Tens of Thousands Flock to Forbidden Island for the Beaches, Cigars and Rum

By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service

HAVANA -- She was an unlikely rebel: a white-haired, exceptionally well-mannered 79-year-old retired school principal from California. But there she was, an
outlaw, sitting at a hotel here in deliberate defiance of the U.S. travel ban to Cuba.

"Our constitution guarantees our citizens the right to travel anywhere in the world, and I don't like being told I'm not free," she said, asking not to be identified. "I
guess it's a late-in-life rebellion."

Between 20,000 and 50,000 U.S. citizens a year violate the long-standing ban on travel to Cuba, usually flying from third countries such as Mexico, Jamaica or
Canada. Many, like the retired principal and her four companions, say they believe "people-to-people" contact with Cubans is more productive for relations between
the countries than the four-decade-old U.S. economic embargo on Fidel Castro's socialist nation.

The House of Representatives sided with that view in July by voting to essentially lift the travel ban. The Senate has not yet acted on the issue, which remains deeply
divisive in Washington.

President Bush is cracking down hard on unauthorized travel to Cuba, vowing to punish violators "to the fullest extent." So U.S. Customs and immigration officials are
carefully checking travelers returning from countries used as gateways to Cuba.

In sharply increasing numbers, those people found to have been in Cuba -- usually given away by Cuban cigars, rum or other souvenirs in their luggage -- are
receiving letters from the Treasury Department threatening them with fines that can reach as high as $55,000, depending on such factors as the length of their stay in
Cuba and the amount of money they spent there.

A Treasury spokesman said the department sent out 188 penalty letters last year and 517 through July this year. The average threatened fine was about $7,500; the
department gives people an opportunity to respond and sometimes drops its case based on the explanation.

The spokesman said many of those cases began during the Clinton administration. She said the department was simply enforcing the law and not responding to
political pressure.

However, Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), who opposes the travel ban, said in an interview that Bush's pro-embargo stance led directly to the stepped-up
enforcement. He said he knew of a retired woman who was fined $7,650 for biking in Cuba on a package tour arranged by a Canadian travel firm. Dorgan said
another man who went to Cuba for a weekend while visiting the Cayman Islands was fined $19,020.

The Treasury Department, Dorgan said, "ought to be using its resources to track terrorists, not to track down little old ladies who ride bicycles in Cuba."

Dorgan said he had planned to offer an amendment to the department's annual appropriations bill cutting off funds to enforce the travel ban, a measure similar to the
one the House passed. But he said he decided not to offer anything so controversial in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

According to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, an independent group based in New York, about 176,000 U.S. citizens visited Cuba last year. The
council estimates that about 124,000 of those were Cuban Americans, who are allowed one trip a year to visit relatives. It says another 30,000 visited legally as
journalists, humanitarian workers, academics or others who received Treasury Department permission.

The remaining 22,000 traveled illegally, according to the council. That number is impossible to verify independently, and others have said it could be as high as
50,000. Cuban authorities, eager to accept U.S. visitors paying in dollars, routinely do not stamp the passports of Americans, leaving no official trace of their visit.

Roberto de Armas, a Cuban Foreign Ministry official, said that before the Sept. 11 attacks, which severely curtailed tourism to Cuba, the number of Americans
visiting this year was on track to surpass last year's total. Tourism is Cuba's most important moneymaker, generating almost $2 billion last year; the United States is
the third-largest source of visitors, after Canada and Germany.

"That means that the policy being implemented [by Washington] is not working at all, and it is not going to work," de Armas said. "It's a policy that is a challenge to
the freedom of the American people. It's nonsense."

And, he added, "For every American they find, we have 10 more coming to Cuba."

That infuriates anti-Castro activists, particularly Cuban Americans in South Florida, who see it as simply lining Castro's pockets with dollars.

"These tourists are actually complicit; they stay in hotels that violate every form of labor law," said Dennis Hays of the Cuban American National Foundation, an
anti-Castro group in Washington.

Hays said many U.S. visitors to Cuba stay in expensive tourist hotels that are off-limits to most Cubans and beyond their means; Cubans earn an average of $10 a
month and many of the hotels charge $200 or more a night.

Hotel workers often earn small wages while the government takes in millions from the hotels, he said.

The visitors "lie on the beach and drink mojitos and they think that they are striking a blow for liberty," Hays said. "But they're just feeding money into the regime's
coffers."

Here in Cuba, U.S. visitors say Bush should leave them alone.

"I feel he has more important things to do," said the retired principal, who said she was a staunch Republican who voted for Bush. "I think we'd all be happier if he
were looking for bomb-making material, not Cuban souvenirs."

One of her companions, a 68-year-old retired telephone company executive from Wisconsin, said his group traveled to Cuba through Mexico and was just finishing a
two-week tour of the island.

"We've learned a lot," he said. "Our impression is that there are two societies being built here, and they are in trouble. The poor are dirt poor, and those with access
to tourist dollars are in tall cotton."

At the Hemingway Marina, a popular destination for U.S. boaters, many of the sailboats and cruisers fly U.S. flags. In one, as Neil Diamond's music played softly on
the stereo, the owner, a self-described "ultra-conservative from Alabama," said he voted for Bush but thinks his Cuba policy is short-sighted.

"I was in Vietnam for a year. I still have lead in my arm right now, and now look at everything we're doing with North Vietnam," he said. "These people, the Cubans,
aren't the enemy. They are fine people. There is nothing wrong with us coming here."

Cynthia Newport, a documentary film-maker from Washington, has been coming to Cuba for more than a year to make a film. Much of it centers around the
Washington Ballet, which performed in Havana last year, and its Cuban American artistic director, Septime Webre.

"Particularly in light of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we can see that lack of understanding and inability to communicate can only lead to horrifying
problems," said Newport, who has a Treasury Department license to come here. "It's important despite political differences to have constructive and meaningful
dialogue."

                                               © 2001