It came as no surprise yesterday when Fidel Castro announced that he was stepping down after 49 years as president of Cuba. It was only a matter of time. The lion of the Cuban revolution is 81 and ailing.

No one expects much change in the short run. Power will likely pass to Castro's brother Raul, 76, when Cuba's National Assembly meets on Sunday, but his big brother will remain a power behind the scenes. Raul is, however, more open to change than his brother. In the year and a half since Fidel disappeared from public life after colon surgery, Raul Castro has convened public forums to hear suggestions on how to improve life under the socialist system his brother created after he seized power in 1959. He has also shown a willingness to permit modest economic reforms, freed 20 percent of the island's political prisoners and said that Cuban troops would recapture any suspected terrorists who escape from Guantanamo.

The United States should reward such overtures with a relaxing of the counterproductive economic embargo it's waged against Cuba for two decades. Had that embargo been lifted long ago, Cuba would be a lot more prepared to move toward democracy after the demise of the Castro regime.

The embargo helped cripple Cuba's economy. But instead of weakening Castro's grip on the island, it hardened it. It also allowed the dictator to blame his government's many failures on Yankee meddling.

It would be nice, but probably unrealistic, to think that progress could be made while President Bush is still in office. The misguided 1996 Helms-Burton Act signed into law by Bill Clinton gives the president wide latitude to loosen or tighten the embargo's restrictions. Bush could begin by lifting his election-year crackdown on visits by Cuban-Americans to see family members and on remittances, the money sent to relatives in Cuba that, along with foreign tourism, allows Cuba's economy to sputter along. Visits are now limited to a maximum of 14 days every three years, and family members can be sent no more than $1,200 per year. Those limits should be raised every time the Cuban government shows convincing evidence of greater respect for human rights and ultimately eliminated.

Bush has vowed not to lift the embargo or his ban on American tourism to Cuba until Castro's government holds free and fair elections. That demand is as unrealistic as talk of "bringing democracy" to Cuba. Democracy requires preparation, and nothing would better prepare Cuba for a transition to freedom than free trade and normal relations with America.

The United States' failed attempt to isolate Cuba helped Castro demonize America, and his words fell on fertile ground in places like Venezuela, whose president, Hugo Chavez, considers the dictator a role model. An aid program that improves the quality of Cuban lives would earn America some badly needed goodwill in Latin America and speed change.

Cuba, by all reports, has good doctors and good schools but a shortage of medicines and computers and other technology. It's also suffering a housing shortage so critical that feuding couples often have to live in the same house or apartment for years after getting divorced - human suffering that most Americans can relate to better than imprisonment.

The Castros' grip on Cuba won't loosen all at once. Nor will America's hard line policy. But changes in Cuba give this president, and certainly the next, even greater cause to end policies that failed years ago.