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MEASURES AGAINST THE CUBAN FAMILY
Bush is isolating himself in Florida
BY
GABRIEL MOLINA
• THE campaign to “sow panic”
among Cubans resident in the United States who are
currently visiting the island, as reflected in
The Miami Herald, is condemned to
failure.
On June 19, El Nuevo Herald
reproduced an article from The Miami Herald,
urging Cuban-Americans on the island to return to
the United States as quickly as possible, before the
measures dictated by the Bush administration come
into effect on June 30.
Titled “Panic over fines among
travelers in Cuba,” the daily announced a new and
illegal attempt to confer a double retroactive
effect onto the brutal prohibitions.
The pressure being placed on Bush
by the lobby headed by the Díaz Balarts – grandsons
of a minister in the Batista dictatorship – is
intensifying as the November elections draw closer.
In a desperate now-or-never race neither the letter
nor the spirit of the law are being respected. Bush
went over the head of the Washington Congress
(attributed the faculty of changing the policy on
travel to Cuba three years ago, at the instigation
of those very pro-Batista individuals) and decreed
the controversial measures.
To make them even more cruel,
they are now attempting to ignore the
non-retroactive principle in penal law, which dates
back to the earliest Western law, that of the
Romans. The clearest expression of the principle can
be found in the codes of Theodosius II and
Valentinian II, in the year 440, which state: “a new
law does not have action over the past.” That
non-retroactive principle is also stated in
contemporary law of Roman origin and in Anglo-Saxon
codes.
That legal principle is made
concrete in Article VII of the 1789 Declaration of
the Rights of Man and Citizens, which affirms that
persons can only be sanctioned in virtue of
established law promulgated prior to their crime and
legally applied.
Travel to Cuba was authorized by
a general license prior to the introduction of the
package of measures. Thus they cannot be applied
retroactively. Moreover, the alleged panic reigning
among “hundreds of Cubans who came to the island
before the new travel regulations that convert them
into illegal visitors come into effect” is a false
claim.
What does exist is a witch-hunt
to impel Cubans to return to the United States ahead
of time. The daily attributes the panic to a
statement by Molly Millerwise, spokesperson for the
Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), attached to
the Treasury Department, which regulates travel from
the United States to Cuba, in which she attempted to
force them to return immediately by saying that if
they do so after June 30 they would expose
themselves to a fine of $7,500. Other statements
have mentioned figures of up to $55,000.
“Under the new stricter policy on
travel to Cuba,” the daily continues, “the general
licenses permitting annual family visits to the
island expire on that date.” The date on the license
is irrelevant.
Despite the campaign – still
ongoing in El Nuevo Herald on June 26 – other
media have reflected a different version. The
Italian news agency ANSA noted on June 24 that
flights have at least doubled and “today, as in the
last few days, the frenetic movement of passengers
under pressure to make a rapid visit before the
measures come into force (June 30) can be observed.”
For many analysts this is yet another indicator of
the growing rejection of the package of measures
against the Cuban family, described by Otto Reich,
up until a few days ago the Security Council advisor
for Latin America, called “his baby raised over the
years.”
In all events, the government is
trying to apply retroactive restrictions, counting
previous voyages as being within the three-year
limit: “My brother was thinking of coming next month
with his wife,” recounted a woman interviewed by the
agency, “but they came two years ago and now they
cannot return until three years after that visit.”
On June 24, Dan Fisk, assistant
secretary at the State Department, virtually
deflated the supposed wave of panic by stating that
Cuban-Americans who are legally in Cuba... will have
sufficient time to return from the island. The next
day, speaking on behalf of the OFAC, Millerwise
specified that the return deadline had been extended
to July 31. However, there was no similar effort to
announce the new ruling and make it known to people
who wish to remain on the island, thus obliging them
to return to the United States by June 25.
Reuters reported from Miami that
the measures have angered many Cuban-Americans,
something that would have seemed impossible in
Southern Florida, and even quoted a fundamentalist
director of the Cuban-American National Foundation
who affirmed: “I don’t believe that anything against
the family can help the development of democracy.”
Many spokespersons from
“ordinary” Cuban organizations, as the EFE agency
qualifies them, have affirmed that they will not
vote for Bush on account of those measures. A report
from the CNN network states that these disgruntled
citizens have prompted the Democratic to hand out
subscriptions to the electoral register.
The New York Times
summed it up by qualifying the three-year
limitations on Cuban-Americans family visits to the
island as particularly outrageous, and refers to
surveys reporting that half Florida’s
Cuban-Americans are angered by the new sanctions.
And not everyone is resigned to
them. On June 26 an AP dispatch noted that House
representatives are to try and block funds destined
to effect the new restrictions on travel and
expenses.
On Friday June 25 congress
members announced that they intend to prevent the
Treasury Department spending money on effecting
cruel and immoral regulations, according to
Democratic Representative William Delahunt, leader
of the Congress Working Group on Cuba.
He maintained that they are
causing pain and suffering to families both in Cuba
and in the United States.
On June 24, the legislators met
with Dan Fisk and Richard Newcomb, officials at the
Treasury and State Departments, to urge the
government to reconsider the measures. Delahunt
described the meeting as tense.
Democrat Representative Jim
Davis, who has previously backed the restrictions on
travel to Cuba imposed by the government, stated on
Friday that limiting visits that Cuban-Americans can
make to the island to one every three years would
harm innocent people in both countries, and
presented initiatives to revert the changes and
maintain the situation operating to date.
Representative Jo Ann Emerson
stated that she had never witnessed such an
anti-family move in her life, and explained that an
individual visiting a seriously sick mother in Cuba
would not be able to travel again for her funeral if
she should die within the three years.
A glance over the opinions
expressed reveals that the only public hard-line
defenders of these measures are the former
collaborators of Fulgencio Batista and his
descendants like Ninoska Pérez, who, being unable to
deny the wave of condemnation, are trying to detract
from it by saying that the only Cuban-Americans who
vote are the hard-liners.
In real terms these measures form
a redesigned support of the kind offered by the
Eisenhower-Nixon administration to the bloody
government of Batista in the 1950s. In that context,
Bush is likewise isolating himself in Florida.
Because, in the rest of the country, the measures
are already highly unpopular.
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