Palm Beach Post Editorial

On the day of his inauguration, Barack Obama can deliver some of that big "change" he promised.

Once in power, Mr. Obama can ease - or, ideally, end - the restrictions on Americans traveling and sending money to Cuba. Such a gesture would carry great symbolic weight, display to the world a more humane and practical foreign policy and shift the pressure from Washington to Havana.

The swearing-in will come 19 days after Cuba celebrates the 50th anniversary of Fidel Castro's revolution. Mr. Obama will become the 11th president during one-family rule in Cuba. American isolation of the country was supposed to force out the communists and bring change. Continuing that isolation puzzles even America's friends and gives Raul Castro, now running the country, a scapegoat for Cuba's domestic problems.

In 2004, after Cuban-American hardliners had threatened to withhold their votes, President Bush tightened the travel and remittances rules. Americans can visit their families in Cuba only once every three years, not annually, and can send less money. Mr. Bush got his reelection, and the United States got four more years of a failed policy.

Mr. Obama owes nothing to those voters. Even if he did, few U.S. policies are more in need of change than this one. Americans should be free to travel wherever they want. With the Castros' new patron, Hugo Chavez, steadily losing support at home, changing Cuba policy also would squeeze the annoying Venezuelan leader and make America look good in Latin America. Mr. Obama owes Americans a break from the past.