Cuba's foreign minister applauds Obama stance on sanctions

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Cuba's foreign minister on Wednesday said he welcomed a call by U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to ease restrictions on travel and remittances to the communist-ruled island.

In an opinion piece in The Miami Herald newspaper on Tuesday, the Illinois senator and a chief rival of Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination proposed easing tighter limits imposed by the Bush administration on Cuban exiles traveling or sending money home.

"These declarations appear to express the sentiment of the majority of the United States," Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said when asked to comment on Obama's proposal.

Measures by the Bush administration to tighten the decades-old blockade were barbaric and an effort to "try to force our people to surrender through hunger and illness," Roque told reporters at a conference in Brazil's capital.

The vote of Cuban exiles has been considered important for U.S. presidential candidates to win in Florida. The community broadly supports the trade embargo enforced by Washington since 1962 but is deeply divided over the additional measures that date to 2004.

"The blockade has to be dismantled and the rights of Cuba respected," Roque said.

In the race to contest the U.S. presidential election in November 2008, Obama trails Clinton by 48 percent to 26 percent in a USA Today/Gallup poll on August 7.

Cuba's ailing leader Fidel Castro, age 81, handed over power to his brother Raul last year after undergoing emergency intestinal surgery.

In a speech on Revolution Day on July 26, Raul Castro -- looking beyond Bush -- said he was open to negotiations with the next U.S. administration to settle the decades-old feud.

Clinton said it was too early to consider broad changes in U.S. sanctions against Cuba until it became clear what policy changes a post-Fidel Castro government will adopt.

Another Democratic candidate, Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, is co-sponsoring a bill that would altogether lift restrictions on travel to Cuba, allowing Americans to visit the island freely for the first time since the Kennedy administration banned travel there in 1963.