• Submitted by: manso
• Politics and Government
• 04 / 23 / 2011

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Pro-Cuba-travel activist John McAuliff seems not overly impressed by the new guidelines issued by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control.

McAuliff, executive director of the Fund for Reconciliation and Development, said in an e-mail to Cuban Colada that, although "the language for general licenses [...] marks an important step forward for student and religious travel [...] the language for specific licenses raises all the predicted problems of cumbersome bureaucracy, wasting time on fine tuning the rights of Americans for political purposes and diverting resources from more serious tasks."

"As we saw with the denial of a license for Irish American traditional musicians to participate in this week's Celtic Festival in Havana, the process will be arbitrary and unfathomable," McAuliff wrote. (For background, read Cuban Colada's April 10 posting "Irish-American musicians are denied travel to Cuba...")

"The core problem is illustrated by this revealing paragraph," McAuliff writes, pointing to Page 4 of the document, which says:

"Meeting all of the relevant specific licensing criteria in a given section does not guarantee that a specific license will be issued, as foreign policy considerations and additional factors may be considered by OFAC in making its licensing determinations."

Elsewhere on that page, OFAC reminds would-be travelers that "specific licenses are not granted as a matter of right." In other words, you can meet all qualifications for travel, but if OFAC doesn't want to let you go, it won't. So there.

Source: //miamiherald.typepad.com/cuban_colada/2011/04/