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U.S. Embargo Walls Us In
New U.S. regulations are building an intellectual iron curtain around Cuba. Students and professors on both sides of the wall have much to lose.
By Cliff Durand and Mike McGuire
On June 30, the Bush administration imposed new regulations sharply curtailing already-limited travel to Cuba. A New York Times article published on June 24 characterized the regulations as "part of a broader plan that President Bush announced last month to be tougher on President Fidel Castro and speed a transition to democracy in Cuba. Democrats and even some Republicans say the election-year crackdown is a nakedly political move to bolster Mr. Bush's support among Cuban Americans in southern Florida, a crucial segment of his base in this swing state." The sweeping measures nonetheless brought sharp criticisms from Cuban Americans, because the regulations severely limit their ability to visit relatives on the island.
The regulations will also greatly reduce academic travel to Cuba, eliminating most university- and all high-school-based exchange programs. The U.S. Treasury Department reports that, in recent years, it has issued more than 750 educational licenses to universities, colleges, and high schools, allowing students, faculty members, and administrators to travel to the otherwise-forbidden island for structured educational programs or to arrange such programs. Under the new regulations, such licenses, previously issued for two years, will now be for only one year. More important, they can be used only for semester-long study programs. Specific licenses will be needed for programs shorter than ten weeks.
Marazul Charters, the leading travel-service provider to Cuba, sent more than 1,300 participants in 60 educational groups to Cuba in the first quarter of 2004. Only five of those groups were for semester-long programs, according to the agency. The rest would not have been allowed under the new regulations.
So far, the other main form of academic travel to Cuba remains in effect: individual scholars can continue to go there for research purposes. But even this type of travel is being limited. No longer can a professor go to a scholarly conference in Cuba simply to discuss research results. Now, the only conferences allowed are those held by international organizations not based in the United States. And such conferences must be specifically licensed by the U.S. government in order for U.S. citizens to be able to attend.
Cuban Americans are even more seriously affected than academics by the new restrictions. While they had been fairly free to visit relatives on the island before, now such visits can be made only once every three years, with no humanitarian exceptions, even in the case of dying relatives. Further, family visits must be specifically authorized and are limited to immediate family (no cousins, aunts, or uncles need apply). This change comes just as Cuba had been making such visits easier.
Travel: A Right or a Privilege?
For forty-five years, the U.S. government has imposed a far-reaching embargo against its nearest neighbor in the Caribbean. It is the longest-standing and most extensive of the many embargoes the United States maintains. It has erected an iron curtain between its citizens and those of Cuba, claiming that Cuba is an enemy. Any financial transactions with Cuba have been defined as "trading with the enemy." Although the U.S. Supreme Court has held that travel cannot be made illegal, the spending of U.S. dollars for travel to Cuba has been banned. Enforced by the Treasury Department, this embargo prohibits trade and travel except that licensed by the department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
Only limited categories of people can be licensed to travel to Cuba—among them diplomats, journalists, and scholars. Travel by ordinary citizens for tourism is prohibited so as to deny Cuba access to U.S. dollars. For a long time, academics had been able to travel for research, professional conferences, or other educational activities. Students had sometimes been able to travel as well.
OFAC regulations and enforcement have varied from year to year, depending on the political winds in Washington and Florida. In January 2004, OFAC eliminated the people-to-people educational licenses that had permitted an estimated 40,000 ordinary tourists and students to travel to Cuba for educational programs even if they were not receiving academic credit. As a result, even before the new regulations, students had found it increasingly difficult to get authorization to travel.
Now even scholars are finding it harder to attend professional conferences in Cuba. In March, OFAC blocked over seventy-five U.S. researchers from participating in a symposium on brain trauma held in Havana. According to Marazul Charters, which had arranged the travel, OFAC asserted that "research cannot be done at a conference or in groups." Many scholars were quick to point out that dialogue is a crucial part of the process by which ideas are developed and tested. "OFAC just has a very narrow concept of research," said philosopher Kathy Russell of the State University of New York at Cortland.
