I kept looking over my shoulder, sure that the police would burst in at any moment. It never happened. But I realized then how the isolation of Cuba imposed by the United States embargo for more than five decades had prevented me from seeing the efforts Cubans were making — and the risks they were taking — to criticize the state through the arts.  After that, I returned to the island many times as the director of the Latino Theater Festival at the Goodman Theater, looking to bring Cuba’s leading theater company, Teatro Buendía, back here to Chicago. I eventually succeeded in 2010.  In my role as a professor, I returned to Cuba this summer to create a theater course with Teatro Buendía for Northwestern’s study abroad program. Incongruously enough, the new course was made possible by a grant through the State Department, designed to foster cultural exchange.  As a Cuban-American who was raised to be fiercely patriotic about my adopted home, I believe the best way to instigate change in Cuba is to support these performers and all those who risk retribution for criticizing the revolution. However, the recent appointment by President-elect Donald J. Trump of Mauricio Claver-Carone, director of a hard-line conservative Cuban-American political action committee, to a transition team for the Treasury Department is a threatening sign for advocates of President Obama’s groundbreaking shift of policy toward Cuba.  Mr. Claver-Carone’s views are consistent with a declining but still influential generation in my community of those who obstinately deny that more access and open communication with those living in Cuba can support pro-democracy activities, and threaten the government of Raúl Castro from within.  To return now to the failed approach of the past would be worse than counterproductive. All you have to do is travel the half-hour from José Martí International Airport to central Havana to see the propaganda billboard that blames the embargo for all the shortages and hardships suffered by the Cuban people. The trade ban is undeniably the most effective prop the Castro regime has to avoid taking responsibility for every ill in Cuba.  I grew up witnessing the profound pain of all that my family lost when we came to this country. I watched my mother, Adela, struggle to create a future for her 10 children in a new country. And I grew up lamenting the loss of a life I never knew, a culture and identity that we, her children, were cut off from.  So I understand, too well, the arguments of political leaders like Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz against normalizing relations with Cuba. They and other politicians aligned with influential hard-line Cuban-Americans argue that while the Cuban government continues to violate human rights, suppressing free speech, unrestricted travel and economic opportunities for its people, the United States should maintain pressure on the regime by upholding the trade embargo. Recently, however, and for the first time after historically casting “no” votes, the United States simply abstained from a vote at the United Nations to lift it.  A door has been cracked open. To push it completely open requires the courage to reassess our true intentions and how best to achieve them. The possibility now exists for artistic collaboration and cultural exchange.  To be sure, human rights abuses do continue in Cuba, most notably in the constraint of freedom of expression. Though Cubans are freer to travel outside the country, the state still restricts unfettered travel, even within the island. And while the Castro regime defends its stumbling economic reforms, opportunities for its citizens are limited to about 200 sanctioned nonstate jobs, which include, somewhat surreally, the profession of clowning.  But when one strategy fails, it is only logical — and human — to explore another. Both the Cuban exile community and Cubans on the island are hungry for change, but part of that change must be to rethink our demands of past decades.  One issue we must revisit is the idea of reparations for families like mine that fled or were driven into exile. In Cuba, generations of families have made their homes in the houses nationalized by the revolutionary government when Cuban citizens fled the country. For many born since the revolution, those are the only homes they have ever known. Meanwhile, Cuban-Americans of my generation have been the beneficiaries of the American dream; generally, we have achieved a much higher quality of life than our counterparts on the island.  I am no political scientist, but I am a proud Cuban-American and socially conscious theater artist who has lived in both worlds. Unlike many hard-liners in the Cuban exile community, I have spent considerable time in Cuba over the last 13 years, working closely with Cuban artists who bravely voice their dissent against the regime.  I’ve seen how Cubans, from artists to taxi drivers, speak freely about how the embargo is a prop for the state’s denial of responsibility for the hardships they face daily. If those who oppose changing United States policy toward Cuba visited the island, they, too, would realize this obvious truth. But many will not, on principle, return.  That is a mistake. Nothing is more threatening to a totalitarian regime than the unfettered flow of information and ideas. By demanding that Congress lift the trade embargo on Cuba, we can make more exchange possible, especially for students and artists, to turn that flow into a torrent. People in Cuba know that change is inevitable; and with the death of Fidel Castro, they need us to act now more than ever.  Henry Godinez is a professor in the Department of Theater at Northwestern University and the resident artistic associate at the Goodman Theater.  Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.  A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 30, 2016, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: The dream, finally, of a free Cuba. Today's Paper|Subscribe
The trade embargo has failed. What Cubans eager for the end of the Castro regime want is for the U.S. Congress to vote it down.