U.S. academics and students sued the Treasury Department in June demanding that the new restrictions be removed immediately and that programs to study in Cuba be allowed to resume.

Wayne Smith, an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins School of International Studies, told the Militant that the school no longer has any students in Cuba. Smith said that before the new restrictions were imposed some 200 universities ran programs for study in Cuba. “That’s only a handful now,” he said.

Smith heads the Cuba Exchange Program at Johns Hopkins. Under the new restrictions he can’t accompany students to Cuba because he no longer teaches full-time, he said.

Smith, a former head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, is also one of the lead plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Treasury Department to overturn the new restrictions. The Emergency Coalition to Defend Educational Travel is organizing the suit. Smith said he expects a date to be set soon for a hearing, even though the government claims it was not properly served notice.

Matilde Zimmermann, director of the Sarah Lawrence College in Cuba program, estimates that some 500 students from 50 U.S. universities were studying legally in Cuba in the fall of 2003. A year later that number had dropped to 13 students—all of them from Sarah Lawrence College, she said.

Sarah Lawrence has the largest program to study in Cuba and sends 12 to 20 students from August to December each year. The new guidelines require colleges to reapply for approval each year. “Right now we are taking applications and interviewing students but we don’t know if we will get approval,” Zimmermann said.

The college had to drop its Cuba study program offered over spring break because the new regulations require that study programs in Cuba be at least 10 weeks long, she said.

Meanwhile, the Harvard Crimson reported that the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and the Harvard College Office of International Programs have gotten a license for a joint study program in Cuba. Obtaining the license for its spring-semester study-abroad program at the University of Havana was an arduous 18-month process said Cuban-born Jorge I. Dominguez, Harvard’s vice provost for international affairs. The license is good for one year. Dominguez said Harvard will apply again for a license next year but does not know whether the school would get it or by what time.

In May 2004 the White House-appointed Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba issued recommendations to tighten the U.S. embargo against Cuba. These included new travel restrictions, including for educational purposes. These guidelines limit licenses to travel to Cuba for educational programs to institutions issuing graduate or undergraduate degrees, require that students traveling to Cuba be enrolled full-time, and require the institution to renew permission for the program annually rather than bi-annually.
 
 
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