Destination: Cuba
The Politics of Cuba Travel
by Jim Benning | 10.14.03 | 9:12 PM ET
I have long disliked the U.S. ban on travel to Cuba. It has done absolutely nothing to encourage the bearded, cigar-smoking, hours-long-speech-giving tyrant Fidel Castro to leave. So I was intrigued to read about a Web site created by former CIA agent Phillip Agee promoting travel to Cuba. Among other things, Cubalinda.com features a Web page aimed at U.S. readers with the headline, “Give No Information and Pay No Fines!” Wired.com features a story about the site. The article notes that Agee, a leftist agitator, has long been accused of spying for the Cuban government and once had his passport revoked during the Carter administration.
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Yahoo! BuzzDeep, Funny Thoughts About the Prohibition of Travel to Cuba
by Michael Yessis | 09.18.03 | 1:26 AM ET
The U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to end the restriction prohibiting travel to Cuba. What do the made-up readers of The Onion think about these developments? Systems Analyst Jane Borden says, “Making Cuba accessible to Americans would encourage reforms there, as it did in the once-oppressive republics of the Bahamas, Aruba, and South Padre Island.”
Last Call for Cuba
by Jim Benning | 06.17.03 | 11:32 PM ET
That’s the word from travel outfitter Geographic Expeditions. The company says the U.S. State Department is further restricting “people-to-people” travel to Cuba—a move I hadn’t heard about until I received the company’s newsletter on Monday. I assume the change is designed to punish the Castro regime for the latest draconian crackdown on dissidents. The result? “Organizations that hold the special permits necessary for ‘people to people’ travel in Cuba will not have their permits renewed this year,” the newsletter states. Geographic Expeditions has added additional trips in September, before its permit expires Oct. 1. Meanwhile, the company says it’s considering organizing a trip to Iraq for next spring.
Cuba and the Travel Ban
by Jim Benning | 04.17.03 | 3:38 PM ET
If Fidel Castro wants the U.S. to lift restrictions on travel to Cuba, he sure isn’t acting like it. His latest human rights violations—a crackdown on dissidents, the executions of several men—haven’t scored him any points with U.S policy-makers. In fact, he has only set back the cause. But should Castro’s behavior be the sole factor in deciding whether to lift the travel ban? No way, Philip Peters of the Lexington Institute said in a recent news story in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel about the incredibly divisive issue. “The policies we advocated have never been predicated on the idea that Castro has a good human rights record or is a nice a guy,” he said. “More than ever there needs to be contact between the U.S. and Cubans, unlimited contact.”
Great Place! It’s So Authentic! Let’s Change It!
by Jim Benning | 11.01.02 | 1:18 AM ET
On a visit to Cuba, Campbell Smith went to Havana’s La Bodeguita del Medio, the same bar where Hemingway and Che once sipped mojitos looking for old Cuba. What he found instead were tourists requesting “Buena Vista Social Club” songs from the house band.
“It is a fundamental contradiction of travelling that as soon as a place becomes a tourist destination, it ceases to be the thing that you wanted to visit in the first place,” he writes in a thoughtful piece in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Fortunately, Smith finds hope in a singing drunk who wandered in off the street.
The Old Ball Game, Cuban-Style
by Jim Benning | 06.08.02 | 1:16 AM ET
During his visit to Cuba, Mike Meyer was encouraged by baseball fans to go to Santiago to see the great ballplayer Antonio Pacheco play. So he did. Meyer joined two local kids, Jesus and Carlos, at a game. His rendering of the outing, which appears in the Atlantic Monthly online, is poignant and eloquent. He found a stadium where outfield signs advertised only revolutionary slogans (“The Cuban Athlete, Example of Patriotism and Competitiveness”). He watched genteel batters who, after getting hit by a pitch, stopped to shake the offending pitcher’s hand en route to first base. And after the game he looked on as three Americans bought the great Pacheco’s jersey off his back for a mere $20. “The tourists emerged laughing from the clubhouse, proud of their loot,” Meyer writes. “Kids surrounded them and pleaded, ‘Dollars, dollars, give us dollars.’ Jesus said, ‘I recognize those men. Last night, they were out with the sixteen-year-old girl who lives
Next door to me.’”
