US groups hope Obama will allow more travel to Cuba

"We're hoping they'll eliminate all travel restrictions, but it seems more likely they will go back to where we were under the Clinton administration," Balog said.

Global Exchange brought as many as 2,000 Americans to Cuba annually under the special "people-to-people" category created by Clinton in 1999 and laxer regulation of other approved US travel categories.

People-to-people travel was intended to spread American ideals and increase understanding between the two nations, which haven't had diplomatic relations since 1961.

Bush shut it down in 2003, saying the policy was increasingly being used to organise tourism packages masquerading as study tours. He also tightened restrictions on educational, religious, humanitarian and other kinds of authorised travel.

Enforcement of the Cuba regulations soared, jumping from 188 cases against people, businesses and groups in Clinton's final year in office to 766 in Bush's first year.

US educational travel, a category that still exists, was slashed by up 90 percent, said William Leogrande at American University, which had to shut down the Cuba study programs of several weeks it once offered between semesters and in the summer.

The more than 100 US universities with licenses for educational travel dwindled to a few dozen after new rules allowed only study programs of 10 weeks or more and permitted only students from the licensed school to participate.

American University still operates a semester-long program in Cuba, with less than a dozen students. Leogrande hopes that will change. "I do think things are going to move now. I think we will see a broadening back to the Clinton era," he said.

Trips conducted by US-based alumni groups, museums, sister city associations, bird-watching clubs and other organisations allowed Americans to visit Cuba without fear of being fined.

Miller, author of "Trading With the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba," was co-director for two years of the US-Cuba Writers Conference. He said it brought 25 writers to Havana to "mix it up with some 25 Cuban writers in a sort of literary detente."

Instructors for the bilingual seminars on fiction, nonfiction, translation, poetry, plays and performance included celebrated Latino authors Junot Diaz and Cristina Garcia.

As many 30,000 Americans visited Cuba legally over the four years that people-to-people travel existed, giving them a US-sanctioned look at this island most of their compatriots cannot.

"What was wonderful about that period is that it allowed us to break down the barriers between the United States and Cuba," said Sandra Levinson at the Centre for Cuban Studies in New York.

Along with Global Exchange, the centre conducted a large chunk of the tours to Cuba.

Levinson said resumption of the trips could be the key to the survival of the centre, which now raises most of its money showing and selling works by Cuban artists - something increasingly harder to do in the economic downturn.

Balog, at Global Exchange, is optimistic.

"We don't know when it could be - in six months, another year, or even tomorrow," she said. "We have to be ready."

AP