by Philip Schmidt and Mavis Anderson
Latin America Working Group

Be tough on Cuba! That's what the Bush Administration is working at doing. And the administration has repeatedly turned to one agency to do a big part of the dirty work. Yet this agency's primary mission, tracking and freezing terrorist assets, is suffering as a result.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), part of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, is charged with tracking and freezing terrorist assets, enforcing the Cuba embargo, and enforcing embargoes on other 'rogue' nations. Increasingly, however, OFAC has been spending its limited time and resources on cracking down on people who travel to Cuba and cutting off remaining categories of legal travel.

In a written response to the questioning of a Senate committee, OFAC's director, Richard Newcomb, recently reported that his agency has committed close to 17 percent of its workforce to enforcing the embargo on Cuba. Members of Congress responded to this figure with a mixture of shock and outrage. Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), a leading proponent of ending the travel ban, said "Yet, the very agency that is charged with this crucial task [monitoring terrorist assets] must divert valuable resources to enforce an absurd travel ban that a clear majority of Congress has already voted to terminate. By its own estimate, OFAC diverts one-sixth of its employee resources to enforcing the Cuba travel ban. One-sixth. How can we justify diverting one dollar of this limited budget? Let alone one-sixth of resources." (Floor speech, January 5, 2004).

OFAC has been quietly pursuing and threatening people who have traveled to Cuba over the last 10 years. In a series of letters to the 'accused,' the agency threatens enormous fines (they can assess civil penalties as high as $55,000 per violation), a hearing process in which their guilt is a foregone conclusion, and then offers to settle for far less. The strategy has led many people to pay a fine despite their innocence-and without claiming their right to a hearing and a challenge to unjust policies. The strategy has effectively kept the procedures quiet and has attracted little media attention. This below-the-radar crackdown is a ploy of the administration, which knows that a strong majority of the American people and a bipartisan Congress do not support the travel restrictions.

In response to this misguided and malicious strategy-which is clearly aimed at shoring up the administration's support among hard-line Florida voters — groups dedicated to easing the embargo are stepping up their efforts to fight the administration and bring attention to their actions.

One of the focal points of these efforts is to identify and protect those people that OFAC is pursuing. An ad-hoc coalition of lawyers and policy analysts/advocates, including the Latin America Working Group, the Washington Office on Latin America, National Lawyers Guild Cuba Subcommittee, and the Center for Constitutional Rights, have combined efforts to make sure that these actions on the part of the Bush Administration come into the public eye and that people who are being pursued for traveling to Cuba are offered legal advice.

The administration's crackdown doesn't stop at just prosecuting people who have been to Cuba. Recently the administration denied travel to a group of 75 neurologists and bio-ethicists from the United States that were scheduled to go to the Fourth International Symposium on Coma and Death, which started on March 9th. Days before they were to leave, OFAC contacted them with the information that they would be breaking the law if they traveled to Cuba.

Scientists affected by the rulings were stunned and outraged. Stuart Youngner, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Case Western Reserve University, had attended the past three Symposia on Coma and Death, all held in Cuba. He was also scheduled to speak. "The subject was brain death, coma and its relation to organ transplantation, hardly controversial or something that threatened the security of the United States" he said in an interview with The Scientist, an online British journal.

U.S. Rep. Jim Davis (D-FL) was also upset by the ruling. "I think this is a huge mistake," Davis said in an interview with the Tampa Tribune. "It is exactly the kind of exchange between people that this country should be encouraging, not discouraging."

Under the existing guidelines, travel to Cuba for professional research is legal. The guidelines allow professionals to travel to Cuba if they are conducting academic, non-commercial research in Cuba, and the research "has a substantial likelihood of public dissemination."

Adding fuel to the academics' outrage was a ruling in early March banning publishers from editing texts produced in ' outlaw' nations like Cuba. According to OFAC's interpretation of the regulations, editing texts, such as scientific articles or studies, for publication in the United States is equivalent to providing a 'service' to the government of 'outlaw' nations, which OFAC deems illegal. Publishers that change so much as one word in a text face stiff fines and jail time.

In perhaps the most troubling development, OFAC eliminated the 'people-to-people' educational licensed travel to Cuba a year ago. This has cut legal travel drastically by preventing groups like museums and alumni associations from taking educational tour groups. They said the institutions abused their licenses in allowing tourism rather than educational travel. However, their solution was not to crack down on any abusers, but rather to eliminate the entire license class, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The impact of doing away with people-to-people licenses cannot be overstated. According to some in the travel industry, legal travel to Cuba has fallen by as much as 30 percent since these licenses were eliminated. Numbers aside, however, the types of groups that were traveling under these licenses were those that did most to promote understanding and build bridges between the two nations. It's hard to believe that the Harvard Museum of Natural History or the Smithsonian Institute would be running tourism junkets to Cuba, but these are the types of groups that are now prevented from traveling to Cuba. The presence of groups like them and their effect on U.S.-Cuba relations will be sorely missed.

More important perhaps to the nation at large is the question of how OFAC is using its resources. Many senators and members of Congress have begun to ask why this agency is spending such a large percentage of its resources on the travel ban instead of on tracking down terrorist funding networks. The question they ask is: Should OFAC spend its time tracking down senior citizens who went on bike trips to Cuba and preventing scientists from attending conferences or should they be tracking money flowing to Al-Qaeda? In this case the administration's actions speak far louder than words.

Suggested Action

Sign the petition to Secretary of State Colin Powell telling him it's time to change U.S. policy toward Cuba. Secretary Powell is the chair of President Bush's "Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba", a group of government officials who have been meeting to take our failed Cuba policy and send it even further in the wrong direction. The petition will be delivered by members of Congress to Secretary Powell.

Sign up for the Latin America Working Group's Cuba policy email network. You will receive timely emails with information about Cuba policy developments and ways to work for change.

General Assembly

Whereas, United States' efforts to bring about political change in Cuba through punitive economic sanctions have largely failed and resulted in both hardship for the Cuban people and resentment among numerous friendly governments around the world; and

Whereas, calls by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to lift the U.S. embargo and normalize relations over the years (1969, 1972, 1977, 1982, 1990, 1993) have gone unheeded; therefore, be it* resolved, that the General Assembly do the following:

• Renew the call upon the United States government to initiate negotiations with the Cuban government toward the end of reestablishing full diplomatic relations.
• Renew the call on the United States government to end the economic sanctions that it has imposed on Cuba, and to respect the opinion of the world community in this matter.
• Call upon the United States to encourage economic investment in Cuba for assisting the Cuban people's efforts to build a just society, and to do so in ways that respect the dignity of the Cuban people and their right to self-government.
• Encourage presbyteries and Presbyterians to seek to be peacemakers by building relations with Cuba through visits, church-to-church exchanges, provision of humanitarian needs, study, and advocacy of positions recommended by the General Assembly. (Minutes, 1997, Part I, pp. 588-592)