Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro is right, of course-much as the American president Barack Obama’s lifting of the travel restrictions that stifled meetings between Cubans on either side of the Florida straits is to be welcomed it does not come anywhere near to lifting the embargo that has crippled ’normal relations’’ between the two countries.

Mr Castro was also right when he noted that the almost 50-year-old embargo had dramatically failed to topple the Castro regime, the Castros and their comrades retaining an iron-grip on the lives of their citizens, many of whom have seized any opportunity provided them to run from the revolution into the waiting arms of the old enemy.

For the last avowed communist leader left standing in the ’Americas’’ that too, is a nettle in the olive branch that Mr Obama has extended with Mr Castro voicing exasperation at the way the United States has welcomed, even facilitated, ’runaway’’ Cubans once they manage to set foot on American territory.

But surely both Castros, the elder and the younger, should look inwards rather than outwards since the real issue here is not the welcome that fleeing Cubans receive in the United States but the reasons behind their flight as Cubans continue to struggle with the quality of life lower than that taken for granted in most, if not all, of the other Caribbean islands.

Cuba, whatever the romanticisation by the Castro supporters, not only here but elsewhere, is a dictatorship, where people do not even have that basic right of freely speaking their mind on any issue, political or otherwise, far less being able to write it and have those writings disseminated by independent media, a strategy aimed, among other things at ensuring the regime’s control of even its sham elections.

Moreover, the old Cuban warhorse is knowledgeable enough in the world of realpolitik to know that for Mr Obama to be able to do more to close the embargo divide something has to give-and that something is for the Castroite regime to give increasing evidence that they are preparing to ’free up’’ their place, whatever the on-the-surface stability of the old ways.

Caribbean and Latin American leaders, we continue to insist, have a right to press for the lifting of the sanctions suffocating Cuba but they have an equal right to press the Castros, first for a freer and then for a really free Cuba. Señor Chavez, given the shared respect and affection, seems the best placed.