As someone who has traveled multiple times to Cuba, not all of which were above U.S. Treasury Department radar, I was more than interested in a recent federal lawsuit that challenges the ban on most Americans to travel to Cuba. Americans, mind you, who can travel to, say, Ahmadinejad’s Iran — but not the Castros’ Cuba. It’s been this way for so long, it has created its own sense of perverse normalcy borne of resignation and third-rail politics.
But make no mistake, legal recourse is not a novel approach. Over the years other suits have periodically challenged the travel ban. And U.S. courts have given them all the Cold War heave-ho.
The key technicality about the ban of most Americans (sans scarce licenses) traveling to Cuba is this: It’s not illegal for U.S. citizens to actually go there. But there’s a governmental Catch 22 on steroids awaiting the unwary. You see, it is illegal to actually spend money there — absent formal authorization from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. Hardly a nominal nuisance.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn and brought on behalf of New Yorker Zachary Sanders, challenges OFAC’s right to compel American travelers to answer questions about their expenditures while in Cuba. According to the lawsuit, volunteering such information would make an individual “vulnerable” to criminal prosecution. Indeed.
The suit, filed by the non-profit, legal advocacy group Center for Constitutional Rights, says the policy forces travelers to “incriminate themselves.” Sanders visited Cuba — via the Bahamas — for three weeks in 1998. He refused to offer details about his spending and was fined $1,000. That was later upped to $9,000 when his appeal was rejected.
The suit could conceivably become moot. A bill, the “Freedom To Travel To Cuba Act,” is now pending in Congress. The good news is that it currently has more than 150 signatories. The bad news: none of them are from the Florida delegation. In other words, if the state most impacted can’t sign on, why should everybody else fall in line? Unless that changes, it’s not likely that the passage of HR 874 is imminent.
But the times – notably politics and the longevity of the Castro Brothers – are obviously changing. Three months ago President Barack Obama lifted (Bush Administration) restrictions on travel and cash remittances by Cuban Americans to their home island.
But it was an incremental, minimal step – and disappointing to those who believe the U.S. travel ban to Cuba is both unlawful and immoral. This latest lawsuit is an attempt to accelerate the inevitable.