“YES YOU CAN” encourages the website of a travel provider specializing in tours of Cuba. Itineraries are listed for nearly every remaining week of 2011 and most of 2012. “The floodgates have opened,” it proclaims, offering visitors endless itineraries for educational and cultural tours. According to the Cuba's National Office of Statistics, the island has already received more than a million visitors this year, an increase of 11.9% over the same period in 2010. While the origin of Cuba’s visitors in 2011 mirror patterns of previous years, the majority arriving from Canada, Russia, Argentina, the UK, Chile and France, it seems Americans may very soon be walking Cuban streets in the greatest numbers seen in more than a decade.

U.S.-based Cuba travel service providers are ramping up operations in the hopes that large numbers of Americans will take advantage of the Obama Administration’s changes to regulations governing people-to people travel to Cuba, announced in January of this year.  The changes greatly expand opportunities for educational and religious travel via general license, (the general license does not require the traveler to be pre-authorized for travel) as well as more limited opportunities for travel under the more cumbersome and restrictive, specific license which continues to govern travel for cultural and humanitarian purposes. (For a more detailed explanation about the regulations, see this excellent analysis by the Latin America Working Group)

Last week, I offered a rather bleak but honest assessment of the Obama administration’s track-record on Cuba policy thus far. As it happened, just a day or two later the Associated Press published an article about the potential up-tick in American visitors to the island in 2011 that may result from the the new travel policy. “The forbidden fruit of American travel to Cuba is once again in reach,” reads the opening sentence.

I couldn’t help but dwell on the absurdity illustrated by the juxtaposition of these two realities. On the one hand, we have an Administration that makes what is essentially its first major endorsement of a policy of greater exchange between Cubans and Americans late on a Friday afternoon, as if it were the ugly step child of its Latin America agenda, yet there are potentially tens of thousands of Americans eager to travel to Cuba, and their right to do so just happens to be supported by Americans and Cuban voices that span the political and ideological spectrum.

Secretary Clinton herself articulated this half-in, half-out position in remarks last week to the Council of the Americas,

“From the very beginning, the Obama Administration believed that the best way to advance fundamental rights in Cuba - in fact, to advance them anywhere - is to support exchanges and constructive relationships. And there's no better ambassador for our values than a teacher or an artist or a student or a religious leader, a Cuban American who has made a new life in the United States. That's why we have eased our restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba. We could do more if we saw evidence that there was an opportunity to do so coming from the Cuban side…”  

Translation- we believe that greater engagement, not less, is the right approach with Cuba but we don’t have the political space to do anything more until Cuba releases American contractor, Alan Gross.  

Gross is serving a 15-year prison sentence for distributing high-tech communications equipment to the island’s Jewish community as part of the United States Agency for International Development's(USAID) Cuba democracy promotion programs. Gross’ lawyers filed an appeal of his sentence back in April which Cuba’s highest court is in the process of considering.  

In the past few weeks we have begun to hear murmurs that Gross may finally be released in the near future. The head of Cuba’s Tribunal Supremo Popular, Ruben Remigio Ferro was recently quoted as saying, "There is a pending appeal and it is being considered to grant a pardon or release on humanitarian grounds, considering that his daughter and mother are very sick." In addition, when Cuban dissident, Vladimir Alejo Miranda was visited by state security agents last week in an attempt to persuade him to end his hunger strike protesting Gross’ imprisonment, it was reported that the government agents told Miranda that Gross would be released soon. Let’s hope so.

In the meantime, we're essentially taking a position on Cuba that is neither here nor there. This kind of rudder-less foreign policy doesn't benefit anyone's interests in a meaningful way, not those of Cubans, Americans, the U.S. government or Alan Gross.