The Obama administration is taking a close look at the complex relationship it has had with Cuba for the past five decades, and there are signs that a change in policy is on the horizon.

A congressional delegation traveled to the island last week and held talks with Cuban President Raul Castro. Three members of the delegation actually met with the ailing former leader Fidel Castro, whom they described as looking quite healthy and lucid. (Does that mean he's actually alive?)

President Barack Obama himself already took steps toward lifting the travel restrictions for Cuban-American families and remittances to the island. Legislation even has been introduced to lift travel restrictions to Cuba for all Americans.

But the mainstay of the U.S. policy toward Cuba is the embargo, put in place in 1962. Since then, the powerful Cuban exile community, through very effective lobbying efforts, has been able to influence policy in Washington.

However, sentiments toward the embargo have changed. While a great majority of Cuban-Americans continue to deplore the communist regime on the island, a growing number have come to realize that the embargo is not going to bring democracy to their beloved homeland. The latest poll conducted by Florida International University in Miami shows that 55 percent of Cuban-Americans favor ending the embargo; that's up from 42 percent a year ago. Sixty-five percent are in favor of formalizing diplomatic ties.

One Cuban-American woman, who came to the United States with her family at the age of 2, wrote a letter to Sen. Mel Martinez expressing a view shared by a growing number of exiles but seldom expressed for fear of being ostracized by the “old school.”

“My father and our family were stripped of their business and property before we left. The anti-Castro sentiment has been prevalent and strong in our family, and still is,” she wrote. Her father, now 81, and she, almost 50, have not been back to Cuba and don't expect to ever see their homeland again. Having said that, she continues: “The embargo has NOT made democracy possible in Cuba and will not.”

A mother of two daughters in their 20s who belong to a generation that thinks the embargo is “worthless,” she urges the senator to vote to lift the embargo. In the words of that younger generation, she says, “Get over it.”

The Cuba issue will not be on the agenda, but will be on the minds of the heads of state meeting this week in Trinidad and Tobago at the Fifth Summit of the Americas. Organization of American States Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza points out that 32 out of 34 countries in the hemisphere have diplomatic relations with Cuba. The newly elected president of El Salvador, Mauricio Funes, has vowed to re-establish relations with Cuba after taking office, so as of next June there will be only one country on the continent that does not: the United States.

It is not expected that the U.S. would go as far as normalizing relations with Cuba without demanding some form of democratic change in the country or, at the very least, asking for the release of political prisoners. And the other countries in the hemisphere should not be giving Cuba a free ride.

The truth is that Cuba is now the only country in the hemisphere that does not have a democratically elected government. It has been run by the Castro dictatorship for five decades. It continues to hold hundreds of political prisoners. It denies basic rights to its citizens, restricts travel within the country and abroad, does not allow its citizens freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to gather or even freedom to access the Internet.

Up to now, the Cuban government has blamed the shortage or inaccessibility of goods on the U.S. embargo, or “el bloqueo,” as it calls the embargo. The day the “bloqueo” is no longer in place, the Cuban people might realize that it is not the capitalist monster that has been their “verdugo,” but rather a totalitarian government that refuses to loosen its stronghold on its very own people.

Yes, the U.S. needs to “get over it” and take a good, hard look at what the embargo to Cuba has and has not accomplished, but Cuba needs to “give it up” if it wants to be completely accepted into the family of democratically elected governments in the Western Hemisphere.

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(Maria Elena Salinas is the author of “I AM MY FATHER'S DAUGHTER: LIVING A LIFE WITHOUT SECRETS.” Reach her at www .mariaesalinas.com)

© 2009 by Maria Elena Salinas

Distributed by King Features Syndicate