(Xinhuanet) -- Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said in an op-ed piece Tuesday in the Miami Herald that he thinks the United States should ease restrictions for Cuban-Americans who want to visit the island or send money home. "Senator Obama feels that the Bush administration has made a humanitarian and a strategic blunder," campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Monday in an e-mail. "His concern is that this has had a profoundly negative impact on the Cuban people, making them more dependent on the Castro regime, thus isolating them from the transformative message carried by Cuban-Americans." While the U.S. embargo has limited who can travel to Cuba and what can be sent there since the early 1960s, restrictions added by the Bush administration in 2004 made visiting and shipping gifts to Cuba more difficult. Most Cubans in the U.S. can only visit the island once every three years and can only send quarterly remittances of up to 300 U.S. dollars per household to immediate family members. Previously, they could visit once a year and send up to 3,000 dollars. The U.S. also tightened restrictions on travel for educational and religious groups.
The Miami-Dade Democratic Party is in favor of lifting the restrictions last week. Obama will speak at a fund-raiser for the chapter Saturday at the Miami-Dade Auditorium, the same Little Havana site where Ronald Reagan won over many in the Cuban community more than 20 years ago. Joe Garcia, the group's chairman, praised Obama's proposal. "It shows courage, and it shows commitment to move beyond the status-quo politics of rhetoric, which is all the Cuban-American community has received from any party for the last half century," said Garcia, a former head of the Cuban-American Foundation.