By Indira A.R. Lakshmanan, Globe Staff  |

MATANZAS, Cuba -- The photo on the living room wall shows a smiling young man on a palm-fringed balcony near his new home in Miami, just 90 miles from here. His aging parents and grandmother fear they may not live to see him again -- and they blame President Bush.

Roberto Beruvides is a textbook example of a dutiful immigrant son. He arrived in the United States in 1999 with just the clothes on his back, worked two jobs at the airport so he could send a few hundred dollars home every month to his parents, uncles, and cousins, and saved up for visits home once a year to this port city 65 miles west of Havana. Everything of value in his parents' modest three-room stucco home -- air-conditioner, refrigerator, television, washing machine, queen-sized mattress -- was purchased with his money.

But with tough new US restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba that went into force at the end of June, Cubans with relatives in America say that they are the victims of the latest salvo in a four-decade grudge match between Washington and Fidel Castro. The Bush administration tightened the longstanding trade and travel embargo to limit family visits to once every three years, down from once a year; to slash the amount of money and gifts that relatives can bring to Cuba; to reduce the volume and value of gift parcels by mail, and to narrow the definition of relatives to whom one can send money.

The administration says the measures will deny vital US dollars to a floundering communist economy, and thereby hasten a transition to democracy. Estimates of US remittances to Cuba range between $200 million and $1 billion annually, much of it carried in by Cuban-Americans -- 115,000 of whom visited last year.

But ordinary Cubans scoff at the idea that cutting off the flow of remittances that sustain families surviving on average wages equivalent to $10 to $26 a month will spark a popular uprising against Castro. On the contrary, many here insist, the measures make US policy makers seem coldhearted and cynical, by holding families hostage to conservative Cuban exiles in Florida who overwhelmingly voted for Bush in the 2000 election and represent a vital bloc in a key swing state in the upcoming election.

"What Bush is doing is choking Cuban people by the neck. . . . The grass-roots people are paying the price, not the government," Beruvides's father, Miguel Beruvides, 58, said bitterly. The measures are "inhumane" and "against families," he said, trying to calm his wife, who has been crying since the rules were announced.

"I'm so angry sometimes I can't sleep just thinking about when I can see him again," said Roberto's mother, Miriam Sardinas, 58, drying her tears on a threadbare apron and stroking another photo of her son at the Grand Canyon. "We're all old here. Before, if someone were to get sick, Roberto could take vacation and come see us in an emergency. He sent money when his father had a kidney operation, he sends money for his uncle with arthritis. Now even if his grandma dies, he can't come for the funeral. What kind of policy is that?"

What most irks her husband, he said, is to hear exiles who lobbied for the new rules "calling on the Cuban people to bring a rebellion against Castro. It's very easy to sit comfortably in Miami and call on people to do what you're not willing to do yourself," he said.

Miguel Beruvides said the policy panders to Cuban exiles who no longer have family or ties on the island, and who think that stopping the flow of dollars will bring down the government. That strategy is misguided, he said, in part because recent immigrants are looking for ways around the rules. Moreover, government-owned "dollar stores," which charge in dollars to collect hard currency for the state, raised prices 15 percent to 20 percent after the US measures were announced, so Cubans now must spend more of whatever money their relatives can send.

The US House of Representatives voted recently to nullify the new restrictions on travel, student exchanges, and agricultural sales to Cuba. But lawmakers say that with a White House veto looming -- and the issue a hot potato -- it is unthinkable that Congress could succeed in reversing the strict rules before the Nov. 2 election.

Meanwhile, the State Department denied visas Tuesday to more than 60 Cuban academics who were to attend a Latin American studies conference in Las Vegas, citing the Cuban government's imprisonment of 68 dissidents since March 2003.

Over the last decade, Democrats and free-trade Republicans have argued that isolating Cuba through the 43-year-long embargo has not worked, and that boosting social and economic contacts would more likely hasten change. Last year, both the House and Senate voted to lift the longstanding travel ban, but Bush made clear he would not approve the measure, and it was stripped from legislation by Republican leaders.

Representative William Delahunt, Democrat of Quincy, a vocal critic of the new restrictions, said that "the Bush policy makes it illegal for Cuban-Americans to send soap to an aunt in Havana, or to see your mother on her deathbed and then return to attend her funeral. That's immoral."

Unlike previous attempts to squeeze the Castro regime, these measures have provoked angry demonstrations by Cuban-Americans in Miami, including pickets outside the offices of congressional members, and polls indicating a drop in Bush's support among Florida Cubans.

In an interview, Roger Noriega, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, shrugged off the backlash, saying that "a policy doesn't have to be popular to be effective. This is a policy aimed at denying capital to a regime that's keeping all Cubans in a dictatorship." As to the hardship for Cuban-Americans who can't see family for three years, Noriega replied confidently: "This is a policy dedicated to the proposition that Castro shouldn't last another three years."

The United States broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1961. It maintains an "Interests Section" in Havana, as Cuba does in Washington.

Cuba's tourism minister, Manuel Marrero, said the number of people visiting from the United States has fallen 25 percent since the new restrictions took effect June 30, but added that some are getting around the rules by traveling illegally through third countries, such as Mexico and the Bahamas. Cuba says it gets 2 million tourists a year, mainly from Canada and Europe.

The long line during a recent lunch hour outside a Western Union office in Havana's middle-class neighborhood of Vedado revealed how Cuban-Americans are coping with the measures.

Although the $1,200 annual limit imposed by the US government on wire remittances to any Cuban household has not changed, additional monies in cash were often carried in by travelers -- including paid couriers, along with suitcases stuffed with toiletries and foodstuffs. Now Cuban-Americans can bring only $50 per day for their family visits, down from $164, and only 44 pounds of luggage.

Jessica Perez Rodriguez, a 25-year-old hairdresser who was waiting to collect a $300 wire transfer from the father of her son, said grimly that because he visited six months ago, he won't be allowed to see their 4-year-old son for three more years. "I cried and cried when I heard about the measures, and I called him immediately. It's terrible for our son to not be able to see his father when he's so small."