President Bush is sharply curtailing academic travel to Cuba. In a move widely seen as an election year ploy to assure the right wing Cuban American vote in Florida, the Bush administration is imposing new regulations June 1. Designed to deny Cuba US dollars as part of a stepped up strategy to promote regime change in Cuba, these measures will eliminate most university exchange programs with Cuba and all such high school based programs.

In recent years, study abroad programs in Cuba have become increasingly popular on U.S. campuses. According to Treasury Secretary Snow, over 750 educational institutional licenses have been issued to universities, colleges and high schools. These have allowed students, faculty 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 reduced to one year. More importantly, they can be used only for semester long study programs. Specific licenses will be needed for shorter stays. Marazul Charters, the leading travel service provider to Cuba, sent over 1300 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 Bob Guild of Marazul. 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. This is travel by individual scholars going for purposes of research. But even this is now being narrowly defined. No longer can a professor simply go to a scholarly conference in Cuba, calling it research, even though the conference is to discuss research results. Now the only conferences allowed are limited to those held by international organizations not based in the US. And they must be specifically licensed by the US government in order for US citizens to be able to attend.

While academics are being seriously walled in by these new restrictions, ironically, Cuban Americans are even more seriously affected. While they had been fairly free to visit relatives on the island before, now such visits can be only once in a three year period, with no humanitarian exceptions even in the case of dying relatives. Further, family visits must be specifically authorized and are limited to immediate family only (no cousins, aunts or uncles need apply). This comes just at the same time that Cuba has been making such visits easier. Given the strong family relations in Cuban culture, the current US attack on family ties is likely to lose many Florida votes for the “family values” incumbent President.

“Some 140,000 Cuban exiles visited the island last year; 100,000 of those lived in South Florida,” said Andres Gomez, head of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, according to the Miami Herald. “This will mean many of those who can’t travel to the island will vote against Bush – and for a candidate who allows travel to Cuba.”

TRAVEL: A RIGHT OR A PRIVILEGE?

For 45 years the United States 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 U.S. maintains. An iron curtain has been erected between its citizens and those of Cuba, claiming that that nation is an enemy. Any financial transactions with Cuba have been defined as “trading with the enemy.” While the Supreme Court has held that travel cannot be made illegal, the spending of US dollars to travel has been banned. Enforced by the Treasury Department, this embargo prohibits trade and travel except when licensed by Treasury’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 especially prohibited so as to deny Cuba access to dollars. For a long time, academics have been a privileged group. Scholars have been able to travel for research, attending professional conferences or other educational activities. Students have sometimes been able to travel as well.

OFAC regulations and enforcement has varied from year to year, depending on the political winds in Washington and in Florida. The current Bush administration, with an eye on Florida’s electoral votes, is now tightening sanctions against Cuba. Students have found it increasingly difficult to get authorization to travel. As of January OFAC eliminated Clinton era people-to-people educational licenses that had opened up Cuba to an estimated 40,000 culture minded tourists and students.

Now even scholars are finding it increasingly difficult to attend professional conferences in Cuba. This March OFAC blocked over 75 US researchers from participating in a symposium on brain trauma held in Havana. According to Bob Guild of Marazul Charters, which had arranged the travel, OFAC asserted that “research cannot be done at a conference or in groups.” Mavis Anderson of the Latin America Working Group called this “a blatant misinterpretation of the existing guidelines.” Many scholars are also quick to point out that since the time of Socrates, dialog has been a crucial part of the process by which ideas are developed and tested. “OFAC just has a very narrow concept of research,” says philosopher Kathy Russell of SUNY at Cortland.

Dr. E. Roy John, a professor at New York University's School of Medicine and director of the Brain Research Laboratories there, said that in areas like molecular biology and mathematics, Cuba was "world class." Stuart J. Youngner, a professor at Case Western Reserve University who helped organize the conference, called the OFAC action "an infringement on academic freedom, our freedom as citizens to travel and also damaging to science in the United States and around the world."