Cuba, Part III
by Michael Yessis | 04.08.02 | 4:51 PM ET
Thomas Swick of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel filed his third and final installment Sunday in his series from a recent trip to Cuba. During his last night in Havana, he took a moment to reflect on the complicated, dilapidated city: “Back at the hotel, after a lobster dinner, I packed my bags and stared out the window,” he writes. “Faint lights speckled a dark thicket of dwellings, while off to the right, a black void sent waves billowing over the seawall. At night, too, the city loomed like a ghostly vessel, fighting through squalls, and going nowhere.”
Cuba Continued
by Jim Benning | 04.01.02 | 7:39 PM ET
Thomas Swick of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel filed another installment Sunday in his series from a recent trip to Cuba. Among his adventures, Swick secured press credentials on the island. He described the government’s less-than-efficient credentialing operation, concluding: “It had taken three people about one hour to produce a document the size of a business card. Here, humanized, was all of the old Soviet waste.”
The Cuba Travel Controversy Endures, But is an End in Sight?
by Jim Benning | 03.21.02 | 9:59 PM ET
U.S. authorities are cracking down on Americans who have traveled illegally to Cuba. Among the targets, according to Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, are “a teacher who biked across Cuba, two Iowa grandmas who were on a diving trip and a man who visited Cuba to scatter his missionary father’s ashes next to a church he had built.” Lopez doesn’t like it. He notes in a column that a group of lawmakers today will call for an end to the Cuba travel ban that, as Lopez puts it, “makes less sense each day Fidel Castro draws a breath.” One expert predicts the legislation will be approved by Congress this year, “setting up a veto by Bush and a subsequent brawl that could go either way,” Lopez writes.
“What is it About These Poor Countries?”
by Michael Yessis | 03.06.02 | 3:43 PM ET
Ann Marlowe recently visited Cuba, and the discrepancy between haves and have nots there caused her to rethink her travels to developing nations. “I am starting to have a problem with my trips to the developing—or, in the case of Cuba, the undeveloping—world, a problem with the perfume of misery, with the way sadism is imposed by the luck of nations,” Marlowe writes in a recent issue of Salon. “Cuba is more interesting than St. Barts, but perhaps I should go back there instead. It might be better to complain about the profit the locals are making on the outrageously priced hotel rooms than worrying about whether they have enough to eat.”
CNN to America: Here’s How to go to Cuba
by Michael Yessis | 02.21.02 | 12:04 AM ET
Miami Herald television critic Glenn Garvin reports that CNN Headline News recently produced a story explaining just how Americans can sneak around their government’s ban on travel to Cuba. Or, as Garvin writes, “A few days ago, in a bold bid for the all-important Felons Aged 21-55 ratings demographic, CNN Headline News offered a detailed primer on how to travel to Cuba illegally.”
How Will Tourism Change Cuba?
by Michael Yessis | 02.07.02 | 1:54 AM ET
Salon’s Damien Cave weighs in on Cuba’s tourism policy and how it might alter the country in the near future. “Could Castro’s ‘tourism apartheid’ inspire the kind of dissent that would threaten his regime?” he writes. “Might the attempt to court tourism become a catalyst for democratic change?”
A Tribute to “Old Man” Gregorio Fuentes
by Michael Yessis | 01.31.02 | 1:18 AM ET
Stephen Kinzer details the impact of the life of Gregorio Fuentes, the inspiration for Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” on Papa and the travelers who made pilgrimages to his home in Cuba in a New York Times story. Fuentes recently passed away. He was 104.
R.I.P. “Old Man” Gregorio Fuentes
by Jim Benning | 01.16.02 | 1:23 AM ET
Travelers to Cuba have long made pilgrimages to the home of Gregorio Fuentes, Ernest Hemingway’s boat captain and the inspiration for “The Old Man and the Sea.”
For a small fee, Fuentes welcomed any and all into his living room in Cojimar, a salty fishing village near Havana, and regaled them with tales of his time with the writer. But the visits have come to an end. On Sunday, the 104-year-old Fuentes died in his home. The Los Angeles Times reports.
“I Have Actually Thrown Punches at Cubans”
by Michael Yessis | 08.31.01 | 9:05 PM ET