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The Miami
Herald.
U.S. may tighten Cuba travel
By Andres Oppenheimer. Aoppenheimer@herald.com. Posted on
Sun, Dec. 15, 2002 .
Bush administration officials are considering new restrictions on travel to
Cuba that would significantly reduce the number of U.S. residents authorized to
visit the island and could further hurt that country's tourism income.
Under the proposal, which officials describe as one of many ideas being
discussed by the administration's policy planners, only Cubans with U.S.
citizenship would be allowed to travel to Cuba.
Accordingly, tens of thousands of Cuban immigrants who are not U.S. citizens
but are currently allowed to travel to the island every year on humanitarian
grounds would be denied permission to return to Cuba to visit.
''We had a lot of complaints from the Immigration and Naturalization
Service, the Justice Department and other agencies, that people come from Cuba
claiming political persecution, and one year later go back with money and
packages,'' one U.S. official said.
However, a U.S. congressman said Saturday in Havana that support is growing
for an end to the travel ban and that the law could be changed within two years.
OVERRIDE PREDICTION
William Delahunt, D-Mass., one of 46 lawmakers on the bipartisan Cuba
Working Group that is pushing a broad series of steps to ease limits on U.S.
dealings with Cuba, said he believes that the two-thirds majority needed to
override a presidential veto could be achieved within two years.
''If Americans can travel to Iraq and Iran, two-thirds of the so-called axis
of evil, why can't they travel to Cuba?'' asked Delahunt, who was in Havana
Saturday for ceremonies marking the first anniversary of the first U.S. food
shipments to Cuba in four decades.
Administration officials say there are key human rights and national
security considerations behind the proposal limiting travel to Cuba, such as
protecting noncitizen residents of this country from possible arrests in Cuba
and preventing terrorists from moving freely between Cuba and the United States.
Cuba is one of the countries on the U.S. State Department's list of nations
that promote or tolerate terrorism.
The possibility of allowing only Cubans with U.S. passports to travel to the
island is being considered in informal discussions between the State Department
and officials of the White House National Security Council. But the idea has not
yet been formally presented to Cabinet-level officials, several administration
sources said.
Asked about the proposed travel restrictions, a State Department official
said, "There is a general discussion of options for travel to and from
Cuba, which has been going on for months. A number of options have been tossed
around, but that doesn't necessarily mean that these discussions will lead to
concrete decisions.''
A spokesman for the National Security Council declined to comment.
QUARTER ARE CITIZENS
About 160,000 people traveled from the United States to Cuba last year with
or without U.S. travel permits, U.S. officials estimate. According to the Cuban
American National Foundation, an exile lobbying group, about 110,000 of those
were Cuban-born or Cuban American, and only 25 percent of them U.S. citizens.
If the proposed travel restrictions are approved, the majority of Cubans who
are not U.S. citizens would be barred from visiting Cuba, or would have to go
through third countries, Cuban exile groups say.
One U.S. official said that, while the Bush administration may tighten
travel restrictions for noncitizens, it may also expand the exceptions under
which citizens -- including Cuban Americans -- can travel to Cuba. Current U.S.
law allows journalists and academics, among others, to obtain special permits to
travel to the island.
John Kavulich, head of the nonprofit U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council,
said the proposed travel restrictions would hit one of Cuba's most important
sources of foreign income.
While U.S. visitors may rank fourth among foreign visitors to the island,
after Canadians, Germans and Italians, they spend about $200 million a year in
Cuba.
Asked about the proposal, CANF spokesman Joe Garcia said, "I think it's
a very viable option to protect Cuban Americans visiting Cuba, as well as to put
further economic pressure on an already desperate situation for the regime.''
But Carlos Saladrigas, a leader of the Cuban Studies Group, another
influential exile group, said limiting travel to Cuba would be a mistake.
''Visits to Cuba are very helpful, because they help break the government's
monopoly on information, they contribute to reducing the fear of change on the
island, and they let the Cuban people know that we are all brothers,''
Saladrigas said. "I understand the risks of a porous border, but I think it
would be a big mistake.''
For Cuban artists, a renaissance
By Alexandra Olson. Associated Press. Posted on Sun, Dec.
15, 2002 .
HAVANA - Adigio Benitez steps out of the morning drizzle and through the
doorway of his ground-level flat in a building with peeling paint, moving from
the mundane to his own world of enchantment.
