Guest editorial: Re-election is more important

Lifting the travel ban, part of long-standing U.S. sanctions against the Castro regime, has growing congressional support. The Senate endorsed it 59 to 38 last month and the House by 227 to 188 in September.

The provision was attached to an overdue $88.9 billion bill funding the departments of Transportation and Treasury for the current fiscal year. President Bush had threatened to veto the bill if the travel restrictions were lifted.

Tourist travel to Cuba is illegal under current law, and the Bush administration has vowed to identify and fine Americans who go there illegally. Travel to Cuba is legal, with licenses, for some -- journalists, scholars, humanitarian workers, agricultural exporters and people with family on the island.

Bush may have been bluffing on the veto threat -- he has yet to veto a bill -- but the lawmakers would have risked delaying a bill that funded not only the two agencies but highway construction, voting reform and Amtrak, not to mention Congress' own pay raise.

The real reason congressional Republicans intervened was the cold calculation that Florida, decisive in Bush's last election, will be so again in 2004 and there was no sense offending the state's 800,000-plus Cuban Americans.

Thus did political expediency outweigh Americans' right to travel freely.