Stopping the Cuban Vacation Crisis

As a former butler, a TV news producer and an aspiring filmmaker, Mytchell Mora kept bumping into Hollywood folk who told of their romps through Cuba. All these stories left the young man with a fever for the forbidden island, and nothing could stop him from going.

Mora’s first visit was in 1999, and it was like being blown a kiss by a lovely senorita. Balmy breezes, white-sand beaches, strong cigars. Cuba, sad and beautiful, romanced him and called him back again later that year. He shot a video about how simple it is to travel there, but it didn’t exactly land him in the Hollywood Hills. He unloaded about 1,000 copies on his Web site, including a bunch he gave away.

Now Mora is 31, living in a studio apartment a block off Hollywood Boulevard with a girlfriend and a Great Dane, and the United States government is after him as if he were an enemy of the state.

He’s not the only snake in our midst. Other targets of the crackdown include a teacher who biked across Cuba, two Iowa grandmas who were on a diving trip and a man who visited Cuba to scatter his missionary father’s ashes next to a church he had built.

Rest easy, America. Washington’s got our backs covered.

Mora was informed in 2000 and again last year by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) that he had violated the Trading with the Enemy Act. He was ordered to document every step he took and every cent he spent while in Cuba, or else.

“They told me it was an extremely serious matter, with a maximum fine of $250,000 and possible jail time of six months,” Mora says, although fines have averaged closer to $7,500 for other violators. In the first warning sent to Mora, OFAC said its gumshoes had spotted the Cuba video on his Web site. Your tax dollars at work.

Mora and others complained to congressional representatives about all this goose-stepping by an obscure federal agency with too much time on its hands. Tomorrow in Washington, D.C., a bipartisan group of these lawmakers will call for an end to a 40-year policy that makes less sense each day Fidel Castro draws breath.

“I just think every American has a Constitutional right to travel unless there’s a compelling security reason not to,” says U.S. Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). “I’m no fan of Castro, and I think he’s a thug and a tyrant. But every American deserves an opportunity to see what a mess he’s made of that island.”

An estimated 60,000 Americans traveled to Cuba last year in violation of the travel ban, while more than 100,000 others managed to get permission. Flake and several colleagues hope to lift the travel ban, advance democracy on the island, permit agricultural sales to Cuba and promote cooperation on drug interdiction.

But there’s a problem.

“The American people and more and more members of Congress want to see changes, but at the White House, the president’s gaze is on the votes of right-wing Cuban exiles living in Florida,” says Wayne Smith, a former U.S. diplomat in Cuba who is now with the Center for International Policy in Washington.

“The president’s brother is up for reelection in Florida, and the president, of course, wants to win Florida more decisively in 2004. So he wants to do nothing that would offend these right-wing voters. He’s got these Neanderthals running our Latin policy, and they are moving in the direction of tightening the controls and cracking down rather than loosening up.”

U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill made the critical mistake of speaking honestly on this subject last week, and was immediately slapped down by the White House. O’Neill was at a hearing in which Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) said in so many words that investigative resources would be better spent hunting Al Qaeda terrorists than little old ladies from Iowa.

“If I had the discretion for applying the resources, I would agree with you completely,” O’Neill told Dorgan. But before the day was out, the White House had removed O’Neill’s tonsils, releasing a statement in his name that supported the travel ban.

Smith predicts Congress will have the votes to lift the ban this year, setting up a veto by Bush and a subsequent brawl that could go either way.

Mora, meanwhile, continues to defy OFAC requests for information on his trips to Cuba, and if he’s fined, he’ll fight. The embargo has done nothing but bring hunger and suffering to Cuba, he says. And with Cuba proving to be a friend in the war on terrorism, there’s an opening for improved relations.

If you can travel to North Korea and Vietnam, why not Cuba? Mora asks. You can also vacation in China, where censorship, torture and executions for mere property crimes did not stand in the way of most-favored-nation status.

“Our government has bent over backward to look the other way in China,” says Mora.

He’s thinking of returning to Cuba, by the way. He’d like to make a documentary, this time, on an embargo that might have made sense once, long, long ago.

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Steve Lopez writes Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com.