Posted on 07/24/2002 3:16:44 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For the third time in as many years, the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday defied White House veto threats and supported lifting the four-decades-old ban on Americans traveling to Cuba.
The House voted 262-167 to lift the travel restrictions as it debated an $18.5 billion bill funding the U.S. Treasury and general government operations in the next fiscal year. It is expected to pass the spending bill sometime on Wednesday.
In the past, the Cuba travel effort has failed in the Senate. This year, however, the Senate also is moving to lift the ban, setting up a clash with President Bush.
The White House last week threatened to veto any change in U.S. policy toward Cuba, accusing Congress of providing "a helping hand to a desperate and repressive regime."
But proponents of ending the travel ban say it infringes on U.S. citizens' constitutional right to travel freely and has demonstrably failed to weaken the grip of President Fidel Castro on the Caribbean island nation.
"For 42 years we've had the same, failed policy," said Arizona Republican Rep. Jeff Flake, the chief House sponsor of the effort. "And the question occurs: after 42 years isn't it about time to decide maybe we need a change here?"
House Republican leaders and the influential U.S. Cuban exile community staunchly oppose the move, arguing that the ban should be lifted only once Castro releases political prisoners and returns fugitives from U.S. justice.
AID TO CUBANS OR CASTRO?
"Any revenue from increased travel or trade will go to support Castro's regime, and the Cuban people will continue to live lives of oppression and poverty," said New Jersey Republican Rep. Chris Smith.
House leaders sought to outflank the vote on the travel ban by trying to add a proviso that it could only be lifted if Bush certified Cuba was not developing biological weapons or aiding terrorists -- but the move was rejected by the House.
Currently, U.S. citizens must get a license from the U.S. Treasury to travel to Cuba, and those are generally limited to Cuban-Americans visiting family, journalists, academics, government officials and groups on humanitarian missions.
But Americans are increasingly finding ways to reach Cuba anyway by traveling through third countries, with an estimated 176,000 visiting the island in 2001. The House action would cut the funds the Treasury uses to enforce the ban.
The House, as it did last year, also rejected a bid to lift the full U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, voting 226 to 204 against the broader move.
But it did back amendments to loosen rules limiting the amount of money U.S.-based Cubans can remit to relatives on the island each year, and to make it easier for U.S. farmers to take advantage of an earlier easing of curbs on food sales.
I have asked that. Often. I'm curious to see if this appeal will add to the anti-communist sentiment, since the other approach often meets deaf ears.
Goodmorning JohnHuang2!
Bump and thank you.
Well you're right, and I'd go even further than you. I'd suggest that the isolation and absolute sanction on Cuba has only served to entrench the terrible dictatorship there (and I think the same could be said of Saddam's brutal regime).
We must not give Castro something for nothing. Bush has told him to open up before the U.S. eases the embargo restrictions. But to give him what he wants, with no requirement in return, is insanity.
The rest of the world has come and gone from Cuba. Castro is free to trade with most countries in the world. But those countries have had enough of Castro and his IOU's and his theft of their investments in Cuba. Why should we take up the slack?
Me too!!
However, my opinion is that letting Americans travel there would open a lot of American Liberal eyes to the true nature of the Cuban Communist police state.
Pasted below are two postings from a few years ago on soc.culture.cuba. The poster was a New York Liberal now living in Seattle. We e-mailed and he and his friend Lois had Cuban Christmas Eve “Noche Buena” with us at our home one year. The story they told us that night of Lois in the Cuban Police station with her New York Liberal attitude and her friend telling her to shut the h*ll up in Pig Latin was hilarious.
They went to Cuba believing the Liberal propaganda about Castro. After three trips, they came to the conclusion that Castro was "a Fascist". They saw for themselves how the Cuban people are treated, in their own country, as blacks were treated in South Africa in the days of apartheid.
Europeans and Canadians go to Cuba, they do as they are told and don’t rock the Communist boat. American grass-roots Liberals, however, often go to Cuba as naïve Castro admirers and return with the shocking discovery that Castro “is a Fascist”. It would be nice if Liberals admitted that Fascism and Communism are the flip sides of the same totalitarian coin but, you take what you can get.
You can talk to a grass-roots American Liberal until you are blue in the face about what Cuba is like and they will not believe you. Only by going to Cuba and seeing it for themselves do Liberals change their romantic vision Castro that was spoon-fed to them by Barabara Walers and by CNN.
As the old Cuban saying goes, "Nadie escarmienta por cabeza ajena"....."Nobody learns a lesson through somebody else's head".
