Closing Cuba

by Bruce Schimmel

If you’ve never visited Cuba, or want to see it again, you’d better hurry and book your trip because it’s unlikely you’ll be allowed to hoist mojitos in Havana by the time the New Year rolls around.

President Bush announced last Friday that Cuba will soon be off-limits to most Americans.

To cultural groups, artists, dancers, musicians and chefs. To ordinary tourists who are curious about the lives of ordinary Cubans.

Unless you're an accredited journalist, a university scholar or have family there, the door to Cuba will be locked -- except, of course, if you happen to be selling things.

While tourism will be forbidden in Cuba, other kinds of trade will continue. So it might still be possible to slip through if you work for an American food conglomerate. Chickens from Tyson, grain products from ADM and soup from Campbell's will still reach the shelves of Cuba's government-run food markets.

U.S. agribusiness will continue to profit from feeding Cubans, while ordinary Americans won't be allowed to go there and share a meal.

This could be, as the trademarked ADM slogan puts it, The Nature of What's to Come, as corporate payback converges with the politics of the upcoming presidential election.

The president's ban on ordinary tourist travel was met with cheers from Cuban expatriates living in Florida, a group that Bush needs to woo in order to win the state in 2004. (While most Americans are barred, Cuban expats will still be allowed to visit relatives in Cuba.)

In the last five years, Cuba has become a popular American travel destination. An estimated 135,000 non-Cuban Americans visited in 2000, with estimates ranging as high as 200,000 last year. Even now, as travel agencies are having their Cuba travel permits yanked, those still open say their tours are booked solid.

Blocked from visiting legally, Americans are also sneaking in through third countries, like Bermuda, Mexico or Canada, whose citizens can visit Cuba freely. Until recently, the U.S. government looked the other way, but now Americans who travel to Cuba indirectly are being prosecuted and fined.

In announcing the travel ban, Bush recalled Castro's recent crackdown on outspoken critics of the communist regime. Bush termed it an oppression that outraged the world's conscience.

Maybe so, but it is an outrage compounded by hypocrisy for the U.S. government to let American corporations profit from contracts with the Cuban government, while forbidding American citizens from witnessing firsthand what U.S. policies are doing to the Cuban people.