The tightened embargo doesn’t only affect travel. OFAC also notified professional journals this spring that editing articles by Cubans for publication was “providing a service to a Cuban national” and thus a violation of the embargo. In this new interpretation, “the reordering of paragraphs or sentences, correction of syntax, grammar and replacement of inappropriate words by U.S. persons” is prohibited. While informational materials are exempt from the embargo, such services are 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 U.S. The State Department has increasingly been denying visas to Cubans trying to attend professional meetings or lecture at universities. Co-chair of LASA’s Cuba Program, Michael Erisman, says these denials are often “arbitrary and absurd.” Among the reasons given are that a professor is an employee of the Cuban government. Erisman points out, so too are “all those US 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. Here too the government is infringing on intellectual freedom, thereby 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 the Carter administration’s thaw by bringing 16 Cuban scholars to the US. US scholars and students have also gone to Cuba in what was a genuine exchange. But, according to Hopkins History Professor Franklin Knight, it has become increasingly difficult for Cubans to get visas from the State Department. So this program has become less of an exchange and more one way, with Hopkins students and faculty going for an annual winter intersession course. In all of this “the US government has been obstructionist,” says Professor Knight.

Now under the new regulations, even this short course in Cuba is threatened. OFAC has informed Hopkins that after 27 years its license will not be automatically renewed. Presumably it will now have to show how their program “directly supports US foreign policy goals.”

THE CUBA OBSESSION

It is easy to conclude that there has long been a bizarre obsession with Cuba by the U.S. government. In 2003 OFAC, which enforces the sanctions against several countries, terrorist networks and drug traffickers worldwide, spent $3.3 million of its $21.2 million budget on Cuba. Twenty one (21) of its 120 employees are assigned to work on the Cuba embargo. On the other hand, OFAC has only four employees investigating Osama bin Laden’s and Saddam Hussein’s wealth. Since 1990 OFAC has opened just 93 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 this July.

In addition, for nearly a year the Department of Homeland Security has been inspecting those boarding direct charter flights to Cuba, blocking many from their travel at the last minute. In the two months prior to January 10, 2004, DHS and OFAC interviewed more than 44,000 travelers to Cuba. Senator Max Baucus, D-Mont., complained “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 Sept. 11.”

Nevertheless, the Bush administration plans to increase sharply its current spending to disseminate 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,” an additional $29 million will be made available to the present $7 million previously allocated. Would any self-respecting sovereign nation accept such blatant intervention in its internal political affairs? How would the U.S. respond if, say, China financed a political opposition here?

In spite of such questions, U.S. 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 under bi-partisan 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 Treasury and Transportation Departments appropriation bill that would have stripped funding for enforcement of the travel restrictions. The measure would have effectively opened up travel to Cuba to everyone. Even though 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, in direct violation of Congress’s own rules. It seems the leadership had done some illegal editing of its own.

Not only have Congress and the general public turned against the embargo, even a majority of Cuban Americans now favor a constructive engagement with Cuba. According to a new report from the Latin America Working Group titled “Ignored Majority: The Moderate Cuban-American Community,” 75% feel that the embargo has not worked. 68% believe that residents of Cuba should decide how and when the political system there should change. By continuing to cater to the older, vocal, well organized and rabidly anti Castro Cuban American National Foundation, candidate Bush ignores this growing, younger majority at his own peril.

An increasing number of universities have obtained their own institutional licenses. These allow a university to authorize their faculty and students as well as administrators to travel to Cuba for educational programs, research and even teaching. They have given great flexibility to educators and have been especially useful in developing on-going exchange programs with Cuban institutions. This has now been effectively curtailed.

INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM IS NOT JUST FOR ACADEMICS

In recent years the largest number of legal U.S. visitors to Cuba (after Cuban Americans) went under people-to-people educational licenses. These allowed ordinary people from various walks of life to travel to Cuba on educational programs even if they weren’t receiving academic credit. Thousands of Americans have been able to get to Cuba this way on programs that emphasized direct contact with ordinary Cubans. 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 was called Track II because it 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.

