LAWG Blog - Latin America Working Group

The People-to-People Travel Crisis

by Emily Chow on October 26, 2012

People-to-people travel has been one of the few successful elements of U. S current policy towards Cuba. However, this category of travel has been under constant attack since its implementation by the Obama Administration in January 2012.

According to the Treasury Department, approximately 160 organizations were granted people-to-people licenses in the past year. Now about 140, a sizeable number, of those people-to-people travel licenses are languishing in the bureaucratic depths of the Office of Foreign Assets Control, pending renewal. Twenty applications of the total 160 have been newly granted or renewed within the past month, but some very respectable organizations have been denied their renewal. In 2010-2011 we worked tirelessly to reinstate this category of travel, and we will not stand by quietly and watch it shrivel and disappear.

:2012, Advocate Articles, End the Travel Ban on Cuba

111th Congress and Travel

by Mavis Anderson on December 21, 2010

For many months—almost two years actually—we’ve focused on congressional action that would definitively end the ban on travel to Cuba; we felt that we had a real opportunity in the 111th Congress to radically alter the stale debate that had developed in Washington DC during the Bush Administration. We succeeded in changing the debate, but so far the policy has not changed.

:2010, Advocate Articles

Cuba: House Action or Status Quo?

by Travis Wheeler on June 03, 2010

At the beginning of the year, as we began the second round of the 111th Congress, our campaign to lift the ban on U.S. citizens' travel to Cuba had come to a crossroads. In 2009, the "Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act," H.R. 874, introduced in the House of Representatives by travel champions Bill Delahunt (D-MA) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ), won strong backing, i.e. co-sponsorship, from an astonishing 180 representatives. Nevertheless, we weren't raising any celebratory mojitos. While the U.S. public was and is increasingly coming around to our viewpoint, we were still 30 or so votes short from being able to pass the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act in the House. With no new co-sponsors in sight, it was time to consider alternative paths to a resounding "Travel for ALL!" victory.

:Advocate Articles