative seeks to reassess the fundamental realities of U.S.-Cuba relations today. This effort seeks to benchmark the relative success and failure of America’s many decades long policy to achieve regime change in Cuba through the isolation of Fidel Castro’s government and the Cuban people from substantial cultural, political and economic interaction with the U.S. The primary goal of this initiative is to achieve a new consensus of national stakeholders in an evolved U.S.-Cuba strategy rooted in 21st century realities rather than those national security features that dominated during the Cold War. Mr. Clemons is planning to soon launch The Havana Note, a blog on the topic.

Video of the event can be viewed at right, while an MP3 audio recording can be downloaded below.