Our organization, the Center for Democracy in the Americas, works on straightening out U.S. policy toward the region. We're trying to understand how and why the Obama administration has gotten off track in its relationship with the hemisphere. Our Cuba policy associate, Collin Laverty, has written the following essay on...

During my last visit to Honduras with a delegation that included Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, we met a man named Jose David Murillo. Jose's son, 19-year old Isis Obed, was shot and killed on July 5, as he and thousands of others clamored for the return of President Manual Zelaya who'd...

On October 28th, the United Nations General Assembly is expected to vote on a resolution condemning the United States embargo against Cuba.

If past is prologue, it will pass resoundingly. The General Assembly has adopted similar measures in each of the last seventeen years; in 2008, by a margin...

President Barack Obama made history this week by freeing Cuban-Americans from restrictions on their rights to visit their families on Cuba and to provide them with financial support. While the changes he ordered affect a meaningful but tiny part of the U.S. embargo, it now seems clear that Obama has...

The news alert that crossed my desk at 5:30pm on Friday afternoon caused sighs of relief and cries of joy in Havana, Miami, and places across our country where Cuban-Americans and others who care about modernizing our hopeless Cuba policy had long hoped for a new beginning.

Here's what the...

On New Year's Day, as Cubans celebrate the 50th anniversary of their Revolution, we in the United States should remember another milestone.

January 3rd will be the 48th anniversary of President Eisenhower's Cold War-era decision to break diplomatic relations with Cuba. Ike might be surprised that a veritable conga...

Florida gave us all a gift last night.

In the election returns, hidden in plain view, is license for President-elect Obama to fundamentally rethink U.S. policy toward Cuba and expand on his incremental approach.

Obama won Florida, he carried Miami-Dade County handily, and yet he enters the White House owing...

Just six days before our election, when the UN General Assembly votes to condemn the US embargo against Cuba, it will toss into the center of our political debate a powerful reminder that the next president must attend to America's debilitated global image.

Every president since Eisenhower has tried...

Our Cuba policy is inhumane, and the Bush administration should be singled out for its short-sighted and politicized response to the tragedy taking place on the island.

In recent days, three hurricanes -- Hanna, Gustav, and Ike -- have laid waste to the island. Thanks to ferocious winds and rain,...

This is the event that fifty years of U.S. policy was designed to stop.

Fidel Castro has announced his retirement. He will be replaced in a peaceful succession, without the violent upheaval that U.S. policy makers have been predicting since the 1960s.

Now that Fidel Castro has announced...

This piece was co-written with Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, a non-profit research center in Washington D.C.

Think of how angry Americans would be if Pakistan's government let Osama bin Laden emerge from his cave of refuge and take up open residence...

In Friday morning's New York Times, as the president continued his tour in Latin America, the national security advisor, Stephen J. Hadley, said this about perceptions in South America about the U.S. - "Something we have not done well enough is getting out the full scope of the president's message."

Pity Carlos Gutierrez, our secretary of commerce.

He's Cuban-American, and his job is to help sell American products and services around the world. But a few times a year, the Bush administration makes him give speeches about how preventing trade with Cuba, and stopping other Cuban-Americans from giving food...

It was a wipe out.

Not the 2006 election, although that was quite a "thumping" (just ask Don Rumsfeld).

It was the vote on the U.S. embargo at the United Nations on Wednesday. By a 184-4 margin, the United Nations General Assembly condemned the U.S. embargo against Cuba and urged...

In Barlovento, Venezuela, about ninety miles from Caracas, Cuban doctors are providing medical assistance to local Afro-Caribbean families, many of whom never had access to health care before.

Now, the Bush administration has a message to those Cuban doctors: "Drop what you're doing and come to the United States. Don't...

For almost fifty years, U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba has been predicated on bringing the regime of President Fidel Castro to an end. That policy, an artifact of the Cold War, has done nothing to change Cuba; it is a museum piece not unlike the American cars from the fifties...

George Bush and Fidel Castro finally have one thing in common: both are making plans for the future of the Cuban people. But, as we've seen, transitions dreamed up and imposed by Washington without local consultation don't always pan out. And people who have suffered from U.S.-imposed sanctions aren't always...

When Randal McCloy returned to his home after a long stay in the hospital, I got to thinking about the Sago Mine disaster, where McCloy nearly died, and its peculiar connection to Cuba policy.

That's not as far a stretch as it sounds.

When mine operations run afoul of regulations...

Before President Bush gives another speech about how confident he is about how things are going in Iraq, he might want to consider what Cubans learned when you have not a communications problem but a reality problem.

Amidst a summer of electrical blackouts and supply shortages, billboards went up in...

America may be addicted to Middle Eastern oil, as President Bush argued in his State of the Union speech last month, but his addiction to the hard line on Cuba is even greater.

How else can one explain the outrageous action by the U.S. Treasury Department to kick 16 Cuban...