Particular vs. General Travel Licenses

Once the Obama Administration decides to use its authority to allow non-touring travel to all Americans, regardless of ethnicity or national origin, an important nuance is whether to employ specific or general licenses. Specific licenses require an application to OFAC in which an organization must justify how its proposed program of travel qualifies under existing regulations. The license can cover a particular trips or a kind of trip being sponsored by that organization. General licenses are not applied for. Organizations and individuals wimply qualify to use them based on who and what the are and/or the purpose of their travel. For example, Cuban American travel at times was a general license under President Clinton and became a specific license under President Bush. Professional journalists and professional research currently qualify for general licenses.

Specific licenses require keeping an unnecessary and costly OFAC bureaucracy in place. Even during Clinton, the process was time consuming, expensive and arbitrary and significantly narrowed the number and range of actual travelers. Legal offices in educational and cultural institutions had to be brought into the process and played a conservative vetting role, probably leading to the demise of many aspirations. People at the grass roots were intimidated or discouraged by their ignorance of how to proceed.

Even with a more liberal mandate from the President and State Department (a default "yes" as existed under Clinton), the culture of any supervisory bureaucracy is to exercise its authority in a "responsible fashion". It will take OFAC a while to recover from eight years of Bush, and to replace/control staff members with an anti-engagement political bias. Tim Geithner's appropriate deputy will have to monitor closely what is taking place and probably will have to bring in a knowledgeable person with the right goals to directly supervise Cuba license requests and hear appeals from people who are denied or jerked around. (I also can't think of a better place to reduce government bloat than by downsizing OFAC's Cuba staff.)

Specific licenses also force legal visitors into group travel. This should be a problem for those who believe Cuba's intelligence and propaganda apparatus takes advantage of group trips with prearranged itineraries. It also enables Cuba to easily channel all higher priced US business to three preferred state companies. Over the years, the Americans who had the most varied and spontaneous encounters with Cuba were those who traveled without OFAC licenses and took public transportation or rented cars to traverse the island and stayed in casas particulares (two bedroom bed and breakfasts)

Ideally a general license is based on intention and credentials and takes the traveler at his or her word. They do not require pre-trip itineraries or post-trip reports. No one is scrutinizing whether a day at the beach was included in the time as long as the visitor can say with integrity (if anyone asks) that the trip included a significant component of education, religious interaction, humanitarian assistance, cultural exchange, sports or "support for the Cuban people".

There is one bureaucratic step back that allows a more objective criteria for a general license but no larger OFAC role. Qualification could be defined as going with or on behalf of a registered 501c3/501c4 not-for-profit organization or as writing for a community newspaper or an on-line blog, or as a professional or recognized volunteer in a related field, etc. This will also push toward group travel, but there would be more space.

Whether a general or specific license approach is followed, qualification should be extended to family members and companions.

There will be some cheating or pushing the envelope on general licenses but it doesn't matter if what one is really trying to inhibit is large scale commercial resort tourism. There will be lots more cheating in general as an Obama administration is not going to be able to enforce what Bush couldn't, especially in the past two years. Travel via third countries is just too easy and morally acceptable. The more the information spreads that OFAC has given up on blocking it, the more people will simply go. (A GAO report last year cited estimates of 120,000 annually.)

General licenses will also eliminate the problem of what to do about publicized civil disobedience by Pastors for Peace and the Venceremos Brigade since they will qualify whether they want to or not. Clinton and Bush couldn't do anything about their travel. Is a liberal civil liberties inclined Administration more likely to be repressive?

It is clear from discussions among Cuba activists, that the idea of "travel challenges" is entering more into the mainstream. If the Congress or Administration have not acted on travel by July, there will be grreater overt exercise of the right to travel, and even more covert non-cooperation. Many of the people involved will be former supporters of, and donors to, the Obama campaign, 84% of whom want normalization according to the October poll.

Stategy and Tactics 2

Further thoughts about why I believe a two track executive + legislative approach is required if we are serious about changing US-Cuba relations.

