Tourists ride a US-made 1957 Chevrolet Bel-Air convertible car on Havana’s seafront boulevard “El Malecon”.
HAVANA: After several frenetic days of travelling, listening to lectures, walking through historic Havana and meeting Cubans, Terry McAbee did not hesitate when asked what the trip with her fellow West Virginia school teachers was missing.
“Beach time,” she said with a laugh. “They have these beautiful beaches and we can’t go.”
“We’re not supposed to be having fun,” another teacher, Steve Stanley, joked as they sat sipping drinks with 20 fellow travellers in a small Havana bar.
They are part of the growing flow of Americans to Cuba on so-called “people-to-people” trips, the only kind the United States government allows for most citizens under its 51 year-long trade embargo of the one-party state.
The trips are regulated to be more like work than fun — “meaningful” in the political parlance of the times — so no beach time on heavily scheduled sprints through Cuban society. Despite that, people pay a lot of money to visit the Caribbean island that has been mostly off limits the past half century even though it is just 145 km from Florida.
A four-day trip to Havana for two costs nearly $5,000, not including airfare, but the forbidden fruit aspect of Cuba is a big draw, said Edward Piegza, who led the first trip for his San Diego, California-based travel company Classic Journeys.
“It is a place and a people so close, yet off limits to us that it creates the natural desire of wanting what you can’t have,” Piegza said. It is, he said, a place many travellers want to see before they die.
Tourists from other parts of the world, mostly Canada and Europe, freely visit the island for its beaches, vintage American cars and Spanish colonial architecture.
In its short history, “people-to-people” travel has been a political football, a reflection of the tug-of-war between those who want to change US policy toward Communist Party-ruled Cuba and those who do not.
It was authorised in 1999 under President Bill Clinton, then shut down by his successor President George W Bush in 2003 and reinstated in 2011 by President Barack Obama.
While the United States tightly controls licences for travel to Cuba, Havana approves the itineraries.
Cuba’s dissidents, considered by Havana to be mercenaries of the US government, is predictably not part of the “people-to-people” contacts.
The Office of Foreign Assets Control or OFAC, the US Treasury agency which enforces the embargo, said it has granted 250 licences since Obama reopened the programme.
One travel agency, Insight Cuba, will bring 150 groups to Cuba this year, its president Tom Popper said. Popper estimates as many as 75,000 travellers could go to the island in 2013.
The first trips of the Obama era began in August 2011 and since then Americans, once so rare as to be almost exotic, have become a common sight, particularly in Havana.
So far, the groups are made up mostly of white, middle-aged and retired people, but the most famous visitors were two young, black superstars — rapper Jay-Z and singer Beyonce.
The married couple attracted international media coverage in April as they strolled through Old Havana, met Cuban artists and enjoyed the music scene, often accompanied by adoring crowds.
The trip touched off a controversy among Cuban-American groups and politicians who oppose liberalisation of US-Cuba policy and questioned its legality.
As it turned out, the couple had a proper “people-to-people” licence — and did not visit
the beach. REUTERS
