“This is a step to extend a hand to the Cuban people, in support of their desire to determine their own future,” Dan Restrepo, the senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council, said in announcing the move. “It’s very important to help open up space, so the Cuban people can work on the kind of grass-roots democracy that is necessary to move Cuba to a better future.”

Image A schoolboy and a man on the outskirts of Casablanca, Cuba. Decades of United States policy has not toppled the Castros. Credit... Tomas van Houtryve

In a sense, the policy shift is an admission that a half-century of American policy aimed at trying to push the Castros out of power has not worked  as the Cuban American National Foundation, the most powerful lobbying group for Cuban exiles in Miami, conceded last week. Cuba policy experts characterized Mr. Obama’s moves as important humanitarian steps but said they still left open the broader question of how the United States and Cuba plan to engage in the future.

The State Department has said it was reviewing American policy toward Cuba, and Mr. Restrepo said the policy was not “frozen in time today”  a suggestion, some Cuba experts said, that the White House is laying a foundation for more far-reaching change.

“We really don’t know yet what he’s got in mind for the long term,” said Sarah Stephens of the Center for Democracy in the Americas, which advocates a further loosening of the restrictions. She said the administration may be trying to take “baby steps toward building confidence” by letting the Cuban exile community in Miami, which has traditionally opposed any softening of American policy, get used to the idea.

Mr. Obama is also facing pressure from Capitol Hill. The House and the Senate are considering legislation that would lift travel restrictions to Cuba for all Americans, not just those with family in Cuba. And some experts, like Philip Peters, a Cuba specialist and vice president at the Lexington Institute, a policy research center, argue that a president who is willing to engage Iran and Syria ought to be willing to engage Cuba.

“This is a narrow set of measures,” Mr. Peters said. “It doesn’t at all get at the issue of broader contact between American society and Cuban society, and it leaves us in kind of an odd situation where one ethnic group has an unlimited right to travel to Cuba and the rest of us are under these cold war regulations.”

Those who still support the Bush hard line denounced the decision. The Cuban government charges hefty fees on remittances, and critics like Representatives Mario and Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Florida Republicans and brothers who are Cuban-Americans, said Mr. Obama was making a “serious mistake” that would effectively put millions of dollars into the hands of the Castro regime.