Hard Lines on Havana Soften in Miami

MIAMI -- Edel Hernández arrived at the airport here last week with a giant duffel bag and a ball cap pulled low over his eyes. Two years earlier he had left Cuba, and he hadn't seen his wife since. "It's been hard," he said, his eyes welling as he tugged on the visor. "Really hard."

Under the old rules, Hernández, 35, would have had to wait another year to return to Cuba to see her. But when President Obama lifted travel restrictions this month for U.S. residents with family on the island, Hernández bought a ticket right away. Arguments that once might have made sense -- that the cash in his pockets and the gifts in his suitcase would benefit the Castro government -- ring hollow next to the pain of separation.

"I'm helping my family," he said, looking down at his barrel-size baggage, swaddled in blue plastic wrap to protect against pilfering. "The clothes I'm bringing are for them. The government isn't going to wear them."

In the nearly two weeks since the policy change was announced, demand for flights to the island has exploded, according to Miami-based charter companies licensed to operate them. At the same time, conversations with Cuban immigrants here at the airport and along Southwest Eighth Street in the heart of Miami's Little Havana neighborhood suggest that hard lines are softening, and that the engagement approach advocated by Obama has set into motion a wide-ranging reexamination of U.S. efforts to bring change to the island.

Until this month, a 2004 Bush administration policy limited visits by U.S. residents with relatives in Cuba to once every three years, curbing gifts for family members as well as cash transfers. Fulfilling a campaign pledge, Obama lifted those restrictions over the objections of Cuban American leaders in Congress who have long argued that travelers like Hernández prop up Cuba's failing economy and perpetuate the 50-year rule of Fidel and Raúl Castro.

U.S. residents without family in Cuba are still generally barred from going to the island, but many Cuban Americans here said they want that to change, too -- out of fairness and a desire to see American tourists flood the island.

With Cuban Americans now able to travel as often as they wish, some of the seven charter companies who send roughly 35 flights to Cuba each week said reservation requests have nearly doubled. The need for excess luggage capacity has been so pressing-- restrictions on baggage weight were lifted as well -- that one company, Xael Charters, has had to send a small cargo plane, nicknamed "El Mosquito," to accompany its main flights.

The incipient travel boom reflects an accelerating shift in attitudes toward America's Cuba policy. A poll of 400 Cuban Americans conducted April 14-16 by Florida-based research firm Bendixen & Associates found that 64 percent of respondents supported Obama's new travel policy. An even larger number, 67 percent, said