Poll: Americans Back Easing of Cuba Policy

Most Americans would support an overhaul of restrictive U.S. policy toward Cuba, says a poll released Tuesday.

This is particularly the case in Florida, home to the largest community of people of Cuban-descent in the United States, according to the nationwide survey.

It found 56 percent of those questioned support change, and the proportion rises to 63 percent in Florida.

The study was carried out by a think tank called the Atlantic Council, which said it was surprised by the figure for Florida.

"This is a key change from the past: Cuba used to be intractable because Florida was intractable. This poll argues that is no longer true," the authors of the study, Paul Maslin and Glen Bolger, wrote in its introduction.

In Miami-Dade County, historically described as a bastion of resistance to any normalization of U.S. relations with Cuba, support for change stand at 64 percent.

The United States imposed an economic embargo on Cuba in 1960, a year after Fidel Castro came to power in the Cuban revolution.

Now, the poll said, more than six out of every 10 people surveyed said they would back a Cuba policy that allows U.S. companies to have normal relations with the communist-run island and operate there freely.

A similar percentage would like to see restrictions on Americans traveling to Cuba lifted.

Likewise, 61 percent of those polled want the U.S. government to remove Cuba from the list of countries that Washington considers to be supporters of terrorism. In Florida, the figure rises to 67 percent.

Commenting on the survey, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy said, "It is time to change this policy towards Cuba, because it is discriminatory, it is wrong, and needs to be changed."

Leahy added: "It is illogical to keep today a policy designed in the Eisenhower era."

Alluding to the embargo, he said, "It is not only a matter of money. It is about how we treat other countries. The time has come for a change of course."

The Atlantic Council poll was carried out in January among 1,024 people and has a margin of error of three percentage points.