Cuba

President Barack Obama said Wednesday he's looking for a transformation on the island before "fully engaging" Cuba. His remarks actually complete something of a transformation for Mr. Obama, who went from saying this on one campaign trail, to saying this on the next campaign trail, to now saying stuff like this:

The good news? Cuban energy officials are taking the lessons of the BP oil spill disaster very seriously, according to a group of oil drilling and environmental experts just back from Cuba, including the co-chairman of the Bipartisan National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling (also former EPA administrator), the head of the International Association of Drilling Contractors, a former senior executive for Royal Dutch Shell, and a longtime Cuba expert with the Environmental Defense Fund.

This report explores the historic reform process currently underway in Cuba. It looks first at the political context in which the VI Cuban Communist Party Congress took place, including the Cuban government's decision to release a significant number of political prisoners as part of a new dialogue with the Cuban Catholic Church. It then analyzes Cuba's nascent processes of economic reform and political liberalization. To conclude, it discusses the challenges and opportunities these processes pose for U.S policy toward Cuba.

The world has been transfixed recently by the struggles of people living under atrophied dictatorships, who, empowered by new forms of communication, have risen up and collectively said "no mas" — or the Arabic equivalent. Individuals such as Wael Ghonim, the 30-year-old Google marketing executive who galvanized the Egyptian opposition on Facebook and spent a couple of weeks in prison for his efforts, have been lionized on American newscasts.

Today the Obama administration announced that it will ease federal regulations governing legal travel to Cuba.  The new rules will expand educational and religious travel, and will restore people-to-people cultural initiatives that were originally authorized under President Clinton and then curtailed by the Bush administration.

On January 11, 2011, the New America Foundation hosted a retrospective discussion on the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Journalist Andy Worthington, Colonel Morris Davis, Thomas Wilner, and Benjamin Wittes all participated. Patrick Doherty, senior advisor to New America’s Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative and Director of the organization’s Smart Strategy Initiative, moderated the event.

It's been said that when elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.

No case illustrates this suffering more than that of Alan Gross, a Maryland resident and USAID subcontractor who was working to connect the Cuban Jewish community to the Internet and was detained by Cuban authorities one year ago. Campaigning for his release these many months, his wife, Judy Gross, fears that her husband has become a "pawn" in the half-century Cold War between the United States and Cuba.

As Havana prepares for its first Communist Party Congress in 14 years in April, the United States should seize the opportunity to positively influence the economic blueprint the party is expected to approve.

In the high-stakes world of international diplomacy, bluffing is a seldom-seen practice -- the stakes are simply too high to risk getting called out. But, that's precisely what seems to have happened with the Obama administration's stated policy of détente toward Cuba. Havana is making concessions, but Washington seems incapable of responding in kind. The United States may be fumbling away its best chance at influencing Cuba in the way that it has claimed to have wanted for decades.

Steel yourselves: you're about to hear a lot of Republican praise for, of all things, the Cuban government.

Yes, it's the next insane and deceptive talking point on the horizon, in California and around the country.