Already, there are bills gaining bipartisan endorsements that would, variously, lift the ban on Cuban-American travel, lift the ban on all American travel, allow Cuba access to private credit for food purchases, neuter the most egregious aspects of the Helms-Burton Act or get rid of the embargo entirely.

A number of committees are also gearing up to hold hearings to expose the corruption and politicization associated with US-Cuba policy. In particular, Massachusetts Democrat Bill Delahunt, who co-chairs with Arizona Republican Jeff Flake the bipartisan Cuba Working Group, will now have the power to exercise long-overdue oversight and launch investigations on a number of fronts.

One order of business under consideration in Congress is to explore why Cuba remains on the State Department list of terrorist nations. The first witness could be Paul Bremer, the former Bush proconsul in Iraq, who could explain to the public why he recommended that Clinton remove Cuba from the State Department list in the late 1990s. Former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez could illuminate the State Department's rationale for keeping Cuba on the list by explaining why, in the 1980s, he asked Fidel Castro to allow former Basque terrorists to reside in Cuba. Colombia's former president, Andrés Pastrana, and current president, Álvaro Uribe, could explain why Havana has sponsored talks with Colombia's terrorist groups as well. And, to illuminate the rationale for America's historic tolerance of anti-Cuba terrorist activities, Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch should be summoned from his Miami retirement--made possible by an administrative pardon granted by George H.W. Bush--to testify about his alleged collaboration with Luis Posada Carriles in the 1976 terrorist explosion of Cubana Flight 455, which killed all seventy-three passengers on board.

A second order of business would be to investigate the fiscal boondoggle of Radio and TV Martí and other "democracy promotion" programs directed at Cuba. Current Bush Administration officials in charge of these efforts should be asked why the lion's share of the millions of taxpayer dollars spent to "promote democracy" in Cuba seldom make it to the island but are distributed in no-bid contracts to the Miami-based Cuban exile cottage industry. And they should be asked to account for funds for Radio and TV Martí that have been pilfered in kickback schemes.

The Armed Services Committees could call former generals Barry McCaffrey and Jack Sheehan, who have both visited Cuba and met with Raul Castro, to offer an assessment of how US national security might benefit from establishing channels with the Cuban military. They could testify to the cooperation that the Cuban military has provided on counternarcotics operations--including Cuba's recent decision to deport a Colombian drug lord back to Bogotá so he could be extradited to Miami--as well as to the support Cuba has provided to operations at Guantánamo Bay in the name of assisting the fight against international terrorism. And the Foreign Affairs Committees could ask former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz to explain why they called for a bipartisan commission to review Cuba policy in the 1990s and whether such an initiative would, in their view, be appropriate today.

Whether or not the 110th Congress makes new law, a year of hearings, testimony and votes will, at a minimum, lay down some markers demonstrating that Congress and the country are poised for an overhaul of Washington's approach to the island.

George W. Bush will leave office with a legacy of having overseen one of the worst failures ever in American foreign policy. He presided over a near global collapse in American standing and prestige. On his watch, Guantánamo morphed from a local symbol of the US colonial impulse in the hemisphere to a global icon of what's gone wrong with America. But the President could begin to salvage his and America's tattered foreign policy legacy with a few strokes of the pen.

He could sign an executive order restoring the ability of Americans, including Cuban-Americans, to travel to Cuba for family, humanitarian and educational purposes. He could issue licenses for American corporations to start negotiating settlements for their nationalized properties. And he could allow Condoleezza Rice to establish a trusted back channel to explore the seriousness of Raul Castro's recent proposals for bilateral negotiations. He could close down the detention centers in Guantánamo as a first step toward giving the base back to Cuba. None of this would require Bush to sign a new law that hard-liners in his own party would vociferously protest. Apart from the kudos he'd garner from governments and publics in Europe and Latin America soured on American power, at home Republicans would also send a positive signal to non-Cuban Latinos, especially in Florida, who resent the distorted attentions and special benefits historically directed to Cuban-Americans by both parties.

After a half-century of failure and delusion it might just be liberal fantasy that a dose of realpolitik could lead to a new approach to Cuba. Fortunately, polling and voting patterns of the American people, even in Florida, are beginning to show that whoever takes the White House in 2009 will have the political running room to turn Secretary Gutierrez's speech on its head. Washington's policy may not bring full-blown capitalism, let alone democracy, to a perennially closed society. But an overhaul of US policy may well relax the siege mentality that keeps Cuba's own reforms muzzled--and recast US-Cuba relations in a more normal light. That's why a little reform might be downright revolutionary.

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