The Senate’s vote this week to join the House in ending the decades-old travel ban to Cuba was a nod to the reality that the prohibition did nothing to unseat Fidel Castro and instead allowed him to describe the United States as his country’s oppressor. Though the White House is furious at Congress for the amendment, expanding travel in Cuba is consistent with its trade stance for another problematic country, China.

It is a fiction that Cuba and the United States are cut off from each other. Not only do some Americans go around the travel ban, since the Trade Sanctions Reform Act reauthorized direct exports of agricultural and food products to Cuba three years ago, the island nation has purchased hundreds of millions of dollars of goods from the United States, including $142 million this year through August. But the citizens of Cuba shouldn’t see the United States merely as another place where trade is all one way. Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who voted to end the travel ban, said, “I do not condone Fidel Castro’s repressive policies, but I believe the best way we can encourage Cubans to embrace a different government philosophy is to expose them to Americans.”

The office of Sen. Olympia Snowe, who voted against dropping the travel restrictions, said Maine’s senior senator “does not want to inject more money into the Castro regime,” though she has supported expanding trade with totalitarian China, where in the first eight months of this year the United States injected $98 billion on its way to a $77 billion trade imbalance. This position is also the administration’s.

There is a legitimate debate over whether inclusion or exclusion is more likely to push another nation to political reform in such areas as human-rights abuses, and there is no reason to assume that the same response would work the same for all countries. But the Cold War is over and the strategy of exclusion for Cuba since 1963 has not had the kind of effect intended.

Economic sanctions and saber-rattling haven’t worked. Perhaps hordes of demanding tourists will do better. They couldn’t do worse.