changing type in python

I think I might be going about this a strange way in Python, but here's what I've been doing.

Code:

#!/usr/bin/env python

entered = raw_input("Enter numbers, separate numbers by spaces ")
numbers = entered.split(" ")

This achieves what I want but trying to pass this through a for statement and do arithmetic seems to not work

Code:

...
temp = 0
for elem in numbers:
    temp = temp + elem

So I get this error: TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'int' and 'str'

So I guess I'm asking can you make python think that elem in the for statement is an int and definitely not a string.

 

you can convert the str into int before the addition using int()