Bush screws US/Cuba travelers to impress Miami "exile" voters

[Judi Lynn]

A Crackdown Worthy Of Castro
More Fines, Arbitrary Enforcement. When Will We Wise Up About Travel to Cuba?

By Alicia C. Shepard
Sunday, July 13, 2003; Page B01


Walk into a travel agency and you can book a trip to communist China or North Korea. But not to Cuba. After 40 years, the U.S. government still bans travel to Castro Country, although thousands of Americans have gone there anyway, aware that enforcement had become lax. Until George W. Bush hit town, that is.

Since Bush took office, some 1,226 Americans have received letters from the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) threatening fines of up to the maximum of $55,000 for violating the travel ban by spending money in Cuba without a license. (The average fine is $7,500.) That's more than double the total during Bill Clinton's entire last term. Scores of others are being investigated. (snip)

(snip) It may be the law, but those who favor lifting the embargo suspect the administration's actions have more to do with Campaign 2004 than with containing Castro. To win a second term, Bush must carry Florida. And that means wooing Miami's powerful (and conservative) Cuban American community. "The crackdown is simply political," contends Sandra Levinson, executive director of the Center for Cuban Studies, a Manhattan-based nonprofit educational organization. (snip)

(snip) Slote, a San Diego grandmother of six, never sought to deceive the government. At 75, she has pedaled through 21 countries and still bikes more than 100 miles a week. An ad in a Toronto-based adventure catalogue for a Cuba bike trip intrigued her. It said -- incorrectly -- that U.S. law does not bar citizens from visiting Cuba as long as they fly there through Canada.

"It never occurred to me to question what I read," says Slote. "I'm a middle-of-the-road person politically. I just wasn't that politically savvy to know that Cuba could be a big problem." Three years later, her dream trip has turned into a legal nightmare, with the government threatening to garnish her $1,184 monthly Social Security check to cover close to $9,000 in penalties and interest.
(snip/...)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46177-2003Jul11.html