The number of US travellers visiting Cuba climbed 20 per cent last year despite Washington’s decades-old restrictions on travel to the communist country, the Cuban government said.

A total of 63,046 US citizens visited the Caribbean island in 2010, the highest number in at least the last six years and a fifth more than the 52,455 who came in 2009, according to Cuba’s national office of statistics.

Americans who visit Cuba must receive permission from the US Department of the Treasury in accordance with a trade embargo Washington imposed in 1962 in the wake of Fidel Castro’s communist revolution.The number of Americans visiting Cuba has steadily grown in recent years.

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