1) We can not afford to leave the Administration to its own devices. We should push against prolonging the interagency review without significant action by creating a buzz through our networks on a nationwide as well as DC basis. We must bring to the surface the full potential of what Obama can and ought to do consistent with his own goals and values. Staying silent guarantees that the only pressure he feels is from the "go slow on change" camp.

Ones stance on this question depends on
a) whether you think it is positive or negative if the Administration allows the twelve categories, and
b) how that balances with a realistic assessment of prospects for legislative victory and the likely time line.

If a credible case is made that there is a high probability of victorious floor votes in the next two or three months. I am not as concerned about the danger of just focusing on Congress. However if we are talking about summer or fall floor votes and an uncertain result, the equation is different.

A Cuban American friend writes from Miami (edited for style):

I spent two days in Capitol Hill with a very strong Jewish American delegation who traveled with me to Cuba last year. We visited Berman's office, Engel himself and other very important members and the fight for ALL travel is a difficult one, a long one and it might not be a winnable one this year, with Reid, Menendez, Ros Lehtinen, Wasserman Schultz and others (not to mention the PAC which has already greased all new members' pockets) putting on a strong fight.

The President must sign the executive order for Cuban American family travel and expand on his powers for purposeful travel....as a first step. Congress can then put up a good fight and we will see if they can deliver…

I, and the others that accompanied me, did not get any "warm" feelings about the win for travel for ALL Americans. I have worked for over 10 years to change US policy towards Cuba from trying to amend the food and medicine embargo to lifting travel, not just for Cuban Americans but for all Americans...It pains me that many of our allies are not there to support unconditionally and urgently the President signing the executive order for family travel and possibly more...and don’t see it as a first step in mending policy. It is the correct thing and the moral thing to do RIGHT NOW and we should all be on this page.

It does not mean that we would rest one second to continue to press Congress to pass those bills, but the opposition is fierce, the money is flowing and if our allies put all their political capital to press only this Congressional tactic, we have a real chance of having NOTHING at the end of the day and that would be truly disastrous and unpardonable.

A bird in the hand is especially worth two in the bush in this case because it allows a wide range of institutions to create programs with Cuba even as soon as this spring and summer, and certainly for fall and winter. If there is likely that a bill is not approved until summer or fall, or even next year, we will have lost the energies of the participants in pressing Congress after they come home. We will also lose a travel season and thus income for Cuba and for pro-travel US organizations.

Having a Congressional majority in 2000 produced legislation that was a big victory on agriculture, but the same legislation contained the codification, i.e. limitation, to the 12 categories of travel, taking away the previous flexibility of the President. Legislation is like making sausages it has been said. The other side is quick on its feet and has shown that it has more firepower than we do.

We cannot base our tactics on being in the best of all worlds. If the above assessment based on recent Hill visits by a very experienced person is accurate, or reality falls somewhere in between, and we don't clearly have a majority of votes, what happens? Do we have evidence that enough has changed in terms of Congress from the twin defeats on the democracy funds and the Rangel amendment that we are prepared to bet the farm? Objectively we still have the problem of human rights and political prisoners that drastically undermined support after the “black spring” of 2003 not to mention the well placed funds and political machine of the other side.


2) Leverage on the Administration is greater now while it is deciding how it needs to present itself at the Summit of the Americas, the review process is ongoing and on the heels of the Lugar and Brookings recommendations. Once the review is concluded, the Administration will be in the mode of selling its conclusions to Congress and to the media. The Democratic majority and the chattering class will be reluctant for months to directly challenge whatever emerges from considered interagency deliberations which puts us into the 2010 election cycle an an open Senate seat in Florida.

Motivating our base for sustained work is complicated. I suspect most of our strength lies in districts and states occupied by natural supporters of travel legislation. When the focus is spread among 435 districts and 50 states, some will be easy and some will be impossible. The challenge is what happens to those energies that have either quickly achieved cosponsors or reached an impenetrable wall.

