Two news articles: “Sixth day of protests in Egypt” (based on AFP) and “Egypt tensions could affect petroleum market.”
There’s also a Fidel Castro commentary that knocks U.S. “Machiavellianism” for supplying arms to the Egyptian government “while USAID supplied funds to the opposition.” He concludes: “Will the United States be able to hold back the revolutionary wave shaking the Third World?”
CNN story here. Yoani Sanchez tweets that she is keeping her contacts informed by text messages.
Today’s Federal Register contains the regulations that make effective the January 14 White House announcement on Cuba policy: on travel and remittances, and on the airports that handle flights to Cuba. The regulations took effect upon publication.
Penultimos Dias posts a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the cash flow resulting from current Cuban-American travel to Cuba: about $1.7 billion, which would amount to about 1.5 percent of gdp. Additional economic impacts come from remittances and the massive amounts of goods that Cuban Americans bring on those flights – some for consumption, some to provide the wherewithal for entrepreneurs to do their work, some for resale.
We can quibble about the estimates but all agree: it’s a significant amount of money.
What is the impact? Some goes to the government, some goes to individuals. Some of the money that goes to the government supports services for the public, and some that goes to individuals ends up with the government, through taxes or mark-ups at hard-currency stores.
A substantial segment of the Cuban-American community – about ten planeloads a day out of Miami – could care less about sorting this out. Contrary to the views of those they elect to Congress, they send their money, buy their plane tickets, go to Cuba, take their families out to restaurants, take them to stay in tourist hotels, and help them as best they can.
They act as regular immigrants, but they elect legislators who consider themselves exiles.
When these legislators talk about Cuba policy, they don’t take a sanctions-begin-at-home approach. Has anyone ever seen them try to persuade their own constituents to stay at home, not to travel to Cuba, not to support such a huge flow of hard currency to Cuba?
The concern about hard currency kicks in now, when President Obama plans to open up travel – partially – for the rest of Americans.
Do as we say, not as our constituents do.
[AP photo.]
I thought it was curious a few years ago when efforts were made to publicize a memorandum by former Attorney General Robert Kennedy in favor of allowing unrestricted travel by Americans to Cuba (see, for example this 2009 Washington Post op-ed).
It was a great memo as far as I’m concerned, but the bulk of RFK’s record on Cuba had nothing to do with people-to-people contacts. It had to do with his brother’s unusual delegation of foreign policy functions to the Attorney General, with RFK’s direction of operations that would be called terrorism today, and with the Kennedy Administration’s Bay of Pigs disaster, a gross betrayal of allies and a waste of lives on both sides of the beach that would be impeachable today. Or at least we would like to think so.
The records of RFK’s official actions regarding Cuba during that period are being bottled up by his family, as this item on James Fallows’ blog details. These are official papers, not personal papers, and it’s a travesty that they are under family rather than government control.
