In Havana a 50-year dictatorship considers dropping the ration book that has defined its control over a citizenry that has come to depend on its meager allotment of staples like rice, beans and coffee.

In Washington a free society debates whether to allow American tourists into Cuba even if the Castro brothers' government has yet to take a baby step to reciprocate President Barack Obama's initial opening for more travel and remittances by Cuban Americans to the communist island.

The backdrop for these two seemingly disparate moves? A global recession that has Cuba's regime scrambling for cash, and a change in U.S. leadership that has travel providers hoping to cash in on Cuba.

Keep embargo in place

The Miami Herald has long supported maintaining the trade embargo on Cuba because of its dismal human rights record but lifting travel restrictions to stimulate more people-to-people contacts that bypass the Cuban government's chokehold on information.

Even if American tourists stay in gussied-up areas and few get to see the desperate situation that most Cubans are forced to live, these same tourists can leave a mark on Cubans. Americans, by their interactions with Cuban workers in hotels, restaurants and on the street, could help to erase the propaganda the Cuban regime has fed its people for five decades about the ``evil imperialist monster to the North.''

So, yes, more travel to the island makes sense, though President Obama's loosening of travel rules for Cuban Americans and others on academic or cultural trips is already helping on that front.

The right time?

The question members of Congress should ask now is whether this is the right time to be opening up all travel to Cuba -- in the midst of a recession where tourist meccas from Miami to Las Vegas are hurting with empty hotel rooms. So far, neither Raúl Castro, who now is supposedly in charge, or his brother Fidel, who remains recovering from an intestinal illness, has offered any hope to Cubans that their lives will be better soon.

Political repression remains a challenge for Cubans trying to build a civil society, as Generation Y blogger Yoani Sánchez has experienced, most recently this week when Cuba denied her the right to travel to New York to accept a prestigious award at Columbia University.

If travel is opened to Americans, they should go with their eyes wide open. Even the food and services that Cuba's hotels offer are lacking by most world travelers' standards. That, too, should be a wake-up call for American tourists enamored with a ``socialist paradise'' that exists in name only on ration cards likely to become extinct.

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