Administration denies aim is to undermine 38-year embargo
By Christopher Marquis. New York Times News Service. Chicago Tribune. June 19, 2000
WASHINGTON -- By relaxing rules and applying only a spotty enforcement of travel restrictions, the Clinton administration is opening Cuba to American travelers at a rate not seen in more than 40 years.
While administration officials deny that the increased travel is intended to undermine the 38-year-old embargo against Cuba, the new flow has given rise to a flurry of business, personal and political contacts. And there is a renewed push in some circles--Democratic and Republican--to relax the
commercial boycott, one of the last relics of the increasingly distant Cold War.
The number of Americans traveling legally to Cuba has surged by 10 percent a year for each of the last five years, according to Treasury Department officials. The number traveling to Cuba on the sly more than doubled in the same period, they said.
According to Cuban government figures, about 135,000 Americans visited Cuba last year on individual or group trips sanctioned under the administration's increasingly relaxed rules. Some 22,000 Americans went last year illegally through third countries, according to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and
Economic Council.
This increase in Americans going to Cuba reflects an administration strategy to encourage contacts between civilians in both countries, partly as a way to help Cuba prepare for a smooth transition after President Fidel Castro, who has ruled since 1959, is no longer in power.
The Clinton administration has helped make those growing numbers possible by allowing direct flights to Havana from New York and Los Angeles this year, and adding more flights from Miami, which now reach four cities in Cuba. The number of people traveling directly to Cuba grew by almost 50
percent last year.
In addition, the Commerce Department increasingly approves licenses for private planes, like those that carried executives in January to the first trade show of American medical products in Havana.
By making more contact with Americans, Cubans "understand they can make decisions in their own lives," said Charles Shapiro, the director of the State Department's Office of Cuban Affairs.
Asked whether the new strategy is a way to relax the embargo while avoiding the political firestorm that would accompany a formal attempt to do so, Shapiro said, "Absolutely not." Congress is needed for any substantial policy switch, he said. "What the president can do is make
some changes in the margins."
In 1996, Congress codified the Cuban embargo into law. That stripped the president of the ability to lift sanctions by executive order, as he has done, for example, with Vietnam. But the president retains a right to define who can travel, and the administration is considering additional measures
to ease travel further, including lifting the once-a-year restriction on visits by Cuban-Americans, officials said.
Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) returned from a recent trip to Cuba and introduced a bill to let Americans travel freely to the island, arguing that the trade ban is failing and the limits on travelers are unconstitutional. "Unilateral sanctions never work," he said. "I thought we were
supposedly shutting the place down, and you see all this new hotel construction."
In recent weeks, some members of the Congressional Black Caucus who went to Havana returned denouncing the embargo. The American Farm Bureau threw its weight behind a Republican proposal to allow the sale of food and medicine to Cuba after two Democrats from Arkansas returned eager to sell rice.
A top official of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce emerged from a meeting with Cuban officials saying that Cuba is willing to negotiate compensation for properties it confiscated from American businesses four decades ago.
Illinois Gov. George Ryan in October became the first U.S. governor to visit Castro-led Cuba and came back with strong words against continuing the trade embargo.
The "people-to-people" contacts were authorized with bipartisan support in the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act but were not broadly put into effect until last year. Access to Cuba, the top Caribbean tourist destination a half-century ago, has been limited for decades to American journalists,
government officials and Cuban exiles visiting relatives. Now the flow includes the likes of the Yale Glee Club, the Baltimore Orioles and 130 students from Buxton High School in Williamstown, Mass.
Vicki Huddleston, the top American diplomat in Cuba, said in a town hall meeting in Los Angeles this month that the goal is to channel information and ideas into Cuba.
"No island can remain an island with open communication," Huddleston said.
But some supporters of the trade ban are skeptical.
"I don't see the benefits of the people-to-people policy," said Rep. Robert Menendez, a Cuban-American Democrat from New Jersey. "There have been hundreds of thousands of visitors and millions of dollars spent, and Castro has become more oppressive."
In May of last year, the administration for the first time gave about 150 organizations, including universities--from Harvard to Berkeley--high schools and religious groups, the authority to license their members for travel to Cuba.
Meanwhile, Americans who do not bother to get government approval face little risk of prosecution, administration officials said.
Unauthorized travelers include everyone from Cuban-Americans--who run afoul of the rules by traveling more than the approved one family visit a year--to beachcombers, fishermen, political activists, sex tourists and others.
Though about 22,000 Americans traveled illegally to Cuba last year, Treasury Department authorities levied only about 200 civil penalties, officials said. And they did not refer a single case to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.
More than 100 cases of suspected travel violations have languished for months because defense lawyers have demanded hearings for their clients and the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control has no judges to conduct them. The office hopes to borrow an administrative judge, part
time, from the Environmental Protection Agency this year, a senior administration official said.
The travel restrictions in reality are curbs on spending money in Cuba. Authorized American travelers are allowed to spend up to $183 a day. Unapproved visitors who spend cash could face up to 10 years in prison, $1 million in corporate fines, $250,000 in individual fines or civil penalties of
up to $55,000 per violation.
Federal authorities admit that their contradictory mandate--to make authorized travel easier while impeding tourism--makes the restrictions on Cuban travel some of the most difficult to enforce. Yet they insist the current law remains an effective deterrent for most Americans.
"It's fair to assume that if you go unlawfully, and are caught, you can expect to be involved in this process" of enforcement, the senior administration official said.
The enforcement scenario is complicated because many of the unauthorized travelers fly to Cuba through third countries, like the Bahamas, Canada or Mexico. Eager for the foreigners' cash, Cuba obliges Americans by failing to stamp their passports. |