Mr. President, rumor has it that on Friday the President will announce a change in U.S. policy toward Cuba. There are lots of different rumors about what that might entail. I thought I would talk for just a couple of minutes about the…
Mr. President, rumor has it that on Friday the President will announce a change in U.S. policy toward Cuba. There are lots of different rumors about what that might entail. I thought I would talk for just a couple of minutes about the consequences of such action, what has been accomplished in Cuba, what our goals are, and what I think our goals should be.
We have had a long policy of isolation with regard to Cuba. For more than 50 years, we tried to isolate the island and hoped the government would change somehow. It didn't. For more than 50 years, we have prohibited Americans from freely traveling to Cuba. We have had periods that the restrictions have gone down a bit and then up again, but by and large Americans have been prohibited, unless they fall into certain classes, to travel to Cuba. Then, when they are in Cuba, their travel around the island, the activities they undertake, are specifically prescribed by the U.S. Government.
I always thought that certainly there is a place for economic sanctions. Sometimes they can help nudge countries or push countries toward a desired outcome--but a travel ban? You only impose a travel ban under extreme circumstances, such as when national security reasons dictate, and there hasn't, for a long time, been national security reasons for a travel ban. I have always thought that as an American citizen that if somebody is going to limit my travel, it ought to be a Communist, somebody from another country that wouldn't let me in, not my own government to tell me where I can and cannot travel. I think most Americans feel that way.
I think we ought to first consider whom these sanctions are on. The sanctions we have had for so many years have not really been on Cubans; they have been on Americans. Gratefully, the previous administration lessened these restrictions or lessened the impact around them. Around 2008 or 2009, the last administration said that Cuban Americans should be able to travel freely at least. Prior to that, we had instances where Cuban Americans would have to decide, if their parents, for example, were still in Cuba and were aging, maybe their mother was infirm--they had to decide if my mother passes away, do I attend her funeral or if my father passes away within 3 years--see, it used to be that Cuban Americans were limited to travel to the island just once every 3 years. They had to decide whether to attend their mother's funeral or their father's funeral. What a terrible thing for our government to tell American citizens, that they have to choose whether to attend their father's funeral or their mother's funeral. What kind of a country is that? Why would we do that? Yet we did for a number of years.
Gratefully, the last administration lifted restrictions on Cuban- American travel and at the same time lifted considerable restrictions on remittances, allowing money to flow more freely to relatives and others on the island. That coincided with the time the Cuban Government realized they couldn't employ every Cuban, not even at $20 a month, so they said: Go ahead and find another line of work in the private sector, run a bed and breakfast, have a private restaurant, have an auto repair facility or a beauty shop. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans have done so over the past 5 years, largely with seed capital provided by travel from Americans, particularly Cuban-American travel and remittances.
So there was a situation where virtually no Cuban was employed in the private sector 5 years ago, but today as much as 25 percent of the Cuban workforce is now in the private sector. They have obviously more economic freedom. The average waiter in a Cuban private restaurant brings in $40 to $50 a day, while the average Cuban working for the Cuban Government brings in $20 to $30 a month. So there is significantly more economic freedom for those in the private sector in Cuba but also significantly more personal freedom as well. That is a good thing. That stands with the policy and goal we always had to increase freedom for the Cuban people.
Now we hear that the administration may want to turn back some of that progress and say that Americans shouldn't be able to travel as freely or as frequently to Cuba. Some of the rumors say they will limit travel to once a year. We don't know if that will be for Cuban Americans or all Americans. By the way, it seems rather strange to have a policy that is ethnically based, where we say: You are a Cuban American, you can travel, but if you are another type of American, you can't. That just seems pretty un-American. We can't get back into a situation where a Cuban American, living in the United States, will have to choose whether they can attend their mother or their father's funeral. I hope we don't get back into that time.
Another thing we ought to consider is that when Americans travel more freely, as they have been able to do under what is called a general license for individual travelers--that was one of the changes that was made in just the past couple of years--then individual American travelers tend to go to Cuba and stay in a bed and breakfast run by a private Cuban citizen, travel in private taxi cabs, frequent a private restaurant. My own family has done that.
If we go back to the time when American travelers have to travel under a specific license or as a group, then those travelers will be pushed toward the Cuban hotels which are owned by the Cuban Government or military. Therefore, you have aided the Cuban Government more than the Cuban people. Under no system will you be able to cut off money completely from the Cuban Government or the private sector. There is leakage everywhere. That is how economies work. Why in the world do we have a policy where we directly benefit the Cuban Government
by pushing American travelers to the hotels they own rather than the private homes owned by private Cuban citizens? It seems to me these policies, if they are going to come forward--and it seems that they might be--just go against the policies and the goals we have.
