Senators Attempt to Block Congressional Travel to Cuba

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As if it weren't enough that U.S. Senators Bob Menéndez and Bill Nelson support the unconstitutional travel ban to Cuba, they're now attempting to put the squeeze on NGOs that sponsor trips to Cuba for members of Congress and their staffs.

Last week, Menéndez (D, NJ) and Nelson (D, FL) wrote their Senate colleagues urging them to stop allowing their staffs to travel to Cuba.

I sympathize with Menéndez and Nelson's stated rationale in a letter they wrote to fellow senators: "To have visits to Cuba in light of these deaths and human rights abuses sends the wrong signal to the Castro regime." The reference is to the recent death of dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo and the December 3, 2009 jailing of a U.S. AID subcontractor, Alan P. Gross, whom the Cuban imprisoned as an alleged spy.

Still, it seems rather amazing that two so-called representatives of U.S. democracy would choose to (ostensibly) promote freedom in Cuba by further restricting freedom at home. Not least because just last year Nelson, a member of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, said that it was okay for Cuban-Americans to travel to visit their relatives in Cuba. Since Cuban-Americans overwhelmingly approve of being allowed to visit Cuba, one assumes the two Senators don't want a fight with their largest constituents.

The hypocrisy behind this craven vote-building move is truly cringe-worthy. In June 2001, Nelson himself won unexpected approval from powerful members of Miami's Cuban exile community for a proposed trip to Cuba in which he said he was even open to a possible meeting with Fidel Castro. And in December 2006, he even met with Syrian president Bashar Assad, despite State Department disapproval because Syria (along with Cuba) is on Uncle Sam's list of state-sponsors of terrorism.

And how ironic that Mendéndez recently participated in a forum sponsored by the, er, Center for U.S. Global Engagement.

One target of the senators' ire is the Center for Democracy in the Americas (CDA), which points out that attempting to restrict U.S. politicians and staffers charged with responsibility for making U.S. policy from visiting Cuba shows "just how failed the U.S. embargo has been and how out of step with the Cuban people our country has become."

The non-partisan CDA is "devoted to changing U.S. policy toward the countries of the Americas by basing our relations on mutual respect [and] fostering dialogue with those governments and movements with which U.S. policy is at odds... [including through] leading fact-finding missions for U.S. delegations, working with U.S. policymakers on strategy, sponsoring and disseminating research, hosting events, and conducting public education and outreach via the news media and the internet."

I'm with the CDA all the way when it says "we need to end the fiction that stopping any American from visiting Cuba, but especially our policy makers, is ever going to change anything for the better."

For further information about travel in Cuba, buy Moon Cuba

Copyright © Christopher P. Baker