U.S. Crackdown on Cuba Travel Leaves Some Cold

U.S. Crackdown on Cuba Travel Leaves Some Cold
Thu November 6, 2003 08:01 AM ET

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By Michael Christie
MIAMI (Reuters) - Tampa retiree Marshall Payn sat at Miami's airport waiting for a charter flight to take him and a other Americans on an art and architecture tour of Cuba.

"This is tourism," the 71-year-old archeology researcher said. "I have no interest in art or architecture. I intend to escape as much of that as I can."

Payn was unfazed by the fact that his admission breached the spirit of a U.S. ban on tourism to Cuba, or indeed that President Bush last month announced a crackdown on illegal travel to the communist-ruled island.

While hundreds of thousands of Europeans, Canadians and Latin Americans have grown used to seeing Cuba in package tour brochures, Americans have been banned from traveling there as tourists since Washington imposed an embargo three years after the 1959 revolution.
(snip)

(snip)"If Bush really believed (that travel supports Castro), he would stop all the flights, he would stop any Cuban American from going back to their family, he would stop all the remittances," said Michael Zuccato, head of the Association of Travel Related Industry Professionals lobby group.(snip/)

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=ourWorldNews&storyID=3768401

won't have to worry about the travel ban after today's Senate vote to lift the travel ban.

http://famulus.msnbc.com/FamulusIntl/reuters11-06-120526.asp?reg=AMERICAS