Cuba Travel Ban: Is the End in Sight?

[Judi Lynn]

Cuba Travel Ban: Is the End in Sight?
1 day ago

Over a year ago, in a gesture of conciliation, President Barack Obama lifted travel restrictions on Cuban Americans wanting to visit their relatives on the island. Havana lovers, tourists and travel agents looking for fresh markets jumped for joy. Soon we would all be planning holidays in Varadero and Cayo Coco.

Well, if there was ever a thaw, it iced over pretty fast.

Relations between Havana and Washington seemed to have regressed in the past year. Cuba has fallen off the political radar and off the news, not that it was ever a Top 10 item for an Obama administration that has much bigger targets on its wish list.

But quietly, without fanfare, there's been some tilting toward lifting the travel ban entirely and hints that some substantive talks may be going on between the two countries. Little-publicized meetings have taken place in the past few months between high-level officials while working-level talks are continuing on such safe issues as direct-mail service, dealing with hurricanes, fighting drug smuggling and the Gulf oil spill disaster that might spread to the beaches of Cuba's northern coast.

At the same time, both chambers of Congress are seriously considering bipartisan legislation to end the travel ban and loosen some embargo restrictions. But high hopes on anything having to do with Cuba have often been dashed in past decades, so sponsors of the legislation are not making too much noise.

In the Senate, Byron L. Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat who announced he will not run for another term, has been a vigorous champion of the bill and said recently it could pass this year. The measure (S428), which Dorgan and Republican Sen. Michael Enzi of Wyoming introduced in March 2009, has wide support from a variety of groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Farm Bureau Federation and Human Rights Watch.

More:
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/05/23/cuba-travel-ban-is-the-end-in-sight/

[Judi Lynn]

1. Travel to Cuba Legislation Mired by Scandal, Fierce Opposition

Travel to Cuba Legislation Mired by Scandal, Fierce Opposition
Friday 21 May 2010

by: Katya Rodriguez and Carl Patchen | Council on Hemispheric Affairs

In 1963, following heightened tensions in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy imposed the first travel restrictions on American citizens desiring to travel to Cuba. After years of gridlock regarding the subject courtesy of Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) and her ideological kinsman from the ultra-conservative Cuban American National Foundation, a growing number of U.S. members of Congress have consistently introduced legislation in an attempt to remove long-held constraints on U.S. citizens’ freedom to travel. Although former Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), among others, nearly managed to muster sufficient forces in Congress to remove the restrictions, these reforms have failed to attract a sufficient number of votes to lift the ban.

In a November 2009 hearing, the Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Howard Berman (D-CA), raised important issues regarding the logic behind the travel ban in his opening statement. During the hearing, entitled “Is it Time to Lift the Ban on Travel to Cuba?,” Berman explained, “Americans have the right to travel to Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism…We can go to North Korea, which threatens to destabilize East Asia with its nuclear weapons program. And even during the darkest days of the Cold War, our citizens could visit the Soviet Union.” Berman argued that the U.S.’s current approach toward Cuba has had the effect of undermining ordinary Cubans’ prospects for attaining political and social freedoms. He emphasized that Washington’s policy, which is centered on inhibiting the Castro regime, should be guided by a more constructive compass that helps rather than consciously hurts the Cuban population.

Although support for the normalization of U.S.-Cuban relations has steadily mounted on Capitol Hill, a number of setbacks have limited the goals of Representative Berman and other progressive legislators. Such incidents include the December 2009 detainment and subsequent imprisonment of Alan Gross, an American contractor working in Cuba, and the death by hunger strike of political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo in February. These episodes have sparked new rifts in the relationship between Washington and Havana. Deep political divisions and a scandal involving Representative Charles Rangel (D-NY), who has sponsored bills that encourage improved bilateral relations, further complicate already frustrated attempts to reinstate American travel rights to Cuba. In addition to these foothills, the Obama administration was not prepared to use its political capital to scale the peaks of a regional foreign policy issue which has a limited domestic constituency and is fiercely opposed by a relatively small core of zealots, whose detestation of the Castro brothers cannot be exaggerated.

Previous Legislation

In the previous congressional session, Representative Rangel and Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY) introduced bills in their respective chambers proposing to end the travel ban. However, neither lawmaker succeeded in passing their bills, which would have appreciably altered the status quo.

More:
http://www.truthout.org/travel-cuba-legislation-mired-scandal-fierce-opposition59745

[flamingdem]

2. The Cuban government is responding to concerns about prisoners health and

working on releasing some moving others to their home areas ... and the Cubans reached out to the US regarding the oil spill.

I do think things are a bit better and anything could happen, even something positive, but perhaps after November!