There was a time when intense U.S. concerns with respect to Cuba were well founded. I can attest to that. I was an officer in our embassy in Havana when we broke diplomatic relations on January 3 of 1961. It had not been a pleasant time. And we did not imagine the Cuban missile crisis, perhaps the most dangerous moment of the Cold War. It was real.

At a time when Cuba was the ally of our principal global adversary, the Soviet Union, and at a time when Cuba was trying to overthrow other governments in the hemisphere, to, in effect, “turn the Andes into the Sierra Maestra of Latin America,” as Fidel Castro put it, U.S. policies of embargo, of efforts to isolate, including travel controls, and to contain Cuba in various other ways, certainly made sense. Most of the other nations of the hemisphere agreed with us and joined in those efforts.

But that was a long time ago. The Cold War has been over for almost twenty years now. The Soviet Union no longer exists (and we have friendly relations with its successor, the Russian Federation). Cuba long since halted any efforts to overthrow other governments in the hemisphere. It now has normal diplomatic and trade relations with all of them. Of the nations of the Western Hemisphere, only the United States does not have normal relations with Cuba.

Incredibly, then, in a sense, on this issue at least, it is now the United States that is isolated and not Cuba. And several of the other governments, including the Brazilian, have made it clear that this failure of the U.S. to adjust its Cuba policy to the post-Cold-War situation detracts from its credentials for leadership. It is a policy which no longer responds to the real world around us but to perceptions from the past. It is a policy which achieves nothing and is so out-dated as to be an embarrassment.

Our isolation is demonstrated every year when the UN General Assembly votes to condemn our embargo, usually by votes of 187 to 3, the three being the U.S., Israel (which trades with Cuba), and some small nation or another with a favor to ask of the U.S. that year. In effect, we have no real support.

Surely the time has come to begin to change our policy toward Cuba. Certainly that is what the great majority of Americans want. A poll last week, reported on by the Reuters news agency, indicated that 58% of Americans surveyed supported full diplomatic relations with Cuba, while only 33% opposed. And 61% of those polled believed that all U.S. citizens should be allowed to travel to Cuba, and 57% that U.S. companies should be allowed to do business there.

Cuba no longer poses any threat whatever to the United States. There is no reason at all that we cannot begin to move toward normal diplomatic and trade relations, toward, in time, a full lifting of the embargo. I would suggest that we begin the process by lifting travel controls. The two bills now before the House or Representatives represent a first step to promote the value of an open society, of democracy, of human rights, by allowing American citizens to travel freely to the island. One does not, after all, encourage movement toward a more open society in any given country by barring one’s own citizens from traveling there. I well remember that during the years, back in the 1960s, that I served at our embassy in Moscow, we always encouraged the travel of Americans to the Soviet Union as an excellent means of letting more light into the country. I do not say that this was a key factor in the Soviet Union’s transformation, but it helped, even in a country as vast as that. Because of Cuba’s proximity to the United States and the natural affinity and sympathy between the Cuban and American people, it could have far more impact in Cuba. And if American citizens can travel freely to China, and even to Vietnam, a country with which we not too long ago fought a bloody and traumatic war, how can we possibly justify refusing to allow them to travel to Cuba? Indeed, that Cuba is the only country in the world that the U.S. Government denies its own citizens the right to visit points up the illogic of our approach.

Representatives of the Obama administration had early on spoken of moving quickly to at least remove restrictions on academic travel and “people-to-people” travel, the latter having been so successful during the Clinton administration. And yet, almost a year and a half after Obama took office, even those forms of travel remain mostly blocked. The administration should be pressed to use its executive authority to grant licenses to allow American educational, cultural, religious and professional institutions to organize travel to Cuba even before the Congress acts to lift the travel ban

And even in the case of the Cuban exile community in Miami, the majority seem to favor the right to travel – and are taking full advantage of the fact that the Obama administration has removed the restrictions on the travel and family remittances of Cuban-Americans. It was a small step but a very welcome one. In my view, however, restricting this right to a select group of Americans because of their national origin is less a policy than a matter of domestic politics

Another step we could take virtually with the stroke of a pen would be to remove Cuba from the list of “state sponsors of terrorism.” Cuba is not involved in terrorist activities of any kind and the U.S. has no evidence to the contrary. Keeping it on the list undercuts the credibility of the list and blocks certain other steps toward engagement. Removing it, moreover, would signal that we are moving to a more serious policy based on factual analysis rather than propaganda ploys.

