Yesterday, the president announced a new series of policies towards Cuba easing some of the travel and trade restrictions with the country, incuding free travel for Cuban family members, unrestricted remittances, and the ability of telecommunications firms to apply for licesnes to business in the country. Each bullet point is in and of itself a good move, but is certainly not enough -- there's no reason our policy in Cuba to be any different than our policy in China, for instance, where trade and travel are taken for granted. But the way this policy was announced by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and Dan Restrepo, the National Security Council's Senior Director for Western Hemisphere Affairs, is especially interesting. Restrepo was present at the daily press briefing to help announce the policy and explain its details, but perhaps more importantly, to do it in Spanish. By announcing the policy in change in Spanish, and being able to field questions from two Spanish language news outlets, the administration offered much more direct outreach not only to the Cuban people and the rest of Latin America, but also to the Spanish-speaking community in the United States. While it would probably be logistically challenging to have a policy expert who speaks the appropriate language on hand every time there is an announcement concerning a foreign country, the U.S. should make a better effort to do so when discussing major issues. I'd love to see an Arabic speaker at Iraq-related press briefings. Because so many people around the world speak English, we often forget that jumping the language barrier is an important part of reaching out to foreign citizens. If the government has the human resources to get fluent speakers publicly explaining U.S. policies in a broad venue, that can only be a good thing.
-- Tim Fernholz