E. Roy John, a professor at New York University's School of Medicine and director of the university's brain research laboratories, said that in areas like molecular biology and mathematics, Cuba was "world class." Stuart Youngner, a professor at Case Western Reserve University who helped organize the conference, called the OFAC action "an infringement on academic freedom [and] our freedom ascitizens to travel." He added that the decision also damages science in the United States and around the world.
The tightened embargo affects more than just travel. OFAC notified professional journals this spring that editing articles by Cubans for publication was "providing a service to a Cuban national" and thus violates the embargo. In this new interpretation, "the reordering of paragraphs or sentences, correction of syntax [and] grammar, and replacement of inappropriate words by U.S. persons" is prohibited. Although the publication of Cuban articles is allowed, the editing of them is not, unless specifically licensed. So, presumably, Cuban articles can still be published, but they will have to have errors in spelling or grammar in them.
The embargo works both ways. It also prevents Cuban scholars and cultural figures from coming to the United States. The U.S. State Department has increasingly denied visas to Cubans who want to attend professional meetings or lecture at U.S. universities. Among the reasons given for the denials is that a professor is an employee of the Cuban government. Indiana State University political scientist Michael Erisman has pointed out that so, too, are "all those U.S. academics who work in public institutions." Last year, over 150 Cuban musicians and artists were similarly denied visas, including all potential award winners at the Latin Grammys. With those denials, the government infringed yet again on intellectual freedom, further isolating us behind the embargo wall.
The longest-standing academic exchange with Cuba is based at Johns Hopkins University. It began jointly with Yale and Columbia universities in 1977, during a thaw in U.S.-Cuban relations, when sixteen Cuban scholars were permitted to come to the United States. As it became increasingly difficult for Cubans to get visas from the State Department, the program became less an exchange and more a one-way relationship, with Hopkins students and faculty going to Cuba for an annual winter intersession course. "The U.S. government has been obstructionist," commented Hopkins history professor Franklin Knight before the advent of the new regulations. Now, under these new regulations, even this short course in Cuba is threatened. OFAC has informed Hopkins that after twenty-seven years, its license will not be automatically renewed.
Also effectively curtailed are the institutional licenses that increasing numbers of universities had obtained to authorize their faculty, students, and administrators to travel to Cuba for educational programs, research, and even teaching. The licenses gave great flexibility to educators and were especially useful in developing ongoing exchange programs with Cuban institutions.
The Cuba Obsession
In 2003, OFAC, which enforces sanctions against several countries, terrorist networks, and drug traffickers worldwide, spent $3.3 million of its $21.2 million budget on Cuba. Twenty-one of its 120 employees were assigned to work on the Cuba embargo. Yet OFAC had only four employees investigating Osama bin Laden's and Saddam Hussein's wealth. Since 1990, OFAC has opened just ninety-three enforcement investigations related to terrorism, but 10,683 investigations related to the Cuba sanctions. Administrative hearings against the first of those accused of illegal travel to Cuba were to begin in July.
In addition, for nearly a year before the introduction of the new regulations, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had been inspecting those boarding direct charter flights to Cuba, blocking many from their travel at the last minute. In the two months before January 2004, the department and OFAC interviewed more than 44,000 travelers to Cuba. Senator Max Baucus of Montana, who requested the OFAC statistics cited above, complained after receiving them that "rather than spending precious resources to prevent Americans from exercising their right to travel, OFAC must realign its priorities and instead work harder to keep very real terrorist threats out of our country and prevent another September 11."
Nevertheless, the Bush administration announced plans in May to sharply increase its spending on anti-Castro propaganda worldwide and within Cuba, while also fostering a political opposition in Cuba. Under the rubric of aiding "the training, development, and empowerment of a Cuban democratic opposition and civil society," $29 million will be added to the $7 million already allocated for such purposes. Would any self-respecting sovereign nation accept such blatant intervention in its internal political affairs? How would the United States respond if, say, China financed a political opposition here?
