It was a blip on the news ticker but people paid attention. Mytchell Mora from Los Angeles went to Cuba illegally to protest the United States ban on travel to the island, hoping to be jailed upon his return. Expecting immediate arrest, he admitted his trip to U.S. customs agents, who unflinchingly stamped his passport and sent him home.
“I am just so surprised nothing happened to me,” Mora told the AP.
Apparently nobody told Mora that customs doesn’t deal with illegal Cuba travel; the Office of Foreign Assets Control does by issuing fines after the fact. When Clinton was president this fine was $1,500, and in 2002, Bush raised the penalty to $7,000. However, of the tiny handful who have actually been penalized since then, most reported a figure of $3,500. By all accounts, with a little haggling OFAC will reduce this to $1,000 — and if you plead extreme poverty they’ll likely drop it altogether.
Does this mean I encourage illegal travel to Cuba? Absolutely. Travel is an inalienable human right, and in the case of Cuba, exercising civil disobedience (another right) is the one of the only ways to protect it.
By reversing most of Bush’s Cuba policy, Obama set the new tone toward the country, meaning OFAC will probably ignore Mora. And while I could care less if he gets arrested, his actions raise some very important questions. The ban on American leisure travel to Cuba has always been a rarely enforced law of principle — an effective fear generator aimed at discouraging throngs of yanquis from swarming to the forbidden island. It went into effect in 1962 when Kennedy suspended direct flights and it has only been lifted once — by a short-lived goodwill gesture of Jimmy Carter in 1978. (Reagan reinstated it in 1981.)
The law’s language deals with business exchange with Cuba, and its wording allows Americans to travel to there, but not spend money. Conservative Cuban exiles are responsible for maintaining the ban with the slogan, “A dollar spent in Cuba is another dollar propping up the Castro regime.” But the truth of this depends both on your politics and how you spend your money. According to the AP story, Mora “spent about $50 in government-controlled stores on a green and red Che Guevara beret, a Cuba T-shirt, Cuban flag refrigerator magnets and postcards featuring a picture of Fidel Castro shaking hands with author Ernest Hemingway.”
“They say if you buy these clothes or anything else it goes into Castro’s hands,” Mora told the AP in Havana. “I don’t think $30 for a shirt is going to make or break this guy. The money that I spend goes to the people and their homes, not the government.”
This is patently false. Every aluminum centavo spent in Cuba’s government-run stores goes directly to the government. Store employees are then paid a monthly salary of 240 pesos (US $10) — scarcely enough for the barest essentials. Money spent with street vendors and private stores however, is pure profit for Cubans. Due to crippling taxation, they never report these earnings to the Cuban state, which would be something like me putting $11 in your hand, then the corner bully racing over, snatching the ten and leaving you with the single.
This is why I urge travelers to spend their money in Cuba’s private sector. By doing so, the cash goes straight into Cuban mouths. Further — and this may surprise some — the $80 room cost at the luxe Hotel Nacional is equivalent to a Cuban senior citizen’s yearly government pension. But if you stay at a private home for four nights at $20 per night, after taxes, the household keeps $25 to $30 of that money, which directly feeds the family’s seniors. As with everything else, spending habits are the only power individuals truly have in forcing change, whether influencing a corporation’s pollution habits, or a government’s treatment of its people.
Photo courtesy of Javier Machado Leyva.