For more than 40 years, Fidel Castro and the foreign-policy establishment in this country have been locked in an absurd embrace that has resulted in incalculable-and wholly avoidable-suffering for ordinary Cubans.

On the one hand is the United States, which has always sought to destroy any regime or social movement that challenges U.S. hegemony in Latin America. Ever since Castro rose to power, U.S. policymakers have found in his dictatorship a useful excuse for squeezing Cuba to ensure that it did not develop an appealing alternative to the dependency and subservience that historically have been the fate of Latin American nations.

On the other hand is Castro, who has built a vast police state and followed the Soviet socialist path to economic ruin, but has justified it all by pointing to the belligerent colossus to the north.

And helping to perpetuate this state of affairs-wittingly or not-are right-wing Cuban-Americans who have fought for policies that clearly have benefited Castro and demagogues here, but have served only to make life extremely difficult for people back in Cuba.

Signs are afoot, however, that Washington may be moving toward ending its callous economic blockade of the island nation just to our south. Congress passed legislation in 2000 allowing some direct sales of agricultural products to Cuba, and a bill cleared the Senate earlier this year that would permit U.S. banks to finance this commerce.

In addition, the House voted last year to scrap travel restrictions that effectively prevent most Americans from legally visiting Cuba (the Senate did not vote on the measure).

Even prominent conservatives are questioning the Cuba embargo. Republican Sen. John Warner, for example, has argued in this newspaper that Washington’s isolation of Castro has failed to achieve the goal of “a free, democratic and economically viable Cuba.”

In a 1999 opinion piece published amid congressional debate over the embargo, the senior senator from Virginia raised concerns about the sanctions’ impact on Cuba’s political situation as well as on the health and welfare of the Cuban people.

More recently, the U.S. travel industry has begun clamoring for an end to the embargo. “We’re not a political organization,” the president of the American Society of Travel Agents told the Kansas City Star, “but we feel that the American public should have the right to travel freely anywhere in the world.”