But interference in Cuba has long been a staple of U.S. policy. As a means to foster regime change, the embargo against Cuba has been supported by both Republicans and Democrats through nine administrations. Only in recent years has this relic of the Cold War come up against bipartisan opposition. Congress has voted in favor of easing the embargo for four years in a row. This year, both houses of Congress attached identical amendments to the appropriations bill for the Departments of Transportation and Treasury that would have stripped funding for enforcement of the travel restrictions. The amendment would have opened up travel to Cuba to everyone. Even though the amendment was passed by large majorities in both houses, it was unilaterally removed from the bill by the Republican leadership at the request of the White House.
Not only has Congress turned against the embargo, but most Cuban Americans even now favor a constructive engagement with Cuba. According to a new report from the Latin American Working Group titled Ignored Majority: The Moderate Cuban-American Community, 75 percent of Cuban Americans feel that the embargo has not worked. Sixty-eight percent believe that residents of Cuba should decide how and when the political system there should change. The mission of the Latin American Working Group is to encourage U.S. policies toward Latin America that promote human rights, justice, peace, and sustainable development.
Not Just for Academics
In recent years, the largest number of legal U.S. visitors to Cuba (after Cuban Americans) went under the people-to-people educational licenses that allowed people from various walks of life to travel to Cuba on educational programs that emphasized direct contact with ordinary Cubans. Thousands of Americans went to Cuba this way. In the minds of some anti-Castro groups, the rationale for allowing this exception to the embargo was that Americans would bring their ideas and values to the Cuban people, thereby undermining popular support for Castro and socialism. This ideological approach supplemented the main track of U.S. policy, which sought to weaken the Cuban government by more aggressive means, an approach that many had come to recognize as a failure after four decades.
Many people believed that OFAC canceled people-to-people licenses in spring 2003 because, rather than eroding popular support for the Cuban government, travel to Cuba was giving Americans a positive impression of what the Cuban Revolution had accomplished and making them critical of U.S. policy. Instead of changing Cuban minds, people-to-people contact was changing American minds. So OFAC terminated the program, claiming that it was a form of disguised tourism that brought U.S. dollars to the Castro government. No longer would ordinary citizens be allowed to penetrate the iron curtain their governmenthad built between them and the seductions of Cuban socialism.
Ending these nonacademic educational programs raises a fundamental question for the academic community. Is intellectual freedom just for academics? Scholars have long enjoyed a privileged exception to the embargo. Almost any professor could travel freely to Cuba for purposes of research without specific governmental approval. This policy was based on "the conviction that the unfettered search for knowledge is indispensable for the strengthening of a free and orderly world," as the AAUP's former general secretary Mary Burgan wrote in a March 2004 letter to OFAC protesting the barring of U.S. scholars from participating in the Cuban conference on brain trauma mentioned above. Doesn't this principle apply as well to ordinary citizens?
After people-to-people licenses were eliminated last year, academics pursuing research accounted for the second largest category of travelers after families with relatives in Cuba. With both of these two categories sharply curtailed, research by individual scholars may well be next to be cut entirely.
As Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote in 1964, "The right to know, to converse with others, to consult with them, to observe social, physical, political, and other phenomena abroad as well as at home gives meaning and substance to freedom of expression and freedom of the press."
It is often not fully appreciated what a rich culture the embargo is walling us off from. "Cuban scholarship has flourished under the revolution across the board," says Franklin Knight of Johns Hopkins. "We would not have known this if not for our exchange. Personally, I have benefited tremendously." Through the Hopkins exchange program, Knight has been active in archival work in Cuba, sending computers there and training librarians to digitize documents (it took three years to get U.S. approval to export twenty-six computers). "The new restrictions hurt us," says Knight. "Cuba is an integral part of the Americas and has been since 1492. Its archives are vital to understanding this."
Jualynne Dodson is another scholar who has built a career on research on Cuba. She does ethnographic field research on African religious traditions in Cuba, exploring the intricacies of popular religious culture. Formerly at the University of Colorado, she moved her African Atlantic research team to Michigan State University, where she is training a new cadre of young scholars to explore the incorporation of African-based culture into the character of Cuban national identity.
