Travelers Give Rave Reviews to Cuba Trip : Protest: A San Pedro man was among 175 people who openly tested the U.S. ban by visiting the island. They now wait to see if they face prosecution.

The 175 people who participated in the Freedom to Travel Campaign’s illegal trip to Cuba earlier this month, including Dick Meyers of San Pedro, returned from the island Sunday and Monday glowing with stories about their sojourn.

For 10 days, Meyers and other members of the group visited hospitals and museums, joined in Afro-Cuban dances and played volleyball on the beach. They ate mangoes and pineapples, fish and chicken, black beans and rice. They helped build a playground in a park in a housing development just outside Havana. They took insulin to a hospital, delivered gifts to deaf children and lunched with banana farmers.

And they had a four-hour private question-and-answer session with Cuban President Fidel Castro, who threw a lavish reception at the National Palace to laud the Americans who had traveled to Cuba in a blatant, publicity-laden violation of U.S. law.

Now most members of the group are back. Sixty-five people had their passports seized at customs in Houston, but others, who entered the United States at different points, did not. Now all of the travelers are waiting to learn if they will be prosecuted.

Commonly interpreted as a ban against travel to Cuba, federal policy bars Americans from spending money--either in the United States or another country--to travel to Cuba. Violation of the ban is punishable by 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Exempt from the policy are journalists on assignment, U.S. officials, Cuban-Americans with relatives on the island and academics and professional researchers (who must first seek licenses from the U.S. Treasury Department before visiting).

Freedom to Travel Campaign, a San Francisco-based coalition of 50 organizations, planned the trip as an overt challenge to the federal policy, which its leaders consider a violation of U.S. citizens’ constitutional right to travel.

“We have a liberal Democratic Administration right now and we feel if ever there was a chance to change a policy that infringes on our constitutional rights, this is it,” said campaign coordinator Pam Montanaro.

Montanaro was one of the 65 travelers whose passports were seized in Houston. Items they purchased in Cuba also were confiscated.

A Treasury Department spokesman said the seized passports and information taken from the travelers at customs would be forwarded to the U.S. Department of Justice. The Justice Department is expected to determine before the end of next week whether to prosecute the travelers, the spokesman said.

Meyers, a retired pool table salesman, was stopped at customs in Dallas, but his treatment was not nearly so rigorous as that experienced by the travelers who returned through Houston, he said.

Meyers’ passport was not confiscated, and when he and other travelers mentioned that they might miss their connecting flight, the customs agent led them on a shortcut to the next terminal.

“My gut feeling is that the (Clinton) Administration has so many foreign policy problems on its plate that it doesn’t really need any others,” Meyers said.

But whatever may happen, the trip to Cuba was worth it, he said.

From the moment they boarded a Cubana airplane in Cancun, Mexico, until they left the island days later, their Cuban hosts bent over backward to show appreciation for the travelers’ visit, Meyers said.

Their journey literally began with a series of serenades. The travelers were greeted by a band when they boarded the Cubana airplane, another band met them at Jose Marti Airport in Havana (where 200 to 300 Cubans cheered their arrival), and a third band was waiting for them at their hotel.

The first day of their trip they met with Ricardo Alarcon, head of the Cuban National Assembly and former ambassador to the United Nations, and the group videotaped his comments about Cuba’s hopes to end the travel ban.

“The entire logic of the policy has disappeared,” Alarcon said on the videotape. “Our links with the Soviet Union, and your confrontation with the Soviet Union, have ended. We don’t have any special relationship with the Soviet Union. We don’t even have a Soviet Union anymore!”

Meyers has visited Cuba three times before, but he said the economic woes caused by Cuba’s loss of its major trading partner are obvious to even casual observers.

“Fewer cars were on the road than when I was there in 1991,” Meyers said. “But there’s been an increase in bicycles. We were told there are now 700,000 bicycles on the streets of Havana, and drivers of private cars are expected to pick up passengers on the streets,” Meyers said.

Freedom to Travel Campaign organizers and participants stressed that their journey was not meant to be a gesture of solidarity with the Cuban government, but rather an act of civil disobedience to obtain a right denied U.S. citizens.

Nonetheless, a highlight of the trip was the group’s private meeting with Castro.

“I stood just two feet away from him for about two or three hours,” Meyers said. “He was really quite animated and articulate and had a very good sense of humor.

“I understand that he knows English quite well, but he insists that everything be in Spanish, so he had an interpreter with him.”

Since the country has launched an anti-smoking campaign, Castro has given up his trademark cigars. For his meeting with the travelers, Castro traded his ubiquitous fatigue shirt and pants for a short-waisted dress military uniform, Meyers said.

“He gave a brief history of the relationship of Cuba with the Soviet Union when Gorbachev came to power, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and what that’s done to the (Cuban) economy,” Meyers said.

Castro declined to comment on President Clinton when asked to do so by someone in the group, Meyers said.

“He said it would be ‘inappropriate’ for him to comment on President Clinton--that if he said good things it would cause trouble from one quarter and that if he said bad things it would bring on trouble from the other side,” Meyers said.

But Castro did talk at length about the shortages in Cuba and said he hoped that U.S. restrictions on travel to the island would be lifted.

While the Justice Department spotlight is on the group, Freedom to Travel plans to step up the pressure for the government to lift the travel ban. Already, preparations are being made for the coalition to take about 100 travelers to Cuba on Nov. 19.