The members of Congress who led the effort to reinstate these draconian rules restricting Cuban Americans are, in fact, themselves Cuban Americans. They include the powerful chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and House Appropriations Committee member Mario Diaz-Balart. In the Senate, both Cuban American senators, Marco Rubio and Bob Menendez, also favor these restrictions on travel and financial assistance to families in Cuba. Of the four, Menendez is the only democrat; all four are anti-Castro hardliners.

They argue that the travel and remittances provide a financial windfall to the Castro government. This is true: the more money Cubans have to spend on daily necessities or on starting up small businesses, the more the Cuban economy as a whole will improve and the government will inevitably capture more hard currency in circulation. The hundreds of thousands of Cuban Americans are not generally fans of the Castro government -- many came to America, or their parents came to America, to escape its political and economic policies. Yet sending money back is a trade-off that many of them believe they must make for the sake of their friends and family on the island.

So why do these Congressmen believe that denying the Cuban government some hard currency is so crucial a policy rider as to nearly allow it to bring down a trillion dollar spending bill? The Cuban government, after all, would likely manage to either replace or do without the money, as it did in financial crises in the early 1990s and again in 2008.

In fact, while depriving the Cuban government of hard currency is a high priority for anti-Castro hardliners in Congress, there is an even bigger issue at stake for these staunch embargo supporters. Senator Rubio put his finger on it when he defended the restrictions in 2008, while still a member of the Florida legislature.

"What you had was a situation where people would come to Miami from Cuba, stay for a year and a day and then go back," he said. "And what this was doing was threatening the sustainability of the Cuban Adjustment Act itself, the U.S. law that gives Cubans who come to this country a special status as political exiles rather than immigrants."

"What makes Cubans different from Haitians who come here or anyone else," Rubio went on, "if they go back and forth, that is to say, if they're not exiles at all? In that case, why should Cubans be any different? The whole structure would have unraveled had something not been done."

Rubio is right to fear increasing awareness that Cubans emigres are no longer overwhelmingly political refugees, but rather are largely economic migrants. But if these newer generation Cuban emigres don't act like exiles, why don't Rubio and his like-minded Cuban-American colleagues fight instead to end the unique access to the United States still afforded to Cubans half a century after Fidel Castro took power?