Focusing attention on a single national target in the White House was pointless when the target was as impervious to reason and our constituency's opinion as Bush. However, when the target is philosophically inclined to, and has many personal links with, our side, mounting a national campaign to appeal to the President’s better angels, or to reinforce and prod our friends on the inside, engages everyone regardless of where they live.

The click-throughs on my newsletter links suggest our base is more likely to give us leverage with the White House than with Congress, at least for the next year.

For what it is worth, the top four were

26% the White House comment page
13% the You Tube interview with Mariela Castro
10% the bill text and cosponsors on Thomas
7% the Florida PAC recipients and donors

(newsletter can be seen here)

3) Bottom line is that the more we get from the Administration, the better positioned we are intellectually and with a reenergized base to influence Congress. If we abandon seeking to influence the executive, minimal policy change could result. We will be forced to challenge an Administration that is very popular with our supporters and the country. We need Obama to do enough with his existing power and to be positive about further action by Congress so that we are working with him not against him. It will be far easier for us if the Administration is advocating rather than ignoring or opposing partial engagement through non-tourist travel and our job is to argue the need for Congress to fulfill the potential of full engagement.

We need to push back aggressively against the arrogant televised boast of Sen. Menendez (D, NJ) as reported from Miami:

“The only thing the administration is going to allow is a roll back to Clinton era family travel" and "if it came down to listening to Senator Lugar (who has called for broad reconsideration of US policy) or him and others in the Cuban American community, Obama would listen to him and the others"

The Omnibus Appropriations bill has created confusion about the status of family travel and the practical effect of non-enforcement provisions. (more here) The clearest way to solve the problem is for the President to fulfill his promise of unlimited family travel and remittances. The only way to do that without discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and national origin is to also authorize the rest on non-tourist travel. It also speaks to Obama’s value of dialog and responds to broader American and international opinion.

It is not a question of giving up before the battle in Congress, but rather being smart about how to win. Given reports that we may be in trouble at the Committee level and on the Floor, and that Democratic members are reluctant to cosponsor because they don’t want to get out ahead of their own Administration, we need to think hard about what changes the dynamic in our favor.

Hill people I've talked to, both three months ago and now, simply don't agree with the argument that the Administration opening the door to non-tourist travel will undermine work on the legislation. They see it as just the opposite.

If a Congressional office says it is not ready yet to cosponsor the legislation, but it will urge the White House to authorize family and non-tourist people-to-people travel, were they more likely to have said yes to cosponsinb if they were not also asked to call the White House?

Sun Sentinel Op Ed

U.S.-Cuba policy: Time for reform, easing restrictions

By John McAuliff

Sun Sentinel, November 9, 2008

In his victory speech in Chicago's Grant Park, President-elect Barack Obama recognized that there are "alliances to repair." The Democratic Party platform plank on Latin America pledged "We must turn the page on the arrogance in Washington."

United States policy toward Cuba is the easiest place to demonstrate that these words are more than rhetoric.

Five days before Obama spoke, national leaders at the Ibero-American Summit in El Salvador urged the United States to repeal its 47-year-old unilateral embargo against Cuba, saying it "is unacceptable and harms the Cuban people."

The week before, the UN General Assembly for the 17th time insisted with a virtually unanimous voice of 185-3 that the United States should end the embargo.

All our friends and allies in the Caribbean, the Western Hemisphere, Europe and Asia opposed us. Israel is our only significant supporter but actually follows a contrary policy as its citizens manage Cuba's largest citrus groves and are major investors in property development.

It is not enough for the president-elect to take the humanitarian step of unrestricted visits and remittances by Cuban Americans.

If he wants to restore U.S. regional and international credibility, he must quickly initiate a more significant policy change.

Obama cannot end the embargo without Congress. But he can unlock the logjam in both countries by using his legal authority to restore in a non-discriminatory fashion the constitutional right to travel to every American who wants to make "non-tourist" visits.

By regulatory fiat, the Office of Foreign Assets Control in the Treasury Department can restore and expand by general license the kind of journeys that took place before 2004 by world affairs councils, museums, Elderhostel, Semester at Sea, religious and humanitarian groups, sports teams, musicians, artists, professional and business associations, students, alumni, people-to-people exchanges and serious individuals.

