U.S. gov’t to begin trials of Cuba travelers .

U.S. gov’t to begin trials of Cuba travelers         .
Vol. 67/No. 42           December 1, 2003

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.