Americas in Cuba? Perhaps someday soon…

Yahoo news reports that Cuba recently welcomed its 2 millionth tourist of 2008, which is notable primarily for the fact that almost none of those tourists were Americans. Sadly, even in this day and age, Americans are not legally allowed to visit Cuba.

The interesting, and very good news, for U.S. vagabonds is that that may be changing. There’s no telling whether President Elect Obama will stick to his campaign promises, but he did say that lifting the travel embargo on Cuba was one of his plans.

Of course those plans can, and indeed already have, changed. Originally Obama promise not just to lift family travel restrictions (which mean Cuban-Americans have to wait three years to visit relatives on the island), but also said he would meet with Raul Castro, which could signal a lift on the broader embargo. Obama has since backed off the later offer, but at least he seems willing to entertain the idea.

And lest you think that lifting the embargo is a some Democrat-only idea, let us not forget that former Secretary of State, George P. Shultz, who served under Reagan, called the U.S. embargo “insane,” and tried to get rid of it (to no avail obviously).

Still, even if the embargo and accompanying travel restrictions remain in place, there are some legal ways Americans can join the over 2 million travelers headed to Cuba each year. The State Department website has more details, but among the possible ways to get into Cuba are by going as a journalist (contact your local paper and see if they’d like a story), as a student studying abroad in Cuba, as a teacher and more.

There used to be a shadier way to visit Cuba — by sneaking in through an intermediary country like Mexico or Canada. This worked quite well since there is actually nothing preventing American’s from traveling to Cuba, we simply can’t spend money once we get there. A number of very suspect travel outfits in Mexico and other countries offered deals where you would pay them as an intermediary party and they would then pay for all your accommodations, food and other travel expenses in Cuba. But in 2004 the U.S. closed up this loophole.

With that loophole gone, the only real option if you don’t qualify for special travel permit is to go to Cuba illegally. I have several friends that have pulled this off, though I don’t recommend it. One friend did indeed get busted coming back with a Cuban stamp on his passport (Cuban officials generally don’t stamp U.S. passports, but sometimes they make mistakes). My friend spent a few hours in customs detention and was then released with some hefty fines, and now he’s flagged every time he goes through U.S. customs and has to spend several hours while officials pour over his papers and inspect his luggage.

As for why you might want to go to Cuba, here’s a thought from Pico Iyer:

“I went back and forth between Cuba and the United States a lot at the end of the ’80s, when very few people were doing, and I always felt that one good thing I could take to Cuba was a human, balanced sense of what America was like. And one good thing I could bring back from Cuba was a human, balanced sense of what Cuba was like, neither a paradise nor a hellhole but a confounding mixture of them both. And I remember soon thereafter I actually made a practice of going to all the countries that were listed in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Trading with the Enemy Act, precisely because I felt they were places I could never learn about sitting in California, that all I would ever read or hear about them would either be propaganda against them or the response to it, which was wild propaganda in favor of them.”

[Photo credit: papalars, Flickr]

Posted by | Comments (1)  | November 19, 2008
Category: General


One Response to “Americas in Cuba? Perhaps someday soon…”

  1. » Is the Cuban-American curtain poised to raise? :: Vagablogging :: Rolf Potts Vagabonding Blog Says:

    […] last month and exactly one year after Scott wrote that it might be possible for U.S. vagabonds to visit Cuba soon, Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) made the following statement in front of the House Foreign Affairs […]