Travel to Cuba low now – travel restrictions and economies prevent

Democrats want to allow all travel to Cuba – people-to-people diplomacy key to relations

WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Representative Sam Farr (D-CA) today sent a letter signed by 59 Members of Congress to President Barack Obama, asking the Administration to expand its current policy for travel to Cuba. The letter encourages President Obama to allow all categories of permissible travel to Cuba, including people-to-people travel, to be carried out under a general license.¶ “There are no better ambassadors for democratic ideals than the American people,” said Congressman Farr. “By including all forms of permissible travel under a general license, more Americans can engage in the kind of people-to-people diplomacy that can promote democratic change and advance human rights.”¶ In 2009, President Obama announced Reaching Out to the Cuban People, a set of policy changes that fully restored the rights of Cuban-Americans to visit their families in Cuba and send them unlimited remittances. This has resulted in the reunification of thousands of families and has provided the capital for Cubans to take advantage of economic reforms in Cuba and start their own businesses.¶ In 2011, President Obama took another important step by reauthorizing purposeful travel for all Americans, fostering meaningful people-to-people interaction between American and Cuban citizens. But these trips require a specific license granted to specialized travel service providers. Unfortunately, the licensing process has reportedly been expensive, slow, cumbersome, and arbitrary, causing delays and – in some cases cancellations- of trips that enable Americans to exercise their right to purposeful travel to Cuba.¶ Earlier this year, Cuba removed the restrictions on most Cubans’ foreign travel, including travel to the United States, a move that the United States and many in the international community had been pushing for.¶ The letter calls upon the President to use his executive authority to included people-to-people travel under a general license. ¶ “A pragmatic policy of citizen diplomacy can be a powerful catalyst for democratic development in Cuba,” said Farr. “This change is the next step in supporting a 21st century policy of engagement in US-Cuba relations.”

Democrats push for less travel restrictions– promote democracy and human rights

Pecquet 4/30 - Foreign affairs reporter/blogger for The Hill (Julian, “House Dems: Time to simplify travel to Cuba,” The Hill, 30 April 2013, http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/americas/297013-lawmakers-time-to-simplify-travel-to-cuba, Accessed 27 June 2013

The Obama administration should make it easier for Americans to travel to Cuba by ending pre-travel approval, 59 House Democrats wrote Tuesday in a letter to the president.¶ This month marks the fourth anniversary of Obama's decision to lift all restrictions on family travel and remittances to the island; two years later, Obama allowed all Americans to participate in so-called “people-to-people” visits, educational exchanges carried out by licensed tour operators. Lawmakers now want individuals and groups to be able to travel under a general license: instead of having to get approval before their trip, visitors to Cuba would be able to travel without hassle but may have to produce supporting documentation upon their return that their visit met the letter of the law.¶ “There are no better ambassadors for democratic ideals than the American people,” Rep. Sam Farr (D-Calif.), who spearheaded the letter, said in a statement. “By including all forms of permissible travel under a general license, more Americans can engage in the kind of people-to-people diplomacy that can promote democratic change and advance human rights.”¶ The letter says that Cuba's decision in January to rescind restrictions on Cubans' travel to the United States gives the administration a “predicate for doing more.”¶ “Exercising your executive authority to allow all current categories of permissible travel, including people-to-people, to be carried out under the general license is the next logical step,” the letter says. “This action would speed the processes you have already unleashed: increasing opportunities for engagement and reconciliation, while also helping Cubans create more jobs and opportunities to further expand their independence.”

Plan Popular- Republicans

Republicans support the plan – they want to end Cuba’s travel ban

Blase 4/11 – the foundress of the largest Hispanic Republican group in the nation that began in Arizona (Dee Dee Garcia, “GOP Lawmakers have no leg to stand on slamming JayZ and Beyonce after ending fund on enforcement of the Travel Ban in Cuba,” Mexican-American Times, 11 April 2013, http://tucsoncitizen.com/hispanic-politico/2013/04/11/gop-lawmakers-have-no-leg-to-stand-on-slamming-jayz-and-beyonce-after-ending-fund-on-enforcement-of-the-travel-ban-in-cuba/, Accessed 28 June 2013

Looks like Jay-Z and Beyoncé can go ahead and get…that…dirt off their shoulders.¶ After all, the GOP lawmakers who are attacking Jay-Z have no leg to stand on when they (GOPers) are the ones who helped to vote an end funding on the enforcement of the Travel Ban in Cuba.

