The Reality of Today's Cuban-American Travel

June 30, 2011

Prior to April 2009, anti-sanctions activists conveniently saw Cuban-American travel as a way to chip away at overall U.S. policy.

They (correctly) felt it was easier to make an emotional case for Cuban-Americans to visit family members, than for spring breakers to party at apartheid-ridden beach resorts.

Thus, they made a compelling argument that Cuban-Americans should not have to choose between visiting a dying relative or attending their funeral afterwards.

Needless to say, this is a legitimate humanitarian concern, which can (and should) be addressed by means of a simple exception.

(In addition to the already existing, generous legislative exception that allows Cubans -- and only Cubans -- to return to their source country of persecution, despite being automatically paroled into the U.S. as refugees.)

Yet, in April 2009 -- instead of focusing on this humanitarian concern -- the Obama Administration decided to unilaterally remove all limits on Cuban-American travel and remittances.

Two years later, Cuban-American travel conjures images of Cubans abusing their refugee presumption (and the generosity of U.S. taxpayer assistance) under U.S. law, as they leisurely commute back-and-forth from the moment their status is adjusted; of Cubans traveling to the island 10-20 times a year as non-humanitarian merchandise-peddling "mules" (see recent New York Times story); and of unscrupulous businessmen using remittances as a loophole to prey on Cubans with their high-cost, high-interest microloan schemes.

Anyone that has traveled through Miami International Airport can attest to this.

Meanwhile, the Castro regime is laughing its way to the bank.

Facing the greatest political and economic crisis of its history, the Castros have exploited this stream of income, which they so desperately needed (as Hugo Chavez's economy tanks), in order to satisfy the basic tenets of totalitarian power: intensifying repression, paying off its cronies and seizing control over the black market.

Today, Cuban-American travel and remittances stands as the Castro regime's main source of income.

As cited in a recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) Working Paper:

- The Cuban authorities are poised to benefit from travel for U.S. visitors (and particularly, family travel) in the wake of the 2009 policy changes. This category of tourist has surpassed that of any individual European country to become the second most important source arriving to Cuba after Canada.

- The impact of a natural experiment resulting from policy driven changes in travel costs from the United States to Cuba is also estimated. The results suggest that for Cuba, the loosening of travel restrictions in 2009 helped offset the decline in arrivals from the global financial crisis—a potentially significant external countercyclical source of growth. Capitalizing fully on this countercyclical external demand would suggest revising policies to lower travel costs for persons under U.S. jurisdiction traveling to Cuba, and in particular "family" travel, which are currently a multiple of the costs to travel elsewhere in the region.

So let's work to curb these abuses and close this lucrative loophole -- while forging an exception for humanitarian cases.

Otherwise, in Castro's Machiavellian masterpiece, he's managed for 100,000 or so Cuban-Americans (traveling multiple times a year) to finance the brutal repression of nearly 12 million Cubans.

That is no one's "right."