I would like to share with the readers of the Havana Note this interview with Douglas Fehlen from Education-Portal.com. The direct link to the interview is at the end of the text:  

Scholar Advocates for Increased Academic Partnership Between U.S. and Cuba

By Douglas Fehlen

Education-Portal.com: In a ForeignPolicy.com article, you praised President Obama's January decision to ease restrictions on academic travel to Cuba. Why do you support this policy change?For decades, the United States has maintained no formal diplomatic relations with Cuba, enforcing severe travel and trade restrictions against the country all the while. Arturo López-Levy, Ph.D. candidate and research associate at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, is a longtime critic of American policy toward the Caribbean nation. The University of Denver scholar believes that recent changes in American policy - including relaxed regulations on educational, cultural and religious travel - have the potential to transform the relationship between the two countries.

“YES YOU CAN” encourages the website of a travel provider specializing in tours of Cuba. Itineraries are listed for nearly every remaining week of 2011 and most of 2012. “The floodgates have opened,” it proclaims, offering visitors endless itineraries for educational and cultural tours. According to the Cuba's National Office of Statistics, the island has already received more than a million visitors this year, an increase of 11.9% over the same period in 2010. While the origin of Cuba’s visitors in 2011 mirror patterns of previous years, the majority arriving from Canada, Russia, Argentina, the UK, Chile and France, it seems Americans may very soon be walking Cuban streets in the greatest numbers seen in more than a decade.

U.S.-based Cuba travel service providers are ramping up operations in the hopes that large numbers of Americans will take advantage of the Obama Administration’s changes to regulations governing people-to people travel to Cuba, announced in January of this year.  The changes greatly expand opportunities for educational and religious travel via general license, (the general license does not require the traveler to be pre-authorized for travel) as well as more limited opportunities for travel under the more cumbersome and restrictive, specific license which continues to govern travel for cultural and humanitarian purposes. (For a more detailed explanation about the regulations, see this excellent analysis by the Latin America Working Group)

Last week, I offered a rather bleak but honest assessment of the Obama administration’s track-record on Cuba policy thus far. As it happened, just a day or two later the Associated Press published an article about the potential up-tick in American visitors to the island in 2011 that may result from the the new travel policy. “The forbidden fruit of American travel to Cuba is once again in reach,” reads the opening sentence.

I couldn’t help but dwell on the absurdity illustrated by the juxtaposition of these two realities. On the one hand, we have an Administration that makes what is essentially its first major endorsement of a policy of greater exchange between Cubans and Americans late on a Friday afternoon, as if it were the ugly step child of its Latin America agenda, yet there are potentially tens of thousands of Americans eager to travel to Cuba, and their right to do so just happens to be supported by Americans and Cuban voices that span the political and ideological spectrum.

You have to wonder if anyone on newly minted Senator Marco Rubio's staff discussed with him the pros and cons of having his very first filed amendment in the Senate be Cuba-focused?  Perhaps they thought no one would notice, since the word Cuba doesn't appear in the amendment to the Senate's FAA reauthorization bill under consideration this week, but the Tampa Tribune's The Buzz wasn't fooled, and sees in it an attempt to block the Obama administration's new regulations allowing any U.S. airport with sufficient resources to handle such flights to offer flights to Cuba. 

Until the new regulations were issued, Miami more than dominated the market with several flights in and out of Cuba daily (Los Angeles and New York offer weekly flights).  But Tampa also has a significant Cuban American population, and both the airport and Tampa Congresswoman Kathy Castor fought to expand rights to more airports around the country.

So, what would the Rubio amendment do?  (Read here for yourself - h/t to the ever vigilant folks at Cuba Central.) It would prohibit any U.S. airports from adding any more flights than there were in the previous fiscal year to countries identified by the State Department as state sponsors of terrorism.  (Cuba, Sudan, Syria and Iran are now the only countries on that list, after the Bush administration removed North Korea, Libya and Iraq.) Sounds a little complicated right?  Why wouldn't Rubio just offer an amendment to ban all flights to such countries, particularly given how strongly he seems to feel about the issue:

“Instead of doing business with regimes that undermine America’s security and routinely violate the basic norms of human dignity, we should be bolstering our democratic allies through deeper economic ties."

Boy, he seems to mean business (no pun intended), no?  So, why the half-measure?  Because leaving the flights as they were last year means Rubio's amendment won't technically ground the hundreds of thousands of Cuban Americans who were already traveling home regularly.  As much as Rubio might wish these Cuban Americans would just stay stateside and act like exiles, putting the genie back in the bottle now would endanger his standing with this sizable block of voters.