I realize that my opinion is contrary to most Cuban Americans. However, I believe that the benefit of the extra money that Castro will get will be more than cancelled out as more and more grass-roots American Liberal make the shocking discovery, as these two Liberals did, that “Castro is a Fascist”. We should also remember that a very large percentage of the U.S. Dollars that keep Cuba afloat come from us Cuban Americans sending Dollars back to Cuba which are then spent in Castro’s Diplotiendas. At least the American tourist money will have negative consequences for Castro.
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It was the best vacation of my life. The people are wonderful; it is one of the best places in the world to visit....but the repression is getting really bad. I have so much to write that I barely know where to start.
Let me just sum up some of what happened to us briefly. When I recover from jetlag I will post in more detail.
We took a road trip to Guernevaca Beach. We were 5, 2 American guys, 1 American woman, 2 Cuban women. The Cubanas were immediately accosted by the police and told they couldn't accompany us to the beach. Everyplace we attempted to eat we were sent away. It is obvious the government wants to keep the tourist beaches sterile with no interaction.
Lois went to Baracoa with a German and a Cuban man. She made the mistake of taking lots of pictures and befriending a homosexual. She was detained, maybe arrested for a brieftime. Her male friend was thrown in jail.
After we moved out of our hotel where the hot water was sporadic and the food was terrible and we weren't allowed Cuban guests, 2 Ministerio de Interior Officials visited our private house and told us to report to the Immigration Office the next morning. There we were told our Visas said we had to stay in hotels (not true). They later checked to make sure we had moved out.
Police came to the casa particulare looking for Lois the next day, scaring the daylights out of our friends. At their request we completely erased all of our videotape to keep them from being compromised.
The place is becoming a Fascist state. It appears to me that Castro is getting scared and tightening the screws.
Even back here I am afraid to tell everything for fear of retribution against my friends.
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Five of us set out for our trip, 3 Americans (2 male, 1 female), and 2 Cubanas. The road from Santiago is wide, at least the first few miles, but pretty much unmarked with absolutely no lights. Of course, there are no streetlights in Santiago to speak of either.
You need to stop every time there is an intersection because there are no signs.
My novia's brother lives in Bayamos so that was our first stop. Even though it is only an hour from Santiago she hadn't seen him for 5 years. Very few Cubans ever get to travel that far. Most of them have never left their own town.
Auspiciously, amazingly, perhaps miraculously, we arrived about half an hour after her brother had been in a motorcycle accident. Details were lacking; all we could find out was that he was in the local clinic. As it turned out, the details weren't lacking because of the severity of his injury (a broken collarbone), but because he was riding with his girlfriend and not his wife.
The clinic was breathtakingly bad. Forget about looking for a receptionist. You find someone milling in the crowd and ask for directions. The place was dingy, dark, and not very clean, although there were people constantly mopping and trying to make the best of the situation. Different rooms had handlettered signs on the door for orthopedics, etc. I went to the bathroom, and there was no soap or toilet paper, normal in Cuba, but in a hospital, too? There were bloodsoaked bandages in the trash.
The brother was on a bed in orthopedics, groaning from the pain. Fortunately my friend Jorge had a large bottle of ibuprofin which we immediately donated to the cause.
Lois was shooting pictures incessantly, which I thought was a little tasteless, but she insisted that she was an "artiste" and "journalist." I don't know what the people thought, but nobody said anything to her.
After determining that he would be okay for now, and probably operated on tomorrow, we paid $6 to the doctor (for God knows what?) and continued on our trip, promising to return on the way back the next day.
Our next stop was Holguin, where my first observation as a driver was that the place was teeming with bicycles. Holguin is much flatter than Santiago and presumably easier on cyclists. As a result we just inched along, feeling rather like we were driving in China!
We stopped in a hotel, where we dropped off Loisa, and were informed not surprisingly that the Cubans could not stay there. So we set out to find private houses to stay in. Almost immediately a guy on a bicycle volunteered to find us one, so we drove through the streets following him. One after another was already full (a sign of something I guess). Eventually we found nice accomodations run by a young guy in his 20's. We called him Calvin, because he wore a CK t-shirt. He looked kind of American or Canadian really, in his t-shirt, BlueJays cap, shorts and sneakers.
This was his job, renting out his house. He informed us he made much more money doing this than he ever could working a job. We invited him out to dinner with us.
Dinner was at a Paladar nearby, on a rooftop. We also managed to score some gasoline there for 50 cents a gallon, half the official rate. We bought 30 liters, literally, because he arrived with 10 liter bottles which he filled 3 times. Our guide, who had originally found us the house to live in, almost got us killed when he insisted on lighting a cigarette while this was going on. We decided from thereon that he was crazy and kept our distance. He had apparently made enough commission to also eat at the Paladar, so he was still around.
