BY BRIAN TAYLOR
NEW YORK - The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) amended its restrictions on travel to Cuba May 11, making it more difficult for some U.S. residents to legally go there. The government will now presume that people visiting Cuba from the United States as fully hosted guests - whose expenses while in Cuba are covered by Cubans or other non-U.S. citizens - are guilty of violating U.S. law.

This dovetails with increasing attempts by the Clinton administration this year to deny or hold up applications by U.S. residents for licenses to travel to that Caribbean island.

These developments were discussed at the June 6 meeting here of the National Network on Cuba (NNOC), a coalition of national and local organizations that actively oppose Washington's economic war on Cuba. The Network decided to distribute more information on U.S. government restrictions of travel to Cuba and encourage its affiliates to secure collaboration with attorneys in each locality who can quickly provide legal help, when needed.

According to the Treasury Department the new OFAC regulations are designed "to establish a presumption that persons subject to U.S. jurisdiction who have traveled to Cuba without the authority of a general or specific license have engaged in prohibited travel related transactions."

Gabor Rona, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCRI), gave a presentation to the NNOC meeting about the regulations. In a later interview, he explained, "The embargo does not prohibit travel to Cuba, but it does prohibit spending money in Cuba." This makes travel to Cuba very difficult. "But there are exceptions," Rona noted. "You can request a license from the [U.S.] government that permits you to spend money. In addition to licenses, there is fully hosted travel, which is consistent with restrictions because you spend no money."

But the Treasury Department's amendment, "shifts the burden of producing evidence" onto the traveler. "Anyone who goes to Cuba without a license now is assumed to have spent money," Rona said.

The new regulations state: "The presumption may be rebutted by a statement signed by the traveler providing specific supporting documentation that no transactions were engaged in by the traveler or on the traveler's behalf by any other person subject to U.S. jurisdiction, or that the traveler was fully sponsored or fully hosted by a third party not subject to jurisdiction of the United States....

"This statement shall describe the circumstances of the travel and explain how it was possible to avoid entering into travel-related transactions such as payments for meals, lodging, transportation, bunkering of vessels or aircraft, visas, entry or exit fees, and gratuities."

While OFAC claims this move is not putting "the ultimate burden of proof" on the traveler, the government can take "appropriate enforcement action...where the traveler is unable to provide sufficient evidence" that they spent no money in Cuba. The government agency justifies this breech of the presumption of innocence by arguing that it is a "practical impossibility for OFAC to prove" that a person on a trip to Cuba broke any laws.

The government claims it's hard to get proof that travelers may be paying airport taxes, transportation fees, and other expenses. Washington also complains that the Cuban government does not allow U.S. federal agents to enter Cuba, making it difficult to enforce U.S. laws there.

"It is easy to prove something did happen - through evidence, witnesses, etc. -but it is much harder to prove something did not happen," Rona stated. Furthermore, "it is a violation of due process to make someone prove that something did not happen. How much proof is enough! At what point does it become an abuse of government power?" According to Rona, the enforcement of the law is arbitrary and discriminatory, leaving open harassment of individuals based on inconsequential questions like political beliefs, nationality, and sex. "One of the main reasons the government has clamped down is because so many people have been able to meet requirements for fully hosted travel," Rona said. "Now people who want to go will have to make a considerably bigger effort to compile proof of innocence."

Rona, representing the Center for Constitutional rights, said, "We will challenge every single case with as much ammunition as we can gather." A video and a six-page publication that spells out the regulations and provides advice to Cuba travelers will be available soon from CCRI. For more information contact the Center for Constitutional Rights at (212) 614-6464.

The NNOC will also be distributing this video and encouraging its affiliates to use it.

In the past several months, Washington has denied licenses to a number of people requesting permission to travel to Cuba, or has held up issuing them until after the planned departure date. One recent incident involved more than 60 would-be participants in the 10th Conference of North American and Cuban Philosophers and Social Scientists, June 12-26 in Havana, Cuba.

"This is the 10th conference and in previous years we never had trouble going," said Cliff DuRand, who is the North American coordinator of the annual event. Participants have applied for licenses since it became a requirement five years ago. This time, as in previous years, professors, students, and others applied for an academic license, which requires the applicant to prove the trip is within their field of research and will involve sharing information with a Cuban colleague.

"They played a bureaucratic trick to deny people the right to travel," DuRand said. The U.S. treasury department rejected the request on the basis that the applications did not comply with the guidelines for an entirely different type of license, issued in cases where an international organization, based neither in Cuba nor the United States, calls a meeting in Cuba.

Professors and others outraged by the denial put pressure on the government through telephone calls and a letter-writing campaign. The Treasury Department reversed 58 of the 61 denials, but the licenses arrived the day the conference was scheduled to begin. Many of the participants had bought nonrefundable airline tickets. While some were not able to attend due to the postponement, most went on the trip. "We had to scurry around to make new arrangements," recanted DuRand. "But after having to do battle to get the licenses it made people more determined to go. The government's moves backfired with us."

In another example, at the end of March 175 professors across the country - members and supporters of the Southwest Council on Latin American Studies (SCOLAS) - were denied licenses just 10 days before departure to a conference in Cuba that they received government approval for the previous fall. U.S. officials claimed that SCOLAS members in the United States participated in the decision to hold the meeting in Cuba - a supposedly prohibited act when applying for the international conference licenses, according to U.S. officials. Conference organizers estimated that at least 150 of the rejected applicants could have applied for an academic license if they had been informed of the rejection earlier.

Thirty Columbia School of Public Health physicians applied for licenses seven weeks prior to their planned departure to Cuba scheduled for June 10, but received no reply. Protest calls were put in and the day before the trip the government issued licenses. The physicians went ahead with the trip.  
 
 
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