Senator Byron Dorgan, D-ND

The Cuban American National Foundation had projected a more moderate tone in the last several years. Its most extreme members split with the organization and formed their own group. CANF was not invited to Bush Administration events and it entered into a mutually beneficial relationship with the Obama campaign. Obama delivered his only pre-election policy speech on Cuba in Miami under CANF auspices.

Hard line Washington lobbying and big time political contributions became the province of the further right US-Cuba Democracy PAC.

CANF, unlike the PAC, supported family travel, although it may have preferred the Clinton version of once yearly limits. Its president, Pepe Hernandez, told me when we were on the same panel at a Brookings Institution conference that he also favored non-tourist travel. He was part of a Brookings working group that called for it.

I expected to see Mauricio Claver-Carone of the PAC fulminate against the Philharmonic on his Capitol Hill Cubans blog, but was surprised to read CANF expound a similar line.

CANF DECRIES NEW YORK PHILLARMONIC (sic) ATTEMPT TO DISGUISE TOURIST TRAVEL TO CUBA AS ‘CULTURAL EXCHANGE’ FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: OCTOBER 2, 2009

Today, the New York Philharmonic announced that it had been denied a visa (sic) by the U.S. Treasury Department to engage in travel to Cuba as part of a program of cultural exchange. Their statement is at best misleading. Under current restrictions, the New York Philharmonic may have been granted a license to perform as was done recently in the case of pop singer Juanes, however, the group applied for licenses for 150 individuals who are ‘friends’ and ‘donors’ of the Philharmonic and had promised to donate $10,000 in exchange for a trip to Cuba—a blatant attempt to disguise tourist travel.

The Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) supports cultural exchange between the United States in Cuba because we believe them to be mutually beneficial to the people of both nations and in particular because they provide the Cuban people with exposure to the outside world, its varied cultures, music, and arts. At the same time, we are adamantly opposed to tourist travel to Cuba because it provides no benefit to the Cuban people while providing critical hard currency to a regime which uses those resources to continue repressing its own people.

Beyond the nasty innuendo about the motives of one of the most highly regarded cultural institutions in the US, CANF aligned with OFAC in mischaracterizing what was at issue. The people who were to accompany the Philharmonic are either on its board of directors or voting members of its not-for-profit Society which was founded in the early 19th century. They had a pre-existing relationship to the orchestra and were not coming out of the blue to use it for a very expensive holiday jaunt to Cuba. Without the involvement of patrons, symphony orchestras could not survive and certainly the Cuba program could not happen. (Who else is going to cover the considerable costs?)

I have not seen their four day schedule, but it will surely include substantial interaction with the sophisticated classical music world of Cuba. In addition to the two concerts and associated ceremonies, they are likely to visit conservatories and schools, meet with Cuban musicians and culture officials, see museums, and attend performances by the ballet and Latin music groups. They are not heading for the beach or golf course in Varadero. In other words they will engage in the kind of serious multi-dimensional cultural exchange that was widely practiced under OFAC licenses issued until 2004 when George Bush paid back his friends in Miami.

Forget the spin advanced in 2004 and now about educational and cultural exchange covering for tourism and the hard currency contribution made to Cuba's economy and government by non-tourist visitors, at peak only 85,000 in 2003. No documentation has ever been offered of serious misuse of educational and cultural licenses (unlike fraudulent religious licenses employed by thousands of never sanctioned Cuban Americans). The dollars such groups bring are hardly noticed among the expenditures of 2.4 million tourists annually.

Travel itself was the target. Opinion leaders, trend setters and average Americans with a serious interest in Cuba bring back eye-witness accounts of an imperfect but friendly society and convey to Cubans that the US is not a hostile monolith. They break down ideology based narratives and psychological attitudes on both sides essential to maintaining the status quo.

Byron Dorgan said it with eloquence on the floor of the Senate:

My colleagues in this Chamber talk a lot about freedom. What about the freedom of the American people to travel? Why is it we have decided to punish the Cuban regime by restricting Americans' freedoms?

I come back to the basic proposition. That is, one of the great music groups in the world, the New York Philharmonic, which has played in North Korea, in Russia, and is about to play in Vietnam, is told: Here are the circumstances and conditions in which you can play in Cuba. By the way, they are onerous. The New York Philharmonic found those circumstances and conditions unacceptable and I understand why.

I am writing to the Office of Assets Control to see if we could not get them to think straight a bit. It makes no sense at all to decide that this kind of exchange is unworthy. Does anybody really think that having the New York Philharmonic play beautiful music in the city of Havana, in the country of Cuba, is in any way going to threaten anybody? Wouldn't it perhaps do at least what it did for those who were able to experience that wonderful music in North Korea?

Is the White House only listening to CANF? Let them know how dumb they look implementing Bush policies rather than their own by clicking here. Urge the President to immediately direct OFAC to allow the Philharmonic concerts, and to then enable general licenses for all non-tourist travel.

Another section of Senator Dorgan's speech should give pause to those who hope for rapid action by Congress and don't seem to care about what the White House does in the interim about non-tourist travel:

we ought to pass the Dorgan-Enzi bill that strikes the travel restrictions with respect to Cuba. We have not yet found a way to get it to the floor. When we do, I guarantee we will have sufficient votes on the floor of the Senate to offer the American people the freedom they should have had in the last 50 or 60 years, and that is freedom to travel. In this case that freedom has been taken from them and it is outrageous.

John McAuliff
Fund for Reconciliation and Development

Not to forget ...
Governor Bill Richardson will speak about his trip to Cuba at the New Democratic Network in Washington on Friday, October 9th. Watch it on line at 12:15 p.m. at http://ndn.org/livecast. Richardson called strongly for the President to open up non-tourist travel and supports Congress ending all restrictions.