New guidelines on people-to-people travel

Following complaints by Senator Rubio and others, the Treasury Department changed the rules governing people-to-people travel programs.  I don’t see that the actual regulations have changed; rather, the description of the licensing criteria has been changed in Treasury’s guidelines for applicants (see here [pdf], scroll down on left to “educational activities – people-to-people”).

I am not finding a plain English, side-by-side comparison of the old and the new.  In the absence of that, my reading is that the change consists of adding the following:

·         A clarification of an existing requirement that licensees have an employee or consultant accompanying each group of travelers; i.e. a licensee cannot send a group to Cuba to be led by a Cuban guide or a foreign national.

·         A clarification that the program activities must serve one or more of these objectives: enhancing contact with the Cuban people, supporting civil society, promoting independence from Cuban authorities.

·         A requirement that applicants (or licensees seeking renewal) explain, if their itineraries include meetings “hosted by” high-level government or Party officials, how such meetings serve one or more of the objectives listed above.

Senator Rubio objected to some programs because they appeared frivolous and because they did nothing to promote political change.  Actually, the regulations in this category of travel never included a government requirement that Americans promote political change as a condition of their travel license.  The requirements were, and they remain, that the travel involve full-time educational programs with lots of interaction with Cubans, and the predominant portion of that interaction cannot be with high-level government or Party officials.  What has been added are explicit mentions of optional objectives regarding civil society and independence.

The people-to-people category is the way most Americans not of Cuban descent travel to Cuba.  Cuban Americans travel without restriction, and no one has taken to the floor of Congress to talk of their “abuses” or to impose a requirement that they engage in political activity as a condition of their license to travel to Cuba. 

This would all be a lot easier, and a lot more American I would say, if we simply allowed Americans to travel freely and did not employ executive branch agencies in regulating their activity.  But Cuba policy is a big-government policy, not a limited-government policy.

For his part, Senator Rubio himself does not go to Cuba, for visits or politics or otherwise.

Herald story here.

The Alan Gross case: much talk, no movement

CNN has done the service of drawing out both the Cuban and U.S. governments on their positions on the case of jailed USAID contractor Alan Gross.

Below is video of an interview with Cuban foreign ministry official Josefina Vidal, preceded by some background on the case. 

The Cuban position is that since Gross was working for the U.S. government, there should be a negotiation with the U.S. government to resolve the case. 

The U.S. position, expressed by a State Department spokesman in reaction to that interview, is to “reject the suggestion that this is a matter for negotiation.”

Earlier, Secretary of State Clinton also spoke to CNN about the case, describing Gross as someone who “worked for a development group,” saying he is held “without justification,” and adding that the Cuban legal system stinks. 

The U.S. position, in other words, is to demand his unconditional release.  It’s a position that works politically in the United States, but it’s hard to see how it does anything for Mr. Gross.

Here’s a link to a Spanish-language interview of Ms. Vidal conducted by Claudia Palacios of CNN, and here’s a roundup of all the back-and-forth by CBS News.

First things first

Cuba’s economic reforms are a two-step process, if not more, as labor federation chief Salvador Valdes Mesa explained in an interview just before the May 1 labor marches, where he tied any state sector salary increases to the big cuts in government spending that have to occur first:

“Until the country, through the measures it adopts, is able to reduce inflated payrolls, eliminate unnecessary free benefits and subsidies, which act against increasing the productivity of work, it will not be in a position to make salary increases from the current pay scale.

Odds and ends

• Granma: 56,500 Cubans have registered and updated their property titles since new procedures went into effect last November.  The benefit, the article explains, is that the owner is “recognized before the law as legitimate owner of his property and gains legal protection in exercising any transfer of the property.”

• Sun-Sentinel: The offshore oil exploration rig continues to work in Cuban waters in the Gulf of Mexico, shifting westward to sites that would be, if something went wrong, more dangerous for Florida.

• La Jornada reviews a series of reforms approved and not yet implemented.

• El Mundo: Spain’s new ruling party rejects a 2.5 million Euro appropriation to pay for extended aid to former Cuban political prisoners and their families who now reside there.

• The New York Times on anti-AIDS efforts in Cuba, here and here.