Most such trips were blocked by the Bush administration, ostensibly because they provided funds to Cuba's government, but the peak number of 84,500 opinion leaders and curious Americans hardly counted among two million European, Canadian and Latin American tourists.

The cost of U.S. self-isolation was confirmed when Washington's role model for responsible hemispheric leadership, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, announced in Havana last week that Raúl Castro will travel to Brazil in December "to participate in the first meeting of Latin American and Caribbean nations, without interference from any other power."

John McAuliff is executive director, Fund for Reconciliation and Development, www.ffrd.org

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/cuba/sfl-forum09cubasbnov09,0,2832224.story

November Perspective on US-Cuba Relations

November 2007:
The President Plays Mind Games, Congress Immobilized, Americans Change the Rules

by John McAuliff

The President's speech on Cuba policy at the State Department on October 24th has been greeted with widespread criticism and editorial derision. Before it was delivered, there were rumors that he would either crack down on thinly veiled violations of travel restrictions by thousands of Cuban Americans or restore family travel to the pre-2004 mode. He did neither.

In fact, it was not immediately clear what his purpose was. Much of what he said simply recycled irrelevant and presumptuous Cuba transition documents. His concrete proposals for donated computers, scholarships and an international fund were saccharine coating for regime change tactics and can not have been intended to be taken seriously, even as propaganda. His appeal for international support was answered within days when the UN for the 16th year adopted a resolution opposing the unilateral US embargo--by a record vote of 184 to 4.

Mr. Bush’s only substantive points were provocative, that the US was now less interested in stability and that the Cuban military and security forces should be disloyal.

Does he now buy into Miami fantasies about post-Fidel rebellion and contemplate a third or fourth front for US military intervention? Or does he put pandering to the hard right above saving the Republican vote in south Florida? (The Administration’s harsh cut-back of family travel is very unpopular as indicated by public opinion polls and the tendency of new Cuban American voters to register independent or Democrat.)

Two people who have a personal stake in what the President said interpreted it this way:

A prominent Cuban-American academic in Miami whose work is well funded by USAID:

Jaime Suchlicki, director of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, said Bush's choice of the State Department as the speech venue sent a signal to those in the foreign service who may want to soften Cuba policy...''Certain elements of the bureaucracy may not be following the president's policies on Cuba,'' said Suchlicki, ...``They are concerned about mass migration. They want stability in Cuba and are not pushing the envelope for change.'' Bush settled the issue when he said: 'The operative word in our future dealings with Cuba is not `stability.' The operative word is 'freedom.' ''

--from "Bush echoed Miamians' words in Cuba speech" by Alfonso Chardy, The Miami Herald - Posted October 26

A prominent Cuban dissident in Havana:

Oscar Espinosa Chepe, economist and former prisoner:
"Instead of encouraging the changes that at this moment are debated within the government, changes that are possible though not certain, [Washington] reinforces the sectors that don't want any reform." In his opinion, Bush should have authorized travel to Cuba by the exiles, instead of maintaining and tightening the embargo because of the upcoming elections. "It seems there is a Holy Alliance between those who -- in Cuba and the U.S. -- don't want anything to change."

-- from El Pais Newspaper of Spain, "Bush hallucinates," by Mauricio Vicent, Oct. 26, as cited on line by Progresso Weekly

Suchliki is deluded by his own wishful thinking and Chepe is closer to the mark.

Presumably some people in the rearguard Miami elite and the US government recognize the potential of Raul Castro enabling significant Vietnam-style reform, producing rapid agricultural and economic progress. This could be coupled with deeper ties to the dominant trend in Latin America, a broad-based market-friendly left.

While most Americans might see such evolutionary changes in Cuba as a good thing and in our national interest, significant economic reforms and closer ties in the Hemisphere will be the death knell for the dreams of the ultras in Miami and their ideological allies in Washington.

