I've been wanting to visit Cuba ever since I read Alejo Carpentier, and seeing Before Night Falls and some early Cuban films renewed it. But we've got a wall to maintain. I can visit Russia, play cards in Chechnya, lunch with Gaddhafi, observe Chinese prison workers make electronics, buy Chinese knick-knacks from Tibetans in rags inside Lhasa's Potala Palace, dine with some of Pol Pot's finest henchmen, chew ghat with Taliban terrorists in Kandahar, lash immoral women in the Swat valley, buy leftover AIG stock from Hank Greenberg in Manhattan, talk education with William Ayers, meet up for drinks with Scooter Libby and Alberto Gonzales at The Palm, and waterboard inmates in Guantanamo, but I can't visit Havana. At least not legally. But I did get to see signs in Yucatan and Jamaica denoting cheap air and boat trips. The next best thing to being there, outside of Miami.

Cubans who reach our shores get automatic US citizenship, and now they can send back as much money as they have and visit as often as they want. But not me. I'm subject to the US embargo against Cuba. Of course this embargo is brutally effective. Cuba is barred from trading with anyone except Canadians, Brits, the French, Somalians, Russians, Chinese, Iraqis, Polish, Spanish, Japanese, Thailand, and a few other select 150 countries. It's so effective that the US is only the 7th largest exporter to Cuba with 4.3% of its imports.

And I'm glad to see Obama reaching across the aisle to embrace the enduring legacy of our great patriots and modern political philosophers, Jesse Helms and Dan Burton (whose bigger fame of shooting pumpkins labelled "Vince Foster" has started to fade). Because it would be a shame to prop up the Castro regime with my money when I could be supporting Chinese gulags or helping Burmese drug lords or promoting female circumcision and macheteing arms off kids in Africa . Democracy is very fragile, and we have to put a line down somewhere. Which just happened to be Cuba, don't ask why.

And speaking of arms control, while Cuba may seem a bit retro, retro's in, so much so that in the middle of this time of terror and crashing financial systems, any day now I expect to hear a big policy speech on nuclear arms control and SALT WARS VI, Return of the Jaded. Perhaps we can look in Putin's eyes and find he does have a soul while he turns off the gas spigots to Europe. And that soul spells the most American of sentiments, $$$$ Ka-Ching. Next stop, Mars?