Plan Popular-Chamber of Commerce

COC supports plan – opens trade and spreads democracy

Bogardus 10 – staff writer at the Hill (Kevin, “Chamber Raises Stakes in Cuba Travel Ban,” The Hill, 29 June 2010, http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/106313-chamber-raises-stakes-in-cubas-embargo-battle, Accessed 28 June 2013

Business associations are raising the lobbying stakes on legislation that would remove the American travel ban and boost U.S. farm sales to Cuba.¶ In an unusual move, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in a letter to House Agriculture Committee members warned it could score House floor votes on the bill that the panel is marking up Wednesday. Such letters typically aren’t sent until a day before a floor vote. ¶ “It sends a signal how seriously we are taking the bill,” said Patrick Kilbride, the Chamber’s director of the Americas office. “This just has been considered by the Chamber as fundamental to its advocacy message of free enterprise.”¶ The Chamber has been a longtime advocate of opening up trade with Cuba, believing it will boost U.S. business and spread democracy to the communist regime. It argues the trade embargo has been a failure despite its best intentions.¶ “Instead of undermining the regime, it has helped the regime. We think opening up trade with Cuba will help spread democracy there,” Kilbride said. ¶ In the letter from Bruce Josten, the Chamber’s chief lobbyist, the group says it will consider scoring votes on the measure if it reaches the floor.¶ Since 2007, the Chamber has only sent two other letters to lawmakers on Cuba-related legislation. Neither included language indicating the Chamber planned to score votes.¶ Chamber officials said there simply have not been votes in the full House or Senate on bills dealing with Cuba for several years that rose to the level of a priority vote for the trade association.¶ The U.S. trade embargo has been on Cuba for 50 years, and lawmakers opposed to the policy have had little success in opening it up.

Key to agenda – independently shields the link

Lichtblau 12 (Eric, New York Times, 11-29 “Chamber Competes to Be Heard in the Fiscal Debate” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/business/chamber-competes-to-be-heard-in-fiscal-debate.html?_r=0, ken)