Food was pretty good although the selection was limited to ham or chicken. Not uncommon. Jamon seems to be the national meat of Cuba! Dinner was about $3 to $4 plus $1 for beers.
The house was comfortable enough, and even had hot water. One of those electrical-wired jobbies that they use in Cuba; I don't think they have even heard of hot water tanks there. (I have written about plumbing in Cuba before and will probably again, it's one of my favorite subjects about Cuba. They have all these beautiful fixtures from which a dribble comes out if you are lucky. Everybody has non-functioning bidets, harking back to a more golden age).
Cuba is a nation of noise, whether it is the street noise of central Havana with mothers yelling out for their children and people tuning up their mufflerless cars, or the noise of animals such as roosters, sheep, goats, and dogs in Santiago. In Holguin we were woken up to the sounds of schoolkids reciting their vowels over and over.....a,e,i,o,u. My Spanish is bad enough that I even joined in after giving up the idea of sleeping.. We discovered we were only a few blocks from the town center, where people had set up tables selling all kind of goods, from shoes to hardware. There was one very long line at the money-changing center. In front of many of the "stores" people were holding up little things that they were themselves selling, panties, pencils, whatever. And always shoes.
Jorge finally figured out why everybody in Cuba always wants shoes. It's because they have to walk so much.
We found a little place where we could buy breakfast, and then set out on the rest of our trip. About halfway to Guernavaca we ran into a procession of hundreds of Italian cyclists, who had a police escort and a bus following behind them with their supplies. Obviously the cyclists were not too popular with us, and we all exchanged anti-Italian stories, as we had to lag behind them for miles until we got to the beach.
There are 3 resorts on Guernavaca Beach, catering to tourists obviously, one of them being the Canadian-run Delta. We chose the so-called public beach, but the 2 Cuban women were immediately spotted by the cops who told them they could not go to the beach with us. This whole thing was infuriating, because Cubans were on the beach, they just couldn't go because they were with us. I took a quick swim on the beach, which by the way is a beautiful place; one of the few white sand beaches I have been to in Cuba. Then we set out to find something to eat and met the same problem. Cubans could not eat at the restaurants either. Loisa had a little bit of a shouting match over this and ended up eating by herself at one of the restaurants. She later told us the food was terrible and espensive anyway. We stopped at a store and purchased bread, cheese, and sardines from Spain. So much for our trip to the beach.
I stopped at the Delta to visit my friend Ana Maria who is the Canadian Holidays Representative. I knew her from when she had that job at the Balnearol del Sol outside Santiago. She was very surprised to see us and delighted. We shared our tales of woe with her and she had one for us herself. Even her Cuban husband was not allowed to stay at the hotel with her. He lived in the tenements across the street, so we went to visit him for awhile. He shared a small apartment with some toothless men whom he introduced as his "drinking club." It was a fun time and made our problems less bothersome.
This was the first time I was exposed to the art of rice-cleaning. All Cubans spend a great deal of time cleaning their rice. They lay it out flat on a tray and pick these little black things out of it. I don't know what they are: bugs, dirt, whatever, rice doesn't come all sanitized like it does here. We smoked some cigars drank beer, and then hit the road again.
On the way back we stopped in Bayamos; the brother was still in the hospital having had surgery; his wife wasn't going to leave him, but she would definitely take care of business. We went to a little Paladar for dinner. The food was great and cheap of course. We had chicken and ham and beer! What else is there?
Then we drove home, discovering that driving in the dark is even more of a challenge. At one point on the small 2-lane road I thought about passing, but saw a glimmer of lights ahead so thought better of it. When we reached the glimmer it turned out to be a truck parked on the highway with his parking lights on. So I was a hero.
We had to stop several times to make sure we were still on the road to Santiago. You don't know dark until you have driven in Cuba. By the time I got back to Santiago I was a wreck, my hands stuck to the wheel, but still I was happy that at least I was the one driving.
That's going to be the general attitude.
What's going to happen is that resorts will pick up tourists at their port of entry, and take them directly to their destinations where they will have a wonderful time. They'll return home thinking that what they saw was Cuba, and they'll tell their friends that all that talk about repression is just "hate speech" from the Batistianos in Miami.
"It's just those Miami Mafia guys still mad after all these years Marge, don't worry about it."
Two words for you my friend---"Sun City"
Reporting on Cuba's Reporters***HAVANA- It was a progressive idea. A delegation of Cuban journalists would host more than a dozen African-American journalists, many of whom would be seeing Cuba for the first time. This would be our chance to see Cuba for ourselves. The brainchild of syndicated columnist Dwayne Hickman, the journalist would hold joint panels to discuss journalism in our respective countries and learn more about one another. The sessions, held here at Marti International Institute of Journalism, were going along well - for awhile.***
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