Kathleen Hughes' Wall Street Journal article on her Cuban-American husband Daniel Bethencourt's return to his childhood home in Havana during a recent family trip to Cuba is a familiar one to many Cuban-Americans. However, no matter how familiar these stories of seeing relatives for the first time in 50 years, or seeing your childhood home decades and a revolution later may be, they never fail to touch the hearts of even those who've never set foot in Cuba but can only begin to imagine the emotions they stir in those who lived and lost.

I encourage everyone to read the article here. Make sure you check out the pictures and slide show.

There is one aspect of the article I want to point out, and I'll start with the following quote from the señora who lives in Dan Bethencourt's childhood home in the Vedado district:

When we were ready to go, Ms. Ordaz seemed shaken. "I always knew you would come back," she told Dan in Spanish, looking at him very directly. "This is your house. If you want this house, it's yours."

What a powerful statement. A statement that humanizes the complex web that is everything Cuba. Old family friends living in a comfortable home in Havana for 50 years willing to give up the home the displaced owners had entrusted them with. No matter how one may interpret the motivations and intentions of such an offer, it speaks volumes about the fact that despite the evil reshaping of an island, no single person can directly change the human spirit.

I realize that I may depart from some of the esteemed collaborators and readers of this blog on the issue of family visits to Cuba. I am in favor of the Obama adminstration's loosening of travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans, but perhaps not for all the same reasons as Obama. To me, it's the simple humanity of being able to visit a relative or a sick, dying parent, brother or aunt, not because it will change or transform the Cuban people.

Mrs. Ordaz's "this is your house" statement to Dan Bethencourt illustrates how flawed the concept of "people-to-people contacts" triggering change really is. It also shows how paternalistic that attitude is. "Those poor Cubans don't know right from wrong. Let's flood the island with family, friends and American tourists and show them the light". How absurd does that sound in light of the many experiences Cuban-Americans like Bethencourt have had with their relatives in Cuba?

As I stated earlier, no single person, not even a (f)idel (c)astro, can take away the essential, basic nature of our human spirit. Cubans, like anyone else, know the difference between right and wrong. They're fully aware of what they have and don't have. What they do with that knowledge is eventually up to them.