Our position: The Bush administration shouldn't restrict Cuba family travel.

EDITORIAL

There was a surge in trips from Miami to Havana this week, as hundreds of Cuban-Americans rushed to beat a deadline before new restrictions on family visits went into effect.

The restrictions are part of a package of measures that President George W. Bush unveiled in May, with the stated goals of hastening the end of Fidel Castro's communist dictatorship and helping the Cuban people in a transition to democracy. While it's hard to argue with those goals, most of the measures are simply more of the same old approach that has failed to dislodge Mr. Castro over more than four decades.

The Bush administration's move to ratchet up the pressure now on the Castro regime looks like an election-year ploy to win votes among South Florida's politically crucial Cuban-exile community. But the tighter restrictions on travel are especially cruel for Cuban-Americans who still have family living on the island. They are political pawns in the struggle between Washington and Havana.

As of this month, Cuban-Americans will be permitted to travel to the communist island to visit only immediate family members -- no aunts, uncles or cousins -- and only once every three years, rather than every year. Visitors will be barred from taking more than $300 in cash, compared with the old limit of $3,000, and will be limited to 44 pounds in luggage.

These draconian restrictions will deprive the Castro regime of some dollars, but it's hard to imagine they will be any more successful than any of the other feckless U.S. policies, including the U.S. trade embargo. Meanwhile, they will add to the hardship of many poor Cubans who have come to count on yearly visits from family members to brighten their often-grim lives and supplement their meager livelihoods.

Even some supporters of the trade embargo, such as U.S. Rep. Jim Davis of Tampa, have criticized the family travel restrictions, as well as new rules that bar Cuban-Americans from sending money to anyone other than immediate family. Mr. Davis has joined with embargo opponents in proposing that the changes be rescinded. Their proposal deserves support from both houses of Congress.

The cruelty of the Bush administration's tighter restrictions has drawn attention from where it belongs -- on Mr. Castro's decades of repressing his people. He already has exploited the travel limits and other measures from the administration to rally tens of thousands of Cubans in Havana and bluster about standing up to threats from Washington.

As we've argued before, a new and different approach is called for in U.S. policy toward Cuba. Rather than impose stricter limits on contact between the two countries, the Bush administration would be smarter to lift the travel and trade bans and allow Cubans to be fully exposed to the power of American people and ideas.