CUBA NEWS
Januray 19, 2003

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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