For a moment yesterday, it looked like the tide had started to turn on the embargo on Cuba. A press release from the Center for Democracy in the Americas announced that Rep. Dan Burton had agreed to support the Cuban-American Family Rights Restoration Act. According to that release, he made that assurance to Sgt. Carlos Lazo, an Iraq war veteran who won a Bronze Star for valor during the Battle of Fallujah and had been denied a license to visit his teenage sons in Cuba after he finished his tour of duty.

For Burton, the co-author of the Helms-Burton Act, to sign on to loosening the Cuba sanctions would be monumental news — both as unexpected and as newsworthy as, say, an announcement that Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell had become engaged to be married. To each other. One South Florida newspaper ran a story headlined “Hard Liner Backs Easing Travel Ban.”

But before anyone could break out the mojitos and Cohibas, it was all over. Burton’s office quickly denied that he’d gone soft on Fidel and called the report in the CDA press release a “rumor.” Sgt. Lazo is sticking by his story and says that Burton told him he was “on board.”

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