(Emerson Lynn, associate editor of the Register, was one of a small group of U.S. journalists who visited Cuba Jan. 16-23 on an Inland Press Association Study Mission. They spent most of that time in Havana, but also traveled across the island to Trinidad and visited the Bay of Pigs en route. This is the first of a series of articles and picture pages describing the trip.)
Travel by U.S. citizens to Cuba is still a hassle. U.S. sanctions against the Communist regime there have been in place since 1960. Under the sanctions, visas were issued to the Inland group because they were practicing journalists.
It is customary for our state department to put off granting the visas until a few days before the departure date. Although our group had paid for the trip in the fall and paid for the airfare to Miami, the departure point, visas were not assured until early January.
Perhaps this will change. On Jan. 14, President Barack Obama announced that he had eased travel restrictions and that it will now be easier for students, universities, and religious organizations to get visas. Additional U.S. airports will be allowed to operate charter flights to Cuba and the rules governing the remittance of money to family members by Cubans living in the U.S. have been liberalized.
This does not mean that the other sanctions have been lifted. It is still illegal, for example, for Cubans to export to the United States. They can buy Kansas wheat, but they cannot sell Cuban papaya, or sugar, or rum, or nickel to American purchasers. More important, Cuba is still not open directly to U.S. tourists.
Americans can travel to Cuba, and do, by entering from Mexico, or Venezuela, or Spain, or Canada. But they take the risk of not being able to call on the U.S. embassy for assistance should they need it while they are there — and facing a possible black mark on their passport record.
A FEW BASICS: Cuba lies half an hour to the south of the United States by air. It is a small nation with little more than 44,000 square miles of land area. (Kansas covers over 82,000 square miles.) It has a population of 11.2 million — 75 percent urban, 25 percent rural; 51 percent of mixed ethnicity, 37 percent white; 11 percent black and 1 percent Chinese.
It is one of the very few orthodox Communist countries remaining. A little more than 5 million work for the government. All land and most buildings belong to the government. Price and wage controls are rigid.
Fidel Castro took over the government by force on Jan. 1, 1960. He remained president until illness forced him to turn things over to his brother Raul in 2006. Two years later Fidel resigned and Raul was elected president. Fidel held the record for longevity as a head of state at his retirement — and still plays a powerful role in decision-making in Havana.
When Fidel was leading his revolutionary band in the mountains of southeast Cuba in the 1950s he was an exciting and sympathetic figure in U.S. intellectual circles. An articulate lawyer who came from a well-to-do middle class family with agricultural roots, he won support for his attacks on dictator Fulgencio Batista. Batista was both brutal and corrupt. He had turned the lucrative casino business over to the U.S. Mafia and made Cuba synonymous with crime-ridden sleaze.
That support evaporated after Castro took power, established a communist regime, expropriated U.S. industries and commercial holdings and began shooting his political opponents. One estimate is that he executed between 15,000 and 17,000 — thousands more than died in the war to gain power.
His brutality was swiftly condemned in Washington, diplomatic relations were severed and the U.S. trained and equipped a group of Cubans who had fled to the United States with the expectation that an expeditionary force would be welcomed by the Cubans who would join the exiles and force Castro out.
The Bay of Pigs invasion was a total disaster. Castro’s army defeated the invaders in three days. His power was consolidated and relations between Cuba and the United States were ruptured beyond repair.
Tomorrow: The way things are today.
