There may not be a more pointless American foreign policy than the Cuban embargo. When Fidel Castro declared himself a community in 1961, President Kennedy crabbed a handful of Cuban cigars and placed them in a paper bag whilst declaring an embargo on Cuba.

Cuba and American used to be close neighbors. Havana was a top tourist destination for Americans, particularly during the decade of prohibition, and American landowner held 60% of Cuban land. The revolution of 1958 deposing Batista was initially greeted with approval in America, and the young revolutionary Fidel landed in New York amid much fanfare. Only Vice-President Richard Nixon saw that Fidel may turn out to pose some trouble for the United States. And so he did. The Kennedy administration was embarrassed by the Bay of Pigs fiasco, a failed C.I.A. attempt to overthrow Castro, and the United States almost fought a nuclear war with Russia over Soviet missiles in Cuba.

Throughout the decades, aided in large part by activism within the staunchly anti-Castro Cuban-American community, the decades has remained in place. It now appears just cruel. Having lost its Soviet patron, Cuba is an incredibly poor country where people still drive around 1950s American automobiles. Many, if not most, Cubans live off rations ironically provided by the United States. And what has it gained? Kennedy instituted the embargo because he thought that a economically crippled Cuba would see the end of Castro. Even with Soviet aid, Castro has been able to stay put in the face of now a fourth American president. The only thing the embargo has achieved is worsening the lives of Cubans.

But now that fourth American president - Barack Obama - may just bring about an end to this futile embargo. President Obama recently lifted the travel and monetary limits imposed against Cuba. And American telecoms operators can now connect callers to Cuba. That is how severe the embargo was. In a free country, American telecoms firms were prohibited from connecting calls. And Cuban-Americans were only allowed to travel to Cuba once every three years and aid to families was capped. Those restriction are now gone, but direct flights to Cuba are still non-existent and the lift on spending money and visitation to Cuba only applying to Cuban-Americans. Although in theory, other Americans may not visit Cuba, the U.S. government no longer enforced this asinine rule.

But will Obama move past that? In his speech at the Summit of the Americas at Port de Spain in Trinidad, Obama stated in no uncertain terms that he would like to open up a new relationship with Cuba, but that he was not just interested in dialogue. Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother and the current president, would have to meet certain obligation in the way of human rights before the United States made more moved in lifting the embargo.

Will Obama end the embargo in one sweep? Probably not. What is to be expected is an incremental weakening of the embargo in correlation with improvement in, say, press freedom and release of prisons of conscience in Cuba. The embargo on rice may be the first to go.

Whatever the path, it should come to an end. It is immoral for a nation as powerful as the United States to impose such a devastating blockade against a defenseless, tiny island. It was always myopic for a free society to ban its own citizens from trading and visiting with a people, because of disputes between governments. Always wrong, but even more so in the post-Cold War world, the Cuban should come to a unequivocal end.