U.S. Senate Committee Approves Amendment to End Restrictions on Travel to Cuba

HAVANA, Cuba, Jul 23 (acn) The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee approved on Thursday to put an end to restrictions to travel to Cuba for U.S .citizens, said a spokesperson of the commission.

The approval had 18 votes in favor to 12 against, the Cubasi Web site reported on Thursday.
In the voting, four Republican senators joined fourteen Democrats to pass the measure, with which the initiative will now go to the plenary of the Senate.
The initiative also includes the lifting of the ban preventing any vessel that has carried goods to Cuba to call at U.S. ports in the following six months.
This is the first measure presented in the U.S. Congress in support of the policies of President Barack Obama to reestablish diplomatic relations with Cuba, which took place on Monday and was concreted with the opening of the Cuban embassy in Washington after 54 years of breaking-off.
The Obama administration announced in January a series of measures that relaxed restrictions on travel to Cuba, mainly in order to facilitate telecommunications and financial companies do business on the island.
But Congress is the body that must vote to end these restrictions within the legal framework on which the economic blockade against Cuba is based on, something the president has already asked lawmakers to do in accordance with normalization of relations.
When the text adopted today in the Appropriations Committee was presented in January at the Congress, called Law of Freedom to Travel to Cuba, the White House expressed its satisfaction with the initiative, which was in line with the historic change in relations Obama had announced a month earlier.
The legislative text was given impetus by Republican Senators Jeff Flake, Jerry Moran, Michael Enzi and John Boozman and Democrats Patrick Leahy, Richard Durbin, Tom Udall and Sheldon Whitehouse.
The strategy mainly promoted by Flake and Leahy, two of the senators more aware about the policy of openness toward Cuba, consist in legislating step by step the lifting of the blockade, aware that the success of a comprehensive legislation would be much more complex.
Moran said after the approval of the legal initiative that it represents for U.S. citizens to have freedom to travel to all countries of the world, but also increases the "odds" of the Cuban people to achieve greater freedom, thanks to their contact with U.S. citizens.
President Obama and his Cuban counterpart, Raul Castro, announced on December 17 a process of normalization of relations which should include the lifting of the blockade.