A CURIOUS asymmetry exists across the 90-mile (150km) Straits of Florida that divide Cuba from the United States. This month American businessmen won permission from their government to start plush new ferry services to Cuba for the first time since the United States trade embargo was imposed in 1960. Moving in the other direction are thousands of impoverished Cubans in makeshift boats and rafts, risking their lives to flee the communist island despite a five-month-old thaw in relations with America that both governments hope will bring more prosperity to Cuba. In the first quarter of the year the number of Cuban migrants arriving in America more than doubled, and 2,460 have been apprehended at sea since October. Why this gap between rhetoric and reality?