Cuba is well known for its vibrant music, cinema, and arts. It is also on the cutting edge of biotechnology research. Researchers there carry out important archeological and environmental work; they have identified rare exotic species and cultivated a world-class orchid garden. Indeed, the social project of the revolution itself offers to the social sciences a unique experiment in transforming a neocolonial society. While Cuba's accomplishments are widely appreciated worldwide, the embargo isolates us in the United States from the island's cultural scene.
The meetings of the Latin American Studies Association have long provided a venue for scholarly exchanges with Cubans. More than seventy Cubans came to the association's 2000 meeting; they were one of the largest delegations from outside the United States. (Most were sponsored by the association, because the embargo denies Cuba access to the dollars needed to fund travel by scholars.) Only five Cubans, however, attended the association's 2003 meeting, because the State Department denied visas to most of the 103 Cuban scholars invited. Not many Cubans are expected at this fall's meeting for the same reason. Members of the association have suggested that meetings be held abroad so that scholars from throughout the Americas can participate free of U.S. governmental interference.
Philosophers and the Embargo Wall
The field of philosophy offers an example of what gets lost as a result of barring U.S. academics from contact with Cuba. For more than twenty years—from 1959 to 1982—there was virtually no contact between philosophers in the two countries. Then, during the Carter administration, travel opened up briefly. In 1982, philosopher Edward D'Angelo, who was then at the University of Bridgeport, organized a small delegation to go to Havana for the first conference between U.S. and Cuban philosophers since the revolution. Cliff DuRand, co-author of this article, was one of the delegates. He remembers, "We flew on a chartered flight out of Newburg International Airport in the middle of the night, direct to Havana. It was like going from one world to another distant land." That encounter involved only six U.S. philosophers, but as small as it was, it was the beginning of a bridge between philosophers from both sides of the wall that had long separated them. While the group was in Havana, the Reagan administration prohibited travel once again.
It wasn't until 1990 that the second such conference was held between U.S. and Cuban philosophers. After that, the conference occurred annually, involving as many as 90 delegates from the United States and 140 Cubans. In addition, it was broadened to include the social sciences as well as the humanities. It became the premier intellectual event in Havana as Cuban thinkers welcomed their neighbors to the north after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where most of them had received their graduate education. To date, the North American delegations, organized by DuRand, have brought seven hundred academics to Cuba. Many have returned again and again, developing collaborative relationships with their Cuban counterparts.
In spite of the blockade, it has been possible to build relationships across the wall, even though each U.S. administration has been hostile to Cuba. "It hasn't been easy. It has taken persistence. It has taken commitment. It has even taken political struggle," says DuRand. In 1998, OFAC denied licenses to DuRand's entire delegation less than a week before its scheduled departure. Delegates nationwide called their congressional representatives, who in turn bombarded OFAC with inquiries until it relented. On the day the delegates were supposed to leave, the licenses came through. Most made it to Havana in time for the opening of the conference. "Intellectual freedom isn't free," DuRand concludes. "It takes struggle to win it."
This past July, hundreds of people from all walks of life took up this struggle by testing OFAC's restrictions following the cancellation of people-to-people travel licenses. In an open, public travel challenge, the humanitarian group Pastors for Peace brought material aid to the people of Cuba. Fifty tons of medicines, computers, and school supplies collected from across the United States were taken to Cuba without a license. The group was joined by two other organizations, the Venceremos Brigade and the African Awareness Association, in a massive act of civil disobedience affirming the right to travel freely. After spending nine days in Cuba, the protesters broke through the wall once again by bringing into the United States forbidden Cuban goods, such as medicines not available here.
As famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass said in the nineteenth century, "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will."
Cliff DuRand is professor emeritus of philosophy at Morgan State University and a visiting professor at the University of Havana. Mike McGuire is a carpenter, translator, and global justice activist.
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