Vol. 72/No. 13      March 31, 2008

“The Supreme Court in numerous cases has upheld the right to family privacy and familial relations,” said Carter, a student at Vermont Law School who is representing himself in the case. “We’re saying if you want to visit your mother who’s in the hospital, you have a right to do it.”

Carter and Leyva applied for a license to travel to Cuba last December to visit their immediate family members to celebrate their marriage, including with her aging grandparents.

Travel to Cuba is regulated by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). As a division of the Treasury Department, the OFAC enforces the government’s economic and trade sanctions. The OFAC denied the couple a license because Mora “had immigrated to the United States less than three years prior to their application for the specific family-visit license.”

The new rules also mean that Vilaseca cannot visit his terminally ill aunt in Cuba and Lucero cannot visit her extended family. Traveling without a license to Cuba is punishable with a fine of up to $1 million dollars and 10 years in jail.

In an editorial, the Burlington Free Press wrote, “Even in the darkest days of the Cold War, we engaged the Soviet Union and China. Yet we continue to shun Cuba. From a humanitarian, political or security standpoint, or even for encouraging democracy, keeping families apart makes no sense.”

Dexter Randall, a Vermont dairy farmer who traveled to Cuba in 2000 with other U.S. farmers to attend the ninth congress of the National Association of Small Farmers in Havana, told the Militant, “People should be able to travel to Cuba just like we can travel to England or Spain. We are all human beings.”
 
 
Related articles:
Caravan protests U.S. restrictions on Cuba travel  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home