Tourism and the private sector

In an article on tourism in Cuba (2.7 million visitors last year, and this year’s figures are up 5.2 percent through March), Juventud Rebelde notes the contribution of the entrepreneurial sector: there are 1,618 private restaurants and 5,207 homes in which Cubans rent rooms to foreign visitors.

Speaking of those homes, the Herald’s Mimi Whitefield has a colorful report on the families who are learning the home-based hospitality business.

Mozambique

Following the big reaction to this photo, here’s another railroad shot from not far away.  With a little less architectural heritage.

Alan Gross, quotable

BLITZER: If you could speak directly to the top leaders in Cuba, what would you say?

GROSS: I would say to Raul Castro that I think he’s trying to do some very courageous things.  He himself has been on national television before the national assembly.  And he said that a major problem with the economy here is the low productivity.  And that can’t be blamed on the United States.  It cannot be blamed on the United States.  And I think it took a lot of courage to say that.

– from a CNN interview with jailed USAID contractor Alan Gross, on the phone from the Carlos Finlay military hospital where he is incarcerated; partial transcript here, the full interview is here on video and well worth hearing.  Asked what he was doing in Cuba, he said: “I was contracted by a company in Bethesda, Maryland to bring some off-the-shelf equipment to test to see if it worked in Cuba.  I decided that I would at the same time try to improve the computer system within the Jewish community.”

"The Cardinal's limits," and Radio Marti's

Radio Marti last week published and broadcast an editorial, “The Cardinal’s limits,” that asserted that Cardinal Ortega is involved in “political collusion” (contubernio) with the Cuban government and shows a “lackey attitude” toward it. 

The editorial, signed by the station’s director Carlos Garcia, has been removed from the Radio Marti website (it used to be here) but is still circulating on the Internet (here, for example).

Garcia began by writing that the station was “obligated” to give an opinion given the importance of recent comments by Cardinal Ortega and the debate they have caused.

His first complaint was that Cardinal Ortega spoke with “disrespect and arrogance” toward 13 Cubans who occupied a Havana church just before the Pope’s visit in an attempt to pressure the church to get the Pope to see them. 

While in Boston recently, Ortega called the group “delinquents” and people of “a low cultural level,” a comment that is certainly fair game for criticism.  I don’t know what either of those things, even if true, has to do with their actions.  I thought the church was on solid ground in its actions and statements at the time – it heard their grievances and vowed to pass them on, it said they were not welcome to occupy and disrupt a place of worship, and it eventually had them removed. 

Garcia’s second complaint is that Cardinal Ortega commented that the late Archbishop Roman of Miami counseled him not to use the word “reconciliation” from the pulpit in Miami, and this somehow “tarnishes the memory” of Archbishop Roman.  To me, that sounds like a smart tip.  Garcia went on to give his view on reconciliation: “When you concern yourself with your brother giving him food, caring for his health with medicines and caring for his physical and spiritual needs as el exilio does with the needy people of Cuba, it is not necessary to ask for reconciliation.”

Garcia went on to say that “there is no national church” and to explain the hierarchy within the Catholic church.

The kicker: “Please, Cardinal Ortega, be faithful to the gospel you preach.”

From today’s Herald story:

“It is a criticism of the two statements made by the Cardinal,” said García-Pérez, a Cuban-American lawyer. “But more than that, we wanted to explain that there is a hierarchy within the Catholic Church and it’s universal, not national.”

He emphasized the editorial was not removed from the website of Radio and TV Martí in reaction to controversy that had arisen. “It’s not something we want to be pounding all the time, we put it up for two days and then took it down,” he said.

Radio Marti is a U.S. government instrument, part of the Voice of America.  It has already given voice to critics of Cardinal Ortega, which is fair, and it’s good journalism because those critics are part of a debate that deserves to be covered. 

An editorial in the name of the station is another matter. 

Voice of America editorials speak for the U.S. government.  Radio Marti editorials aren’t presented that way, but listeners could hardly be blamed if they were to interpret them as speaking for the Obama Administration and wondering why, of all the possible lines of criticism against Cubans who are independent of the government, it chose to voice this one.