The Militant (logo)  
   Vol. 67/No. 42           December 1, 2003  
 
 
U.S. gov’t to begin trials of Cuba travelers
 
BY PAUL PEDERSON  
The U.S. government has announced that it is about to begin, for the first time, judicial proceedings against U.S. citizens accused of traveling to Cuba without state authorization.

“We’re really going to be stepping up enforcement,” Taylor Griffin, a spokesperson for the U.S. Treasury department, told the November 8 Orlando Sun-Sentinel.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control, a branch of the U.S. Treasury Department assigned to enforce the law that bans U.S. citizens from traveling to the Caribbean island without a license, has begun processing 50 cases of unlicensed travel. To do this the office, which previously had no justices, borrowed several judges from the Justice Department and the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission to begin prosecuting the cases.

“We’re for independence, we’re for being free to travel,” Michael McCarthy, 56, told the Sun Sentinel. The Michigan man and his wife, Ande, were slapped with a $15,000 fine for violating the Trading With the Enemy Act by spending about $750 on a one-week visit to Cuba in 2001. The couple has appealed the fine.

According to Nancy Chang, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, two of her clients have received notices from the department and could face hearings early next year.

About 160,000 people traveled to Cuba last year using Treasury Department licenses, according to a BBC News report. About half of these are Cubans visiting family on the island. Licenses are also available through educational institutions, and for journalists and a range of religious organizations. Earlier this year the Bush administration announced it would restrict licenses for “people-to-people” exchanges, under which a host of groups have organized educational trips.

The Cuban government estimates that at least 30,000 people from the United States visited the island in 2002 without using licenses by traveling through a third country. Of these, a small percentage is targeted by the Treasury Department with letters threatening fines and even jail time.

In the face of this intimidation, many travelers plea-bargain and settle by paying a fine. Others appeal and are placed on the list for an administrative hearing. By June 2002, the backlog of these appeals had topped 2,000 cases and many more U.S. residents have been targeted since.

A wide range of organizations and individuals could be required to come before the administrative judge for exercising their right to travel. The U.S.-Cuba Labor Exchange, a group that facilitates exchanges between U.S. and Cuban trade unionists, for example, is among those that have received threatening letters from the Treasury Department. The letter that group received demanded names and information about each person who traveled to Cuba with their organization and threatened fines of up to $55,000 for each violation.

“This is a violation of our constitutional right to pursue knowledge and to have a free exchange of ideas with the Cuban people,” said Ignacio Meneses, the national coordinator of the U.S.-Cuba Labor Exchange. “No other people of the world are banned from traveling to Cuba by their government.”

At the same time, an amendment introduced last month with much fanfare as part of a bill in the U.S. Congress that would have ended Washington’s 40-year travel restrictions to Cuba was dropped by a congressional committee before the bill was sent to U.S. president George Bush for his signature. Both houses of Congress had earlier approved the amendment, but Bush had declared he would veto any such bill. The backers of the legislation asserted that pressure from the Bush administration was behind their decision not to challenge the policy of restricting travel to Cuba, which has been sustained by the past eight administrations—Democratic and Republican alike.  
 
 
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