Another thing we need to consider is that in the old times, when we had more restrictive policies on travel on Americans, those had to be enforced somehow. That falls upon the Office of Foreign Assets Control at Treasury.
OFAC, you may have heard recently, is the office we charge to enforce our sanctions on Iran. We are putting new sanctions on Iran. They will be charged with enforcing those. They will be charged with enforcing sanctions on Russia and new sanctions on Russia as well. Sanctions on North Korea, again, falls to OFAC. Yet we are telling OFAC that now they are going to have to spend a considerable amount of time and resources and manpower tracking down people going to Cuba to see if they stick to their designated, approved itinerary, whatever that might be, whatever we think they ought to be doing there, rather than what they want to be doing there. That just seems foolish to me and a waste of money, time and resources, and wrongheaded priorities with regard to other priorities that we have on sanctions.
We had situations in previous years that would simply be laughable if they weren't true, but I think the administration ought to consider that when we have a restrictive policy on travel, we are going to have situations that are just flat embarrassing to us. If that sounds crazy, it doesn't sound crazy to Joan Slote of San Diego, who traveled to Cuba in the year 2000 at the age of 72 with a Canadian company that organized cycling tours. She was fined $7,500 in the United States because she hadn't preapproved the itinerary and didn't follow the guidelines. She went through a Canadian company to do that. The subsequent fees totaled nearly $10,000. I think it was settled for something less, but why in the world are we sanctioning and fining a 72-year-old woman who went on a biking tour in Cuba.
Consider the case of Cevin Allen in the State of Washington. He spent part of his childhood in Cuba, where his parents were missionaries. They built an Assembly of God Church in a town in southeastern Cuba. His parents died in 1987 in a house fire. Ten years later, Allen traveled to Cuba to scatter the ashes of his parents at the church they had built. He also brought a family Bible to give to the church's pastor. Cevin returned to the United States via Nassau, Bahamas, where he told U.S. agents he had just been to Cuba. He told them the reasons for his travel. His initial fine was $7,500.
Do we really want to be fining people who are scattering the ashes of their parents? These aren't isolated incidents. This went on for a while.
A woman from Indiana was fined for distributing Bibles in Cuba because her itinerary didn't include a trip to the beach. She went to the beach, I am told, to participate or to watch a baptism that was happening at that time. Why in the world would we try to limit that kind of travel? Yet that is what we would be doing if we go back to restricting travel.
Maybe these rumors are overblown. Maybe we will not be imposing new restrictions on travel, but if we are, I hope the administration will consider these things.
There is another rumor out there that we know that if we diminish American travel, therefore diminishing the amount of money that goes to these Cuban entrepreneurs who are running bed and breakfasts and private restaurants, then we can make up for it somehow by having some of our government agencies teach entrepreneurship classes. Anybody who has been in Cuba understands that Cubans who have survived on $20 a month for decades are more entrepreneurial than we will ever be. They don't need lessons in entrepreneurship, they need customers, and by denying Americans the freedom to travel to Cuba, we will be denying them customers, and they will be worse off. Their political freedom will be diminished. Their economic freedom will be diminished. Their personal freedom will be diminished. That is not what we want.
Obviously, we want the Cuban Government to change. It has been disappointing, the rate of change. Why would we take it out on the Cuban people? Don't they have it tough enough with a Communist government that wants to control and keep that control as long as they can? Why don't we continue to help the Cuban people as they have been helped over the past couple of years? We also want to consider the cooperation we have with the Cuban Government with regard to issues such as drug interdiction, environmental cooperation, immigration enforcement. In the past couple of years, we had a lot of Cubans rafting to South Florida because of the wet foot, dry foot policy. We have had tens of thousands of Cubans crossing the Mexican border to make it to Arizona or Texas or California or New Mexico to claim or to be paroled into our system and ultimately perhaps to get citizenship. Because of agreements we have had and the diplomatic cooperation we have had over the past couple of years, and specifically over the past couple of months, we have been able to reach an agreement where we don't have that kind of migration and those kinds of issues. So there are tangible benefits to the diplomatic cooperation we have had. I am told we are not going to touch that; that we are not going to roll back. We have diplomatic relations and that is a good thing.
We don't want to go back to the time where instead of an embassy, we had a special interests section in Cuba and the Cubans had one here. I hope the President of the United States and his Cabinet will consider these things as they make decisions on what to do on Cuba. There are changes to policy we can make, but I would argue they would be more in terms of further liberalizing travel. We have a bill that has been filed in the Senate with 55 cosponsors. It is a bipartisan bill to completely lift the travel ban and get rid of it completely. If such a measure is brought to the floor, I am confident there will be between 65 and 70 votes--maybe more--for such a bill. Instead, we seem to be going in the other direction or the administration is talking about going in the other direction. I hope they will reconsider.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.