WASHINGTON — After months of sparring with President Obama in the heat of the campaign season, Chamber of Commerce executives came to the White House this week with a far more conciliatory tone, offering up suggestions to avert large budget cuts without having to raise taxes. Enlarge This Image Charles Dharapak/Associated Press Thomas J. Donohue after introducing President Obama at a Chamber of Commerce event in 2011. But Mr. Obama’s top advisers were not budging. There would be no deal on the federal budget deficit, they told chamber executives, without higher taxes, participants said. If there were doubts about the White House’s resolve, Mr. Obama met the chamber’s chief executive afterward for an unscheduled Oval Office chat about the showdown. For the United States Chamber of Commerce, long the leading business voice in Washington, this month’s negotiations over the nation’s debt will be a key test of whether it can retain its influence and swagger in the capital even after a string of bruising political losses. Many business leaders are looking to the chamber as a bulwark against the White House’s push for higher taxes, but it is unclear if the century-old association has the clout it once did. Other business groups seen as more open to tax increases have become players in the negotiations, exposing rifts in the private sector. The Chamber of Commerce, in the biggest voter mobilization effort in its history, spent tens of millions of dollars in support of pro-business candidates, usually Republicans, in the Nov. 6 elections. But the results were disastrous: out of 48 House and Senate candidates that it spent money to try to either elect or defeat, the outcome went the chamber’s way only seven times, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington research group that tracks political spending. If the chamber was an 800-pound gorilla before the elections, “now they’re a wounded 500-pound gorilla,” said Cyrus Mehri, a Washington lawyer for U.S. Chamber Watch, a union-backed group that is critical of the chamber’s political practices. “But they’re still a major force to be reckoned with,” he added. As the White House looks to work out a deal with Congress to avert hundreds of billions of dollars in automatic budget cuts at the end of the year, Mr. Obama and his top economic advisers have been meeting through the week with business leaders to push their plan for raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Mr. Obama met Wednesday with chief executives from Goldman Sachs, Coca-Cola, Yahoo and other prominent firms, and he met a day earlier with small-business representatives. The president’s advisers also met with officials from the Campaign to Fix the Debt, a centrist group that has become influential in pushing for a combination of tax increases and spending cuts. It is led by Erskine B. Bowles, a former Clinton administration official, and Alan K. Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming. When Mr. Obama met two weeks ago with a dozen corporate leaders but did not invite the Chamber of Commerce, it was widely seen as a snub of the group over its political attacks during the presidential campaign. But the chamber got its turn Monday. Jack Lew, the White House chief of staff, and other senior economic advisers listened as chamber executives, including Thomas J. Donohue, the group’s president, and Bruce Josten, its top lobbyist, laid out their ideas for raising significant revenue without necessarily raising taxes by expanding energy development. “They wrote it down, but where that goes, I don’t know,” Mr. Josten said in an interview. But Mr. Josten said that the White House advisers stressed that any debt deal would have to include increased taxes at the highest brackets and that if an agreement could not be reached, they were willing to risk the automatic spending cuts — the so-called fiscal cliff option — at the end of the year. “They reiterated that they want the higher rates, and they’ll go over the cliff if they need to,” Mr. Josten said. After the meeting, White House officials led Mr. Donohue to the Oval Office for a brief session with Mr. Obama, which chamber officials described as “positive and constructive.” White House officials would not discuss the president’s meeting with Mr. Donohue or the earlier meeting with chamber executives. An Obama administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that “the White House does not want to go over the fiscal cliff, but at the same time, we’re not going to accept a bad deal.” The chamber has already circulated letters in Congress, targeted crucial lawmakers, taken out ads and prepared position papers and Internet videos intended to discourage any debt deal that it believes would deter private investment and free enterprise through higher taxes. While the chamber and its business members often proved the dominant voice on such issues in the past, the competing agendas of different business sectors have in some ways diluted the chamber’s overall influence. The Fix the Debt campaign, for example, adopted a much higher profile than the chamber in recent weeks with its own flurry of political ads, Washington meetings and news conferences to push its case for a balanced solution that would probably include tax increases. “There are going to be a lot of distinct voices, and we’re not simply going to throw in with any single coalition,” said Matthew Shay, president of the National Retail Federation, a trade group that is pushing for a quick end to the debt negotiations. At the same time, Mr. Shay said “there’s no daylight between any members of the business community” on the overall need to reach an agreement without imposing hundreds of billions of dollars in automatic cuts. “I expect the chamber will continue to play an enormously influential role in the debate,” he said. Chamber officials acknowledged that they were deeply disappointed by the poor showing of the Congressional candidates they backed, particularly in the Senate. But they scoffed at the notion, discussed in Washington political and media circles since the election, that the chamber’s political influence was waning and that the group might become marginalized in the debt negotiations as a result. “You really think we aren’t going to have any influence?” asked Mr. Josten, the group’s lobbyist. “If that’s the case, why would the White House want to meet with us?” he said. “My suspicion is that they know we’re going to have some influence on this. I don’t think there’s any member of Congress out there that doubts that.”

Plan Popular-Economic Sectors

US economic sectors support the plan – want access to Cuban market

Lee et al 1/31 – Senior Production Editor (Brianna and Stephanie Hanson, “U.S.-Cuba Relations,” Council on Foreign Relations, 31 January 2013, http://www.cfr.org/cuba/us-cuba-relations/p11113, accessed 28 June 2013)

Some U.S. constituencies would like to resume relations. U.S. agricultural groups already deal with Cuba, and other economic sectors want access to the Cuban market. Many Cuban-Americans were angered by the Bush administration's strict limits on travel and remittances, though a small but vocal contingent of hard-line Cuban exiles, many of them based in Florida, does not want to normalize relations until the Communist regime is gone. "When they're polled, the majority of Cuban-Americans say that the embargo has failed, and support lifting the travel ban or loosening the embargo or some steps along that continuum of liberalization and normalization," says Julia E. Sweig, CFR director of Latin American studies.

Key to agenda – contribute to campaigns

Gimpel et al 12 – professor of political science at University of Maryland (James G., Frances E. Lee [professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland-College Park], Michael Parrott [doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland], “Business Interests and the Party Coalitions: Industry Sector Contributions to U.S. Congressional Campaigns,” NCAPSA American Politics Workshop at American University, 7 January 2012, page 28, http://home.gwu.edu/~dwh/gimpel_lee_parrott_workshop.pdf, Accessed 28 June 2013

Differing types of relationships between economic interests and the parties are not distributed randomly throughout the entire economy. The most partisan sectors are greatly concentrated in a relatively small share of broad industry classifications. Expansive parts of the U.S. economy employing millions of people remain undefined by partisan cleavages, including most retail trades and nearly all service sectors outside of finance, insurance, and real estate. To return to the question of the party polarization of economic interests in the U.S., only around half the sectors that are consistently active in campaign contributions exhibit any partisan preference. Of those that do, these alