Why travel to Cuba must be regulated
By Mauricio Claver-Carone
The Miami Herald
Mar. 01, 2008
As November approaches, presidential and congressional candidates will be asked to elaborate their views on U.S. policy toward Cuba. Most candidates approach the issue in good faith and take some time to understand the implications of unilaterally changing U.S. policy.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about those politicians and pollsters (pundits) who mischaracterize the issues, seek to drive a ''wedge'' among Cuban Americans and confuse America's electorate.
In 2007 -- to the surprise of most -- a bipartisan coalition mobilized in the newly seated Democratic-controlled Congress and successfully prevented unilateral changes to U.S. policy toward Cuba. Proponents of appeasing the Castro brothers' regime are now pinning their hopes on November. Claiming that Cuban-American attitudes have changed, they are calling for more ''freedom to travel'' to Cuba while at the same time implying U.S. trade sanctions will remain in place. The political arguments made in support of commercial sanctions but against travel regulations are creative but misleading and contradictory as a matter of law and policy. The Trading With the Enemy Act, enforced by the Treasury Department, prohibits and regulates commercial or financial ''transactions related to travel,'' not travel per se.
Paradoxical position
Proponents of lifting U.S. sanctions also conveniently conceal the exception in current law that allows unlimited ''travel-related'' transactions for the purpose of providing direct support to Cuba's civil society.
Yet their most paradoxical political platform is that ''national reconciliation'' between Cuban nationals on the island and those in exile is best pursued by eliminating regulations on Cuban Americans visiting family members in Cuba. Factually, this argument fails to consider that, while most of the exile community in the United States is white, the vast majority of the population and most of democracy's advocates in Cuba are of African or mixed descent and have no family members living in the United States. The result would be a policy that not only creates an underclass among those -- the majority -- without family abroad, but also foments division among Cuba's active and courageous democratic opposition. It would set back rather than advance national reconciliation in Cuba. The Castro brothers would certainly label and exploit the emerging disparity as ``racist.''
For November's candidates, the question remains: Why is it important to continue regulating travel-related transactions with the Cuban regime?
• To keep hard currency out of the hands of Cuba's repressive state police and military. The regulations now in place were carefully designed to deny financial support to Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces, which own and operate Cuba's tourism industry. If the United States were to lift restrictions on travel-related transactions, Cuba's own Ministry of Tourism has estimated that Cuba's communist government would net an additional $5 billion annually. That would be a subsidy five-times greater than what Venezuela's Hugo Chávez now provides Cuba.
• To oppose the apartheid-like restrictions the Castro regime imposes on the Cuban people. Most resorts in Cuba are segregated, beachfront enclaves. Cuban nationals -- although not Cuban Americans -- are barred from hotels, beaches, restaurants, nightclubs and even medical clinics.
It is time to accept the reality that the influx of European and Canadian tourists during the last decade has not brought greater freedom to Cuba; it has only perpetrated a new kind of repression.
• To protect U.S. security interests. The State Department lists Cuba as one of the world's five remaining state-sponsors of terrorism and, in 2007, reported that the regime ''maintains close relationships with other state sponsors of terrorism such as Iran and North Korea.'' In the last five years, there have been more convictions in U.S. federal courts of individuals conducting espionage activities for the Cuban regime -- including on the Central and Southern Command of the U.S. Armed Forces -- than from any other country.
• To stand in unconditional solidarity with Cuba's opposition leaders and political prisoners. From Eastern Europe to South Africa, sanctions have historically signaled solidarity for democracy's advocates and provided them with leverage to challenge their governments. Like Burmese democracy advocate and Nobel laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, who has called on the world to ban travel to her country, Cuba's opposition leaders recognize the importance of this leverage.
Sanctions must be viewed holistically. Easing sanctions on Cuba -- in whole or in part -- runs the risk of legitimizing and emboldening only one Cuban family: that of Fidel and Raúl Castro.
Mauricio Claver-Carone is a director of the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC in Washington, D.C.
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