Maybe Bush is setting his sights for destabilizing governments closer to home now....say, Cuba. Seems his administration has made it more difficult for Cuban Americans to travel to their homeland to visit relatives. Now, instead of allowing them one visit per year, they can only visit their families once every three years, and are not allowed to spend any American dollars while they are over there as well. You are truly insane, if you vote for this man and his cronies in November. This country is headed in a very destructive direction. We are alienating our country from the rest of the world by allowing these atrocities to continue to occur. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TRAVEL TO CUBA SEVERELY RESTRICTED - JUNE 30TH DEADLINE The Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”), a division of the Department of the Treasury which enforces the economic embargo of Cuba, published revisions to the regulations restricting travel to Cuba by prohibiting all spending while in Cuba (unless authorized by OFAC). The new regulations, issued on June 16, will become effective on June 30, 2004. These revisions mark the broadest changes to the travel restrictions since they were reinstituted in 1982. The major changes are that Americans will no longer be able to visit Cuba lawfully by having hosts pay all their expenses in Cuba, and Cuban-Americans’ ability to visit their family members still living in Cuba and to send them money will be greatly curtailed. Historically, the regulations have banned spending money without precluding travel to Cuba. If a traveler visited Cuba without spending any money there (that is, by having a host pay for room, board, and all other expenses) then her travel was legal under the so-called “fully-hosted” exemption. The new revisions eliminate “fully-hosted” travel as a lawful means of travel. When the new rules go into effect,, anyone who “accepts goods and services” in Cuba will be in violation of the embargo, regardless of whether any money is injected into the Cuban economy as a result. This means that a visitor who shares a meal with a Cuban family in their kitchen will be in violation of the embargo. Any payment for air transportation to Cuba—even to a non-Cuban airline—without an OFAC license for the trip-- will also be a violation of the embargo. The changes to the family visit regulations will affect large numbers of Americans with relatives living in Cuba. Currently as many as 200,000 trips a year take place under licenses allowing Cuban-Americans to visit their loved ones still on the island. Under the new regulations, persons visiting family on the island will be limited to one trip every three years, and must apply for and receive approval from OFAC prior to departing. OFAC will have absolutely no discretion to entertain additional family visits under any circumstances until after three years have elapsed from one’s last trip. Even if a Cuban-American’s grandmother had just had a heart attack, he could not undertake an emergency trip to Cuba to visit her in the hospital if he had traveled to Cuba in the last three years. In addition, the new “family visit” regulations sharply narrow the definition of “family.” Under prior regulations, family visits could be made to anyone related by a common great-grandparent. Now, visits may only be made to “immediate family”: spouse, children, parents, grandparents, and brothers- and sisters-in-law. If nothing else, this definition shows how out of touch OFAC is with Cuban-American family life, which extends beyond one’s nuclear family. Remittances—sending cash back home to persons still in Cuba—will be sharply limited by the new regulations. Whereas now remittances can be sent to any household in Cuba (with a few exceptions for those with close ties to the Cuban government), they will soon be limited to members of the sender’s “immediate family” as defined above. Like family visits, remittances were always justified as a humanitarian relief measure, and it is unclear why this time was chosen to forbid Cuban-Americans from visiting sick relatives or from providing much-needed financial assistance to more distant relatives (e.g. second cousins) still in Cuba. In fact, the new family travel and remittance policies are inconsistent with the direction this administration’s travel policy has taken over the last three years. Since 2001, the government has made the embargo more restrictive for everyone except Cuban-Americans, while liberalizing restrictions on Cuban-Americans. In 2003, for example, the remittance limits were raised tenfold, from $300 to $3,000 per trip. The family visit criteria were liberalized, and the definition of family for purposes of such visits was extended out an extra generation. Now the administration has completely reversed course, in what appears to be a political ploy. The new policy upsets the expectations of thousands of Cuban-Americans—around one in ten of the 1.4 million Cuban-Americans living in the United States visited the island annually under the rules that are being replaced—many of whom applied for and received licenses to visit family in Cuba which, as they found out today, will be invalid after June 30. It also threatens to divide the Cuban-American community against itself. “The embargo and the travel restrictions haven’t worked to help the people of Cuba for forty years running. Now, the administration is making sure that it hurts Cuban-Americans as well,” said Shayana Kadidal, a staff attorney at the Center. “The travel restrictions work only as an embargo on American ideas and influence, but rather than lift them, the administration is finding new ways to make a broken policy worse.” Nancy Chang, Senior Litigation Attorney at the Center, commented: “The new regulations, together with regulations issued in March 2003 that eliminated licenses for people-to-people educational travel, make it virtually impossible for ordinary Americans to travel lawfully to Cuba and form independent judgments about the Cuban government and its people. These draconian restrictions on travel to Cuba dispense with the First Amendment guarantees of freedom of thought and association.” .......
My great aunt (an inlaw) is from Cuba - defected to Miami in a boat 50 years ago. Every year that she has been able to go during my lifetime she has traveled back to Cuba to visit her family and bring them money. I have obviously never met this side of my family (those in Cuba), but they are very poor. At 72 years of age now, she still goes and as it has been since she has arrived in america - she literally stuffs her bra full of cash to give to them. She actually had been caught on a couple of occasions in customs trying to leave during the Reagan administration and was not allowed to board the plain. If someone could give me one good reason why our government should control and limit a citizen of our country to travel, visit family and offer aide to their impoverished family in another part of the world - I'd really like to hear it. It just goes to show how US foriegn policy is ALL about politics and control and nothing about PEOPLE. I haven't read up on this recent report that this post is based upon, but in general - US Sanctions do SOMETIMES create change which is great, but is it worth it that these same policies ALWAYS cost lives?
Our policy towards Cuba is really outdated. I can't see why Bush would even bother to acknowledge Cuba.
Oh silly me. I was under the impression that Bush was about "compassionate conservatisim, one of the platforms he ran under back in 2000. Bush also spouts off about being "pro family." I guess the Cuban American families don't count in his little, pea-brained head. Bush is mean AND politically stupid. By doing this, he has completely lost the Cuban American vote and probably some of the general Latino vote as well. He continues to dig his own political grave -- what an idiot. George "Duh" Bush.....sounds about right.
It's ridiculous we still have that embargo going, there are much worse governments that we trade with, and all we accomplish with the embargo is make Cuba even dirt poorer. And to add insult to injury we can't even get Cuban cigars (I'm going to Cuba as part of a study abroad trip this fall semester though, gonna load up on those).
The only reason america hates Cuba is because Castro was threatening to Big corporations in America, because they would use Cuba to take advantage of the workers there, and do all their secret buisness deals down there, and there was also ties with the Mafia doing shit down there. When Castro came into power, he put a stop to all that. After that happened, the CIA and the Mafia came together to assasinate Castro, which failed, and failed again, and again, and so on. Peace and Love, Dan
Well, not for us maybe, except that we could get Cuban cigars a lot more easily, which would rock... but seriously it would be the best aid we could do for Cuba. We'd be doing something "compassionate" for once.
And I'm sure ALL Cubans love the fact we deny them trade and thus condemn them to even lower poverty, and now this. How does this in any way affect Castro's regime? It affects the Cuban people, not Castro. And Castro isn't a complete ogre. As I said there are much worser regimes with whom we do trade. I'm not condoning the fact Castro suppresses dissidents, but he hasn't run his country that badly for how poor it is. He's actually rather popular among Cubans in spite of his dictatorness, if anything because they prefer him over the big American companies and the rich Cuban minority that once ruled the island.