Another easy step for us to take is to expand agricultural sales to Cuba, and under conditions less restrictive than in the past. That clearly is in our interest and can lead, in time, to commercial relations on a wider scale. One thing we could also do in the near term is to allow limited Cuban agricultural sales to the U.S., initially perhaps of products that do not compete with those produced in the U.S. Certain delicious Cuban fruits come immediately to mind.

And to bring about a new policy, a new approach toward Cuba, we should open a dialogue with the Cuban government to discuss our various disagreements. President Raul Castro has several times offered to discuss any and all issues without preconditions. Initially, President Obama also spoke of open dialogue, but more recently he seems to have come down to saying that first the Cubans must respond to our lifting of the restrictions on Cuban-American travel and remittances by releasing political prisoners and taking other steps to improve human rights, and then the U.S. can move forward – though how it will do so is left to the imagination. In any event, imposing conditions will not work. It has not worked in the past and will not now. And in this case, it almost comes down to saying that first they must release political prisoners and then we’ll talk about it.

Interestingly, Cardinal Ortega, the Archbishop of Havana, in a statement on April 20, called for open dialogue between the two sides and expressed disappointment that while President Obama had at first seemed to promise that, in the end, “the old policy seems to have prevailed.” In other words, dialogue is put on hold.

And the Archbishop is by no means the only Cuban calling for meaningful dialogue between our two countries. In statements over the years, dissidents such as Elizardo Sanchez, Oswaldo Paya, Vladimiro Roca and Manuel Cuesta Morua have all urged the U.S. to begin such a dialogue. And in conversations with many Cubans during my visits to the island over the past two years, I found the overwhelming majority in favor of that. Interestingly, just after the U.S. elections, there was great optimism that such a dialogue would take place. The optimism seems to have dwindled, however, possibly because of the perception, noted above, that “the old policy seems to have prevailed” ?

Be that as it may, it is of marked importance that a meaningful dialogue begin. And inevitably one of the issues to be discussed will be that of political prisoners. A complicating factor is that beginning under the Bush administration, programs directed by USAID to “promote democracy in Cuba” often gave the appearance of being aimed at bringing down the Cuban system and government and thus led to the imprisonment of a number of dissidents. As Oswaldo Paya, a leading Cuban dissident and the leader of the Varela Project, put it to me in 2004, he would accept no assistance from the U.S. government because that would have placed him in the position of being supported by a foreign power against his own government. “U.S. talk of assistance, in short, doesn’t help us; it harms us,” he said. Fortunately, Senator Kerry and Congressman Berman have put a hold on these funds in order to press the administration to define the purpose of these programs and their effectiveness.

In more or less the same context, another impediment to improving relations is the continued detention of Alan Gross, an operative of USAID, who was arrested in December. He had been in Cuba a number of times on tourist visas and said that his purpose was to help Jewish groups on the island communicate with one another. Two problems. First, the leader of the main Jewish group in Havana says she never heard of Gross. And second, as indicated above, these programs directed by USAID to “promote democracy in Cuba” can often look like programs against the Cuban system and government. The Cubans apparently saw Gross’ activities, which included distributing satellite technology financed by the U.S. government, in that light and he has been held now for over four months. Understandably, there have been protests in the U.S., including in the Congress.

While Gross’ activities may have been questionable from the Cuban standpoint, and indeed he presented himself as a paid contractor carrying out a program funded by the U.S. Government, he seems not to have been involved in anything threatening or dangerous. It is therefore to be hoped that the Cubans will soon charge him and then expel him from Cuba with a sharp warning. And to avoid future arrests, problems, and misunderstandings, the State Department and USAID should formally suspend any further programs “to promote democracy in Cuba” that do not follow normal diplomatic protocol and host country authorization.

There are, in short, ways of removing many of the disagreements between us. What it takes is the will to do so.