The University of Alabama’s Alabama-Cuba Conference, which concluded last week, was a great success.

World-famous art historian Robert Farris Thompson of Yale University danced the mambo. Mobile Mayor Mike Dow toasted trade. A film festival screened some fascinating Cuban movies rarely seen in this country.

The festival offered a little of everything one could hope for -- everything, that is, except Cubans.

The university had hoped to bring 18 Cuban artists, academics and officials to attend the conference, the first of its kind at the Capstone. Because of travel restrictions between the nations, however, only three of those Cubans could attend.

The lost opportunity for interaction and cultural exchanges with the Cubans is disheartening but hardly unique to the university’s event. The Border Security Act, an anti-terrorism bill enacted in 2002, has been used indiscriminately by the Bush administration to make it difficult even for academics and artists from Cuba to travel to the United States.

Bush, moreover, has vowed to veto any bill by Congress to lift the restrictive ban on travel by people from this country to Cuba.

The rigid restrictions may play well in Miami, but they don’t make much sense. Not only has the decades-old travel ban has failed to shake the government of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, but it also is manifestly unfair to Americans, who can travel to North Korea but not Cuba.

Restricting travel by Cubans to this country, even to participate in educational and cultural exchanges, is similarly shortsighted, for the friendly interaction that would result would surely prove to be an effective tool for Cuban democratization.