I believe that the real goal of the President's speech was to provoke the more orthodox and cautious sector of leaders in Cuba to oppose the surprisingly open and wide-ranging debate that Raul Castro has launched, and to push them to block any serious reform initiatives in agriculture, small business and the media. The orthodox will be motivated to argue that the aggressive tone of Bush's speech must be taken seriously. They will fear that US promotion of instability is more likely to find vulnerabilities in national unity during a process of public criticism and socio-economic experiment. At the least, they will say, let’s play it safe and wait until Bush is gone and we see the attitude of his successor.

No doubt other leaders will argue that ignoring real problems actually makes Cuba more susceptible to outside interference, and that viewpoint will probably win.

However, we have seen in the past that Cuban reactions to pressure can be as counter-productive as conventional wisdom is in the US. Cases in point: the shoot down of the deliberately provocative Brothers to the Rescue flights; the crackdown on dissidents because of the intentionally provocative role with them of Jim Caison, head of the US Interests Section. The former had a dramatic impact on the Clinton Administration and Congress, leading to passage of the Helms-Burton law. The latter substantially diminished Congressional support for moderation of the embargo.


Congress and the American People

A few members of Congress and Democratic presidential candidates gave appropriately critical responses to President Bush’s speech. However, to my knowledge, the House and Senate leadership were silent.

Moreover, there is no indication that the Democrats are prepared to take advantage of the weakness of the Administration on this issue. They are leaving in the State Department appropriations bill $47 million of “democracy funding” which in part assists Miami Republicans in the 2008 election and in part subsidizes conservative propaganda aimed at Americans.

Congressional leaders are not challenging the President to veto a bill that reflects the desire of nearly two-thirds of Americans for normal relations. They have done nothing to bring to the floor legislation to regain the Constitutional right of travel for the 40 % who want to visit Cuba—even though it has 120 cosponsors in the House and 23 in the Senate. Despite the special benefit of track 2 style dialog during a period of far-reaching domestic debate, Democrats are not restoring travel that was possible during the Clinton Administration for non-tourist purposes such as academic, humanitarian, religious, cultural, professional and people to people exchanges. Congress has even turned its back on the least controversial humanitarian cause of Cuban American family reunion.

One consequence of the President’s extremism and Congressional inaction is that constituent anger over draconian restrictions on family travel is putting at risk the reelection of one of more of Miami’s Cuban American Republican Representatives. Should the Democrats win, it will echo in Washington.

In the meantime, Americans are increasingly voting with their feet and the Bush Administration can do little about this spontaneous grass roots resistance. While mainstream religious institutions have lost their licenses, thousands of Cuban Americans have gone on fraudulent or dubious religious trips, or simply traveled unimpeded through third countries. The US Attorney’s office in Miami successfully won guilty pleas last month from the creators of blatantly phony churches, but neither it nor the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) seem disposed to act against the 4,500 Cuban Americans who paid to use those licenses.

In addition, an estimated 40,000 other Americans will travel to Cuba this year, most without the approval of OFAC. They have found it is easy to book tickets and receive a tourist visa to Cuba from travel agents in a dozen countries with direct flight connections, and know that the Cubans do not stamp US passports. If suspected by US immigration authorities, unlicensed travelers may receive a letter from OFAC threatening a fine for violation of regulations. However, if they appeal for a hearing, nothing else happens because the administrative judge process has ground to a halt with an unmanageable backlog of individual and group cases.

As information spreads by word of mouth and through the internet that travel restrictions cannot be enforced and how simple it is to go, more Americans will no longer wait to see Cuba. Some will do this as an act of principled non-cooperation, the exercise of one more fundamental Constitutional right that has been compromised by a discredited lame-duck Administration, this time for purely partisan political reasons. Others will simply want to beat the rush of a million American tourists predicted for the first year after the next President officially ends travel restrictions.

If the Democrats win the 2008 Presidential election, the failure of the current Congress to act on travel will leave the new Administration with the immediate choice of either harassing tens of thousands of its supporters, or quickly moving to clean up one more mess left by the Bush Administration.