U.S. Authorizes Charter Flights to Cuba From L.A., N.Y.

The Clinton administration on Tuesday authorized direct charter flights from Los Angeles and New York to Cuba, a step officials said will enhance “people to people” contacts without eroding Washington’s four-decade-old economic embargo of the Communist-ruled island.

Los Angeles International Airport and New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport will join Miami International Airport in offering direct flights to Havana, making travel easier for a narrowly defined list of potential passengers who can obtain permission from the government, said State Department spokesman James P. Rubin. However, the criteria for going to Cuba will not be eased, he said.

“This does not mean that U.S. tourists can travel to Cuba,” Rubin said. “The flights will be only available to travelers licensed by the Office of Foreign Assets Control in the Treasury Department.”

Journalists, government officials and U.S. residents with family members living in Cuba will receive automatic permission, while the department will have the discretion to authorize trips for technical personnel working for news organizations, athletes and sports teams and people invited to attend professional meetings, Rubin said. Family visits will be limited to one a year.

The move was greeted on Capitol Hill as an attempt by President Clinton to start dismantling the embargo that the United States clamped on Cuba shortly after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. Some lawmakers welcomed that prospect, while others deplored it.

Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), a longtime critic of the embargo, said the decision “will someday culminate in an end to the U.S. embargo and restoration of normal relations.”

But Cuban-born Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) denounced the decision as “part of the Clinton administration’s campaign to circumvent the Cuban embargo and to put pressure on Congress to lift it. We will be preparing and holding hearings this fall on the incessant violations of the law by the Clinton administration.”

Rubin said Los Angeles and New York were chosen on the basis of potential demand for seats, demographics and the availability of customs and immigration facilities to process the passengers. With an estimated 80,000 people of Cuban origin in the metropolitan area, Los Angeles ranks third, behind Miami and the New York City-New Jersey metropolitan region, in the size of that population group.

The reaction in Los Angeles’ Cuban community was decidedly mixed Tuesday.

Although it has been more than 32 years since he saw an aunt who helped raise him, Juan Asensio, 46, said he will never take a flight to Cuba as long as Castro holds power. A unit chief in the trauma surgery division at County-USC Medical Center, Asensio said that as a physician, he can never condone human rights violations.

“I cannot compromise my principles,” he said.

But Pedro Miguel Gonzales, 39, a Santa Fe Springs resident who fled Cuba by raft in 1995, said: “We have to balance what is more important: the few dollars I’m going to give to Castro or being able to help my family, who I haven’t seen in a long time. If you have your relatives there, you need to see them. I think that’s the most human thing there is, and I don’t think that a few dollars will make a difference.”

Gonzales said his wife, Rosa, 32, will go to Cuba to visit relatives as soon as she can make the arrangements.

Jesus Hernandez, editor of Contacto magazine in Los Angeles, said most people in Southern California’s Cuban community are opposed to Castro’s government. But he expects opinion about the new flights to break mostly along generational lines, with those who left Cuba in the years immediately after Castro’s ascension opposing anything that would put money into the regime’s coffers, while those who came to the United States during the last decade or so more concerned about relatives still living in Cuba.

Hernandez said there already are scheduled flights to Cuba from the Tijuana airport, just across the border from San Diego. Some travel agencies in California and Nevada send passengers by bus to the Mexican airport.

In January, Clinton announced several modest steps that he said were intended to improve relations with the Cuban people while maintaining the pressure on Castro. The administration reestablished direct mail service between the two countries and permitted, for the first time, Americans to send money to individual Cubans who are not relatives. At that time, officials said the administration planned to permit airports other than Miami’s to handle charter flights to Cuba, although the specific cities were not identified until Tuesday.

Rangel, a leading congressional advocate of closer economic ties with Cuba, revealed the decision on charter flights a few hours before the State Department made it official. A spokesman for the lawmaker said the administration is considering a further step to permit scheduled airline service from the United States to Cuba, but Rubin said he could not confirm that.

Times correspondent Joseph Trevino in Los Angeles contributed to this story.