A kaleidoscope of lively paintings greets the 79-year-old artist. Bright
colors dominate the playful scenes in his artwork, in which much of the world is
represented as origami and sprinkled with irreverent characters borrowed from
history or religion.
''The paper figures allow me to bring a little humor to painting,'' says
Benitez, who won Cuba's National Prize for Plastic Arts this year. "I was
searching for a more poetic way of saying things.''
The gray-haired art professor is among dozens of Cuban artists who are
flourishing as the government promotes art abroad and economic reforms allow
artists more freedom to market their work. They also are benefiting from an
increased interest in Cuban art by American collectors.
The great Cuban modernists -- Wilfredo Lam, Mariano Rodriguez and Amelia
Palaez del Casal -- have long been internationally recognized. Many painted with
Pablo Picasso, and their work is found in galleries and museums worldwide.
But increasingly, the island's newer art is getting international attention,
with the United States its biggest market.
''There has been an intense development of the plastic arts in the last
decade, from production, promotion to marketing,'' says Lourdes Alvarez, vice
president of the Culture Ministry's National Council of Fine Arts. "There
is a lack of a domestic market. That's why the foreign market is important.''
Since the mid-1990s, Cuban artists have been allowed their own galleries,
most often in their homes. Like other small businesses here, artists are charged
a 10 percent tax on profits.
Cuba's latest initiative was an online art auction of 62 paintings and
sculptures. Works by Lam, Palaez, Rodriguez and young artists such as Carlos
Estevez were on display at www.subastahabana.com last month. Another 66 works
were sold in a live auction Dec. 11.
Benitez has a piece in the cyber auction, but it belongs to the more somber
style of his youth, dedicated to the suffering of working-class life in Cuba.
Abriendo Caminos, from 1958, depicts three handcuffed peasants being marched
down a country lane by soldiers on horseback.
His newer work is more playful.
A self-portrait in his small dining room shows an origami Benitez dozing in
a yellow arm chair, surrounded by a Japanese geisha, a plump woman from a
Fernando Botero painting, and other women.
Plopping down on his sofa, Benitez opens a catalog and examines a painting
of an origami woman making love to the Torso of Belvedere, a first-century
Hellinistic-Greek sculpture. The piece belongs to a Colombian collector.
Those fresher Benitez paintings are attracting attention from collectors,
especially Americans. In November 2000, more than 800 Americans traveled to Cuba
to attend the Havana Biennial, a citywide art exhibit that included his work.
Benitez's work caught the eye of Leslie Bigelman, the American director of the
National Gallery of the Cayman Islands, who organized an exhibit of his
paintings in her gallery between February and April 2002.
''There was a time when there were hardly any ties between Cuban artists and
countries in the Americas, not just United States,'' Benitez says. "Now,
there is a very fruitful relationship between the United States and Cuban
artists.''
American interest in contemporary Cuban art grew especially after 1991, when
the U.S. Treasury Department exempted art from the four-decade trade embargo on
the communist island, said Sandra Levinson, director of the New York-based
Center for Cuban Studies. Levinson's group spearheaded a lawsuit that prompted
the decision.
''Things have changed a lot,'' Levinson said during a visit to Havana in
mid-November. "Before 1991, hardly anyone brought [Cuban] art into the
United States.''
Those who did often got into trouble. In 1971, U.S. customs seized several
Cuban posters Levinson tried to bring across the Canadian border.
A more dramatic episode involved collector Ramon Cernuda's Cuban Museum of
Art and Culture in Miami. In 1989, U.S. Customs seized more than 200 paintings
he bought from artists living in Cuba. Months later, a federal judge ordered the
paintings returned, finding the seizure violated the First Amendment.
The museum was bombed the previous year after an auction of paintings by
artists still in Cuba. The auction was criticized by Cuban exiles who said the
artists weren't sufficiently anticommunist. One man bought a painting by Manuel
Mendive and burned it.
Mendive smiles ruefully remembering the painting: a peacock and human
conversing. Peacocks, a symbol of happiness, appear frequently in Mendive's
paintings and sculptures, which fuse Catholic and Yoruba African religious
beliefs.
The burning did not dissuade Mendive from exhibiting his work in the Gary
Nader Gallery in Miami in 1999. It sold out in one night.
''Cuban art has made important headway in the United States. My paintings
get more and more attention,'' he says, sipping juice in a Havana cafe, his
graying dreadlocks pulled back in a ponytail. | 