In the spring of 2003 OFAC announced that no more people-to-people licenses would be issued, ending this first large-scale experiment in “citizen diplomacy” with Cuba. The reason for this reversal was widely believed to be that because rather than eroding popular support in Cuba, Americans were returning with very positive impressions of what the Cuban Revolution had accomplished and critical of U.S. policy. Rather than changing Cuban minds, people-to-people contact was changing American minds. So OFAC terminated the program, claiming that they were just disguised tourism and brought dollars to the Castro government. No longer would ordinary citizens be allowed to penetrate the iron curtain their government had built between them and the seductions of Cuban socialism.

Ending these non-academic 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. Most any professor could travel freely to Cuba under a General License 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,” in the words of AAUP’s General Secretary Mary Burgan. Doesn’t this principle apply as well to ordinary citizens?

After the elimination of people-to-people licenses last year, educational institutional licenses accounted for the second largest category of travelers after family visits. Now with both of these sharply curtailed, research by individual scholars may well be next to go.

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 Professor Knight. “We would not have known this if not for our exchange. Personally I have benefited tremendously.” Through the Hopkins exchange he has been active in archival work in Cuba, training librarians and sending computers so documents could be digitized (it took three years to get US approval to export the 26 computers). “The new restrictions hurt us,” says historian 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 hurtled over the wall to build a career of research on Cuba. For over eight years she has been doing ethnographic field research on African religious traditions in Cuba, exploring the intricacies of popular religious culture on this Caribbean island. Formerly at the University of Colorado, she has now moved her African Atlantic Research Team to Michigan State University where she is training a new cadre of young scholars who are exploring 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 biotech research. It carries out important archeological and environmental work, identifying rare exotic species and cultivates a world-class orchid garden. Indeed, the social project of the Revolution itself offers to the social sciences a unique experiment in transforming a neo-colonial society. While this and much more is widely appreciated worldwide, the embargo isolates us in the US from this cultural scene.

The meetings of the Latin American Studies Association have long provided a venue for scholarly exchanges with Cubans. Over 70 Cubans came to the 2000 meetings, one of the largest delegations from outside the US. Most came sponsored by LASA, since the embargo denies Cuba access to dollars needed to fund travel by their scholars. But at last year’s meetings there were only five Cubans because the State Department denied visas to most of the 103 Cuba scholars invited. Not many Cubans are expected at this fall’s meetings in Las Vegas for the same reason. Many LASA members are thinking of holding its meetings abroad so that scholars from throughout the Americas can participate free of US governmental interference.

PHILOSOPHERS CLIMB OVER THE EMBARGO WALL

The way in which the embargo has walled in U.S. academics from contact with Cuba is illustrated with the field of philosophy. For over 20 years –from 1959 to 1982—there was virtually no contact between philosophers in the two countries. Then during the Carter administration there was a brief opening of travel. In 1982 philosopher Ed D’Angelo, 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, who was one of the delegates, 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 they were in Havana, the Reagan administration closed that opening by prohibiting travel once again.

It wasn’t until 1990 that the second conference was held between U.S. and Cuban philosophers. Since then it has been an annual conference involving as many as 90 delegates from the U.S. and 140 Cubans and was broadened to include the social sciences as well as the humanities. It soon became the premier intellectual event in Havana as Cuban thinkers opened up to 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 Cliff DuRand, have brought a total of 700 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 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 their scheduled departure. From across the country delegates began phoning their Congressmen who in turn bombarded OFAC with inquiries until they relented. Finally, on the day they were supposed to leave, the licenses came through. Scrambling to remake cancelled reservations at the last minute, most delegates 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 July hundreds from all walks of life took up this struggle by challenging the licensing requirements. In an open, public travel challenge, Pastors for Peace took its 15th Friendshipment of material aid to the people of Cuba. Fifty tons of medicines, computers and school supplies collected from across the US were taken to Cuba without a license. They were joined by 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, they broke through the wall once again by bringing into the US forbidden Cuban goods such as medicines not available here.

As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.”