HAVANA -- Pedro Manuel Camos' firstborn was a babe in arms when the boy's grandparents met him last year during a trip back to their native Cuba from their adopted home of Florida.

But under U.S. rules taking effect Wednesday, the grandparents likely won't see little Pedro Alejandro again until he is a walking, talking 3-year-old. The rules say Cubans in the United States can visit family here just once every three years, rather than the previous once annually.

Aimed at strangling Cuba's communist economy and forcing out President Fidel Castro, the rules also cut the amount of cash visiting Cubans can bring to $300 from $3,000 and restrict them to bringing 44 pounds of luggage.

In addition, the measures say cash can now be sent from the United States only to immediate family in Cuba, ruling out aunts, uncles, cousins and others not considered immediate family.

The rules on visits are retroactive, beginning the three-year count from a Cuban-American's most recent trip to Cuba.

"It will affect my mother more than anyone else," said Camos, 40. "She has a lot of family here: her mom, a brother and sister, two sons and her grandchild.

More than 1 million Cubans live overseas, an estimated 600,000 of them in South Florida. The rest live mostly in other parts of the United States, Latin America and Europe.

Nearly 168,000 Cuban visitors -- including 115,000 from the United States -- visited last year, bringing with them cardboard boxes and huge suitcases stuffed with clothes, medicine, toys and household goods.

Direct charter flights between Havana and Miami were packed this week as Cuban-Americans rushed to get in one more trip to the island.

"These regulations are a harsh blow to the Cuban family," said Rafael Dausa, director of the Foreign Ministry's North America Department. Castro called them "an atrocious and inhumane act," and vowed Monday that the U.S. pressure will not dislodge him from power.

Administered by the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets control, the rules were welcomed by conservatives in Miami's Cuban exile community, many of whom left in the 1960s and have no family here.

"These new pressures on Cuba's command economy will rob the dictatorship of funds to further oppress the Cuban people," said U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Cuban-born Florida Republican.

But the measures have been largely criticized in Cuba, where many look forward to visits from relatives bearing gifts, cash -- and stories of new lives across the Florida Straits.

Even many Cuban dissidents oppose the rules, and resent emigres who support U.S. campaigns designed to make life here even tougher.

Miriam Leiva, wife of imprisoned dissident Oscar Espinosa Chepe, said the measures will hurt Cubans more than Castro. Her husband, who is serving 20 years, was among 75 opposition members rounded up in a crackdown last year.

"For which Cuba -- and for whose Cuba -- was the Bush administration's plan to hasten reform in Cuba written?" Leiva asked in a May 24 article in the Internet magazine Salon.com.

Eloy Gutierrez-Menoyo, founder of the Miami-based exile group Cambio Cubano, also is a critic. "These measures are in absolute disagreement with the interests of Cubans on the island and only contribute to the entrenchment of Cuba's government," he said.

Gutierrez-Menoyo, 69, and nearly blind, returned to the island last year hoping to stay for good, but his application to live permanently in Havana as a Cuban citizen hasn't been ruled on.

His wife, also of Cuban origin, and his three school-age sons, all U.S.-born American citizens, live in Miami. They visited him last year and have applied to the U.S. government for permission to come back this summer.

"Can you imagine not being able to kiss your sons for three years?" Gutierrez-Menoyo asked.
Copyright © 2004, The Associated Press