CUBA
NEWS
The
Miami Herald
New travel rules make life easier for
Cuban Americans
By Madeleine Marr, mmarr@herald.com.
Posted on Sun, Jan. 18, 2004
Until this year, U.S. citizens could arrange
legal travel to Cuba with relative ease.
Those days are gone.
The ''people to people'' provision that
allowed Americans to visit Cuba as part
of an organized tour for educational, humanitarian
or religious reasons has been tightened
by the U.S. government as of Jan. 1. The
result: Many tours once available to Americans
are offered no longer.
''Tourist dollars provide vital hard currency
that Castro and his cronies use to continue
to oppress Cuba,'' R. Richard Newcomb, director
of the Foreign Assets Control Office at
the Treasury Department, told a House subcommittee
last fall, according to the New York Times.
Tour operators are unhappy with the policy
change.
''The primary reason the people-to-people
license was dismantled had to with abuse
by a few hustlers that crippled a relatively
beneficial program,'' said John Kavulich,
president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic
Council Inc., a business consultancy based
in New York.
Said Tom Popper, director of Insight Cuba,
a nonprofit cross-cultural tour operator
in New Rochelle, N.Y.: ''The number of U.S.
travelers that will legally travel to Cuba
in 2004 will decrease drastically, almost
to a trickle.'' Insight found its license
to offer such tours was not renewed for
this year by the U.S. government.
But not everyone's frothing over the new
rules. For Americans born in Cuba or those
who have a relative there, life's a little
easier. Though they still are allowed visits
only once per year, the circle of qualifying
family members has been widened.
For example, a mother's cousin is now deemed
"a close relative.''
The administration also scrapped the requirement
for a family authorized to visit ''in circumstances
that demonstrate humanitarian need.'' Now,
family members can visit for any reason.
Also, the amount of cash a Cuban-American
visitor may bring to the island rose from
$300 to $3,000. The amount one is allowed
to spend while there has been lifted entirely.
So which U.S. citizens can legally go,
according to the U.S. government? Anyone.
Visiting Cuba is legal -- but spending money
there isn't, except for the following travelers
(see the State Department's website, www.travel.state.gov/cuba.html):
o U.S. and foreign government officials
traveling on official business;
o Journalists and supporting broadcasting
or technical personnel employed by a news
reporting organization;
o Full-time professionals whose travel
transactions are directly related to their
jobs, provided their research: (1) is of
a noncommercial academic nature, (2) comprises
a full work schedule in Cuba and (3) has
a substantial likelihood of public dissemination;
o Full-time professionals whose travel
transactions are directly related to attendance
at meetings or conferences (such as doctors
or dentists);
o Those involved in transactions directly
incident to marketing, sales negotiation,
accompanied delivery, and servicing of exports
and reexports that appear consistent with
the licensing policy of the Department of
Commerce. (Approved industries include agriculture,
telecommunications, medicine and medical
devices.)
o Amateur or semiprofessional athletes
participating in an athletic competition.
o Travelers on ''fully hosted'' trips whose
Cuba-related expenses are paid by someone
who is not subject to U.S. jurisdiction.
Such travel may not be made on a Cuban carrier
or aboard a direct flight between the United
States and Cuba.
In addition, the Treasury Department will
also consider requests for humanitarian
travel not covered by the general license,
educational exchanges, and religious activities
by individuals or groups affiliated with
a religious organization.
Those tempted to travel without U.S. permission
-- via Cancun, the Bahamas or another third
country -- should think again. Fines can
reach as high as $7,500. And increasingly,
those governments advise the U.S. government
of citizens who have been to Cuba.
AFTER CASTRO
Planning on Cuba urgently needed, U.S.
told
U.S. officials and relief experts are
stepping up planning for ways to deliver
assistance to Cuba after the Castro government
is gone.
By Frank Davies. fdavies@herald.com.
Posted on Fri, Jan. 17, 2004.
WASHINGTON - A top U.S. official and several
public health experts Friday warned of the
urgent need to plan for chaos, shortages
and a potential migrant crisis in a post-Castro
Cuba.
''There's a real possibility of a complex
emergency'' including ''a high risk of chaotic
migration,'' Andrew Natsios, Agency for
International Development administrator,
told a conference on the future of Cuba.
The Bush administration's top officials
on Cuba policy said an interagency commission
studying how to hasten a transition to a
free Cuba and get assistance to the island
will report to President Bush by May 1.
''There is growing urgency for this kind
of planning,'' Assistant Secretary of State
Roger Noriega said. Otto Reich, special
White House envoy, said the swift delivery
of aid "would help the Cuban people
see that the future is better than the past.''
HEALTHCARE SYSTEM
Two health experts, Richard Garfield and
Frederick Burkle, said Cuba's healthcare
system, reputed to be one of the best in
Latin America, is also fragile, running
low on essential medicines and vulnerable
to political instability.
''Despite great public health achievements
in Cuba, hygiene, sanitation and public
health infrastructure are deteriorating,''
said Burkle, a scientist at the Johns Hopkins
University Medical Institutions who studies
disaster and refugee crises.
The conference, sponsored by the Institute
for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at
the University of Miami, brought together
dozens of academics, relief specialists
and policy advocates. The institute receives
substantial funding from the AID.
PROPOSAL FOR RELIEF
Before he took over the AID, Natsios wrote
a paper four years ago on how to plan for
a humanitarian crisis in Cuba. He stressed
the need to involve nongovernmental agencies
and Cuban-American charities in any relief
efforts.
But planning for any Cuban crises faces
many difficulties. As long as the Castro
government is in power, the Helms-Burton
Act limits how U.S. officials can deal with
Cuba.
Policy experts disagree over whether the
change will be peaceful, chaotic or violent
once the communist government is gone or
starts to change. No one knows whether a
post-Castro government will welcome U.S.
assistance.
Garfield, a health expert at Columbia University
who has visited Cuba, said the healthcare
system there is much better than in Haiti,
Yugoslavia or African countries that have
gone through upheavals.
''We should build on wheels that are already
rolling, rather than build new wheels,''
said Garfield, referring.
But Reich said that much of Cuba's health
and educational advances are a façade
that "will require a massive recovery.''
''The president wants to make sure that
we're absolutely prepared to address every
single need in Cuba,'' said Adolfo Franco,
assistant administrator for the AID. "We
don't want to repeat mistakes.''
Officials warn of need to plan for social
chaos in a post-Castro Cuba
By Frank Davies. fdavies@krwashington.com.
Posted on Fri, Jan. 16, 2004.
WASHINGTON - A top U.S. official and several
public health experts Friday warned of the
urgent need to plan for social chaos, severe
shortages and a possible refugee crisis
in a post-Castro Cuba.
''There's a real possibility of a complex
emergency'' after Castro, including ''a
high risk of chaotic migration,'' U.S. Agency
for International Development administrator
Andrew Natsios told a conference on the
future of Cuba.
Two health experts, Richard Garfield and
Frederick Burkle, said that Cuba's health-care
system, reputed to be one of the best in
Latin America, is also fragile, short of
essential medicines and very vulnerable
to political instability.
Natsios is participating in a commission,
chaired by Secretary of State Colin Powell,
to study ways to get humanitarian aid to
Cuba. The commission's report to President
Bush is due May 1.
The conference Friday was sponsored by
the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American
Studies at the University of Miami. The
institute gets substantial funding from
the U.S. AID.
Real Ché Guevara is still an
enigma
A new movie skips Ché Guevara's
leftist revolutionary period in favor of
a spectacular South American road trip he
took in his 20s.
By Kevin G. Hall, Knight
Ridder News Service. Posted on Fri, Jan.
16, 2004.
ROSARIO, Argentina - More than 36 years
after his capture and execution, Ernesto
''Ché'' Guevara is about to be reborn.
As a celluloid hero.
The Argentina-born, anti-American revolutionary,
perhaps best known today for millions of
appearances on T-shirts and posters, is
the subject of a much-anticipated movie,
The Motorcycle Diaries, which will debut
Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival in
Park City, Utah.
The movie -- directed by Brazil's Walter
Salles and produced by actor-producer Robert
Redford -- is based on diaries Guevara wrote
during a 1952 road trip by motorcycle and
thumb across South America. Guevara, then
an asthmatic 23-year-old medical student,
sweated his way across the Chilean desert,
played soccer with lepers in Peru and rafted
down Amazon River tributaries to Colombia.
The nine-month trip introduced Guevara,
a son of an upper-middle-class engineer,
to the harsh realities of poverty and the
indifference of the region's ruling classes
to the poor. What he saw led him eventually
to seek revolutionary change in Latin America.
Were Guevara still alive, he would now be
75.
According to Salles, the movie focuses
on Ernesto, the young man coming of age,
not Ché, the revolutionary he became.
Salles describes his film as the "story
of two young men's search to discover for
themselves an unknown continent -- before
the age of television and globalized information
. . . the story of two young men crystallizing
their identities in the process.''
Movies often reshape public perceptions
of history. Likely to be overlooked in this
instance is the fact that Guevara, when
he was a little older than he appears in
the movie, preached a gospel of violence
and advocated a nuclear showdown with the
United States during the Cuban missile crisis
of 1962.
JOURNEY TO CUBA
Guevara was born June 14, 1928, in Rosario,
about 110 miles northwest of Buenos Aires.
After the epic journey, he became a doctor
in 1953 and soon afterward met Fidel Castro
in Mexico City. After Castro seized power
in Cuba in 1959, Guevara held numerous government
posts before parting ways with the communist
leader in 1965.
The author of a treatise promoting guerrilla
warfare, Guevara tried to export rebellion
in the Congo but failed. He then sought
to spread revolution in Bolivia but was
hunted down by U.S.-trained Bolivian soldiers
and executed by them on Oct. 9, 1967. To
prove his identity, his face was spared
from gunfire and his hands cut off for fingerprints.
Three decades later, his handless skeleton
was sent to Cuba for burial.
Today, Guevara lives on as a fashion statement.
College students worldwide wear T-shirts
bearing his handsome bearded face. Internet
retailers hawk his trademark soldier's beret
for $16.95 plus shipping.
''He has become a plastic Ché,''
lamented Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro,
61, a former leader of the Tupamaros, an
armed urban guerrilla group in Uruguay during
the 1960s and 1970s to whom Guevara was
an inspiration.
''What lingers is the image of an age when
youths were the protagonists, the clothes,
the music, revolution, a new way to see
sex. It was a cultural revolution that swept
the world,'' said Fernández, who's
now an influential Uruguayan senator. "All
the leaders then were 20-somethings. Today
we have a youth that complains a lot but
is unwilling to act.''
In Rosario, there's no plaque on the elegant
apartment building where Argentina's most
famous, or infamous, son once lived on the
second floor.
Elderly doorman Miguel Gili gladly showed
a reporter the damaged steps where Guevara
sympathizers, angry at neighbors' refusal
to place a plaque on the building, blew
off the front door with a homemade bomb
several years ago.
A group of local professionals has tried
for years to create a Ché Guevara
museum. The city renamed a small plaza in
his honor, and city fathers last year named
him an ''illustrious person.'' But they
won't go any further than that.
'DIDN'T EXIST'
''Here in Rosario, Ché didn't exist,''
said Diego Sciascea, 32, a psychologist
who is a museum proponent. "I've been
struck by his humanity, the disposition
to change things, more than the guerrilla
part of him.''
His group gives away bottles with a quote
from Guevara inside: "The only fight
you lose is the one you abandon.''
Verónica Domínguez, a clerk
in a convenience store near Guevara's apartment
building, said she'd had a surprise encounter
with the famous revolutionary symbol.
When robbed at gunpoint recently, Domínguez
noted that the crook wore the telltale rebel's
badge on his arm: a tattoo of Guevara's
face.
''I wondered if he knew what Ché
was about,'' she recalled thinking.
María Masse, a Buenos Aires painter
of T-shirts with Ché's image, had
this answer about who he was:
"When Ché died, I was just
a kid. I didn't know what his revolution
was all about. The image I formed is of
a man following his ideals. . . . This spirit
is what I see. Only every now and then someone
like him comes along.''
Patriarch to dedicate cathedral in Cuba
Posted on Sat, Jan. 17,
2004
HAVANA - (AP)-- The spiritual leader of
the world's 300 million Orthodox Christians
will travel to Cuba next week at the invitation
of President Fidel Castro to consecrate
a cathedral, a regional church leader said.
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew will arrive
on Wednesday and consecrate the cathedral
on Jan. 25, said Metropolitan Athenagoras
of Panama and Central America, which includes
Mexico, the Caribbean, Colombia and Venezuela.
''Our church is very old, the oldest in
all of Christianity, and we bring a message
of peace,'' Athenagoras told The Associated
Press. "For us, it is an honor to be
in Cuba.''
Cuba was explicitly atheist for about 25
years after Castro's revolution, but the
collapse of the Soviet Bloc led the government
to abandon official atheism and to openly,
if warily, accept religious faith.
The St. Nicholas Cathedral was constructed
with Cuban government funds on one side
of the Byzantine-style Basilica of San Francisco,
a former Roman Catholic sanctuary now used
mostly for concerts.
There are some 1,200 practicing Orthodox
Christians in Cuba.
Jailed Cubans will be heard
The Supreme Court will answer a question
that has vexed the justice system since
the 1980 Mariel boatlift: Can criminal aliens
be held indefinitely?
By Gina Holland, Associated
Press. Posted on Sat, Jan. 17, 2004
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court agreed Friday
to decide whether authorities can indefinitely
imprison hundreds of Cuban immigrant criminals
and other illegal foreigners with no country
to accept them.
About 2,220 are in jail, in limbo because
the U.S. government says they are too dangerous
to be freed.
The Bush administration wants the Supreme
Court to say that longtime detentions are
acceptable, especially in light of post-Sept.
11 concerns about protecting U.S. borders.
But the government narrowly lost the last
time a similar issue came before the court.
Justices ruled in 2001 that it would be
unconstitutional to detain indefinitely
legal immigrants who have already served
time for crimes. In this follow-up case,
justices will decide whether people in the
United States illegally have the same rights.
PUTTING U.S. AT RISK
Solicitor General Theodore Olson warned
justices that they could create a ''back
door into the United States'' for dangerous
foreigners.
The test case involves a now-45-year-old
man who fled Cuba with thousands of other
people in 1980. Daniel Benitez was sent
to prison in Florida for armed robbery,
burglary, battery and other crimes.
He finished his sentence in 2001 but has
been in U.S. immigration custody since then,
under a 1996 law that tightened restrictions
on criminal foreigners.
His lawyer, John Mills of Jacksonville,
said Benitez and the others "face the
very real possibility of spending the rest
of their lives incarcerated, not because
of any crimes they may have committed but
because their countries will not take them
back.''
Olson, the Bush administration's top Supreme
Court lawyer, told justices that forcing
the release of immigrants "creates
an obvious gap in border security that could
be exploited by hostile governments or organizations
that seek to place persons in the United
States for their own purposes.''
Benitez was among about 125,000 Mariel
boatlift migrants from Cuba, some of them
convicts, who arrived in the United States
in 1980.
UN-AMERICAN
''I think in the long run, the whole issue
of indefinite detention is against the grain
of what this country stands for,'' said
Miami attorney Rafael Peñalver, a
longtime activist who has worked on behalf
of indefinitely detained Mariel refugees.
Peñalver said many of the detainees
accepted plea bargains in hopes of avoiding
a trial or even longer imprisonment. "And
many of these were minor offenses, and they
have served their sentences.''
The Supreme Court's decision to hear the
case ''presents the next hurdle,'' Peñalver
said. "I hope the courts find that
there is such a thing as universal human
rights.''
Records show that 2,269 immigrants awaiting
deportation are in custody, and more than
half -- including 920 Mariel Cubans -- have
been held for more than six months.
Lower courts have split on what to do with
them since the 2001 Supreme Court ruling
that immigrant detentions longer than six
months probably would be unconstitutional.
The case will be argued at the Supreme
Court in April, with a ruling before July.
Herald staff writer Tere Figueras contributed
to this report.
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