Senate Votes to End Limits on Cuba Travel

WASHINGTON - The Senate joined the House on Thursday in striking at the four-decade-old policy of making travel to Cuba a criminal act, putting Congress on a collision course with Bush administration efforts to step up enforcement of travel restrictions.

"The travel ban does nothing to hurt Fidel Castro (news - web sites)," said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D. "It only harms Americans." He was co-sponsor of the measure, passed 59-36, that bars use of government money to enforce current travel restrictions.

Last month, the House approved identical language in its version of a $90 billion bill to fund Transportation and Treasury department (news - web sites) programs in the budget year that started Oct. 1.

The votes in the two GOP-controlled chambers came despite a White House warning that the president would be advised to veto the bill if it includes the Cuba provision. The legislation contains vital money for highways, law enforcement and anti-terrorism.

The White House said in a statement that unlicensed tourism "provides economic resources to the Castro regime while doing nothing to help the Cuban people."

In neither the Senate nor House did the Cuba vote reach the two-thirds margin needed to overturn a presidential veto. House and Senate leaders must negotiate a final compromise on the spending bill; in the past, they have used this process to remove language approved earlier that would have eased penalties against Cuba.

But Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., said the Senate vote was "a strong repudiation of the president's recent announcement that his administration plans to tighten and increase the travel restrictions."

The Homeland Security Department announced this month that it was enhancing efforts to curtail illegal travel and transport of goods to Cuba.

Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, a co-sponsor with Dorgan, said fighting terrorism and drug trafficking should be a higher priority than Cuban tourism. He said a Treasury office was spending 10 percent of its budget "to track down little old grammas from the West Coast who through a Canadian travel agency chose to bike in Cuba."

The Treasury Department estimates that about 160,000 Americans, half of them Cuban-Americans visiting family members, traveled to Cuba legally last year. Humanitarian and educational groups, journalists and diplomats are also allowed visits, but thousands of other Americans visit illegally, by way of third countries, risking thousands of dollars in fines and imprisonment.

Tourism officials have estimated that as many as 1 million Americans might visit Cuba in the first year after the lifting of the embargo.

President Kennedy imposed the travel ban in 1963, a year after the Cuban missile crisis. President Carter let it lapse in 1977, but it was reimposed by President Reagan in 1982. Violators could face criminal penalties of up to $250,000 and 10 years in prison.

Free-trade Republicans, mostly from farm states, have joined liberal Democrats in recent years in questioning the effectiveness of the trade and travel embargoes, saying that the Cuban president has used them to his own advantage to avoid liberalizing contacts with Americans.

Congress loosened the trade embargo in 2000 to allow sale of agricultural products and medicine on a cash-only basis.

The House, along with its vote last month on the travel restrictions, lifted caps on money that can be sent to Cuban family members on the island.

No it won't. The communist philosophy entails that the capilalist will sell the communists the rope with which the capitalist will be hung. There is no capitalist honey for them. Their only "honey" is the overthrow of the USA.

THEY KNOW capitalism works. The entire black market in cuba is a capitalist system. However, the black market moeny ($$$) is in PRIVATE hands. Legal tourism will put money in COMMUNIST hands.

One source of money for Cuba is "education" trips. University Faculty are guided through trips to the state. They are told how peasants have more opportunity than in the 50's. Law professors comming back simply say cuba is a paridise which only needs a coat of paint and nothing else. The government, the parrot, is fine for the needs of the people.

I say start putting this commie shills in jail.

The SLIME jimmy carter on his last trip to cuba did the following: In english which the cuban assembly did not understand and was not translated to spanish, demanded cuba adopt democratic reforms. In spanish which the cuban assembly did understand and was translated to english, demanded the united states lift sanctions and basically leave the communists alone.

JFK botched the bay of pigs otherwise this would have been taken care of years ago.

You should have some exiles who lived the political prisons and nightmares of cuba's prisons tell you their stories. (eating bugs to stay alive, torture)

(BTW: Cuba has a strict quaranteen policy for HIV positive people. If you are positive for the disease you are locked away. Period no exceptions.)

Your so right my friend. Seems like ever since the Soviet Union was vanquished, the Cuba Communist dictatorship ceased to be an enemy threat in the hearts and minds of most Americans, consquently the oppressed Cuban citizens under Castro have been left without any of the previous 'solidarity' and support of even many of the so-called 'conservatives' who post on this forum.

They would rather now see Americans 'patronize' the Communist dictatorship with "open trade" and money for the Cuban Military's tourist hotel enterprise.

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