John Kerry: “I just make the point to the Senator that, having spoken with a lot of people who have gone down there and made some of…”

“I just make the point to the Senator that, having spoken with a lot of people who have gone down there and made some of those trips, the families aren't restricted in that way. They meet with relations. They tell people what is going on in the United States. They talk about their feelings about Fidel Castro. What is amazing about this debate, what is absolutely stupefying, is that what the Senators seem to be defending is completely contrary now to the experience since 1959. We went through the whole 1960s, went through the Bay of Pigs, went through the 1970s. We went through the height of the Reagan opposition to the Iron Curtain and through all of the changes in Russia, the former Soviet Union, the former east bloc countries. We have seen the dynamics of that change. The one place where our policy remains the same as it has throughout all of those years is the place where there has been the least change. One of the reasons they had the power to shoot down those four planes is that there is no movement in the relationship, because they are as isolated. If you look at the experience of Cubans, restricted, who go back to Cuba to visit their families, limited by the United States of America to one visit a year with their own family, you find that they are the ones saying to us today, we would like to have the right to travel to visit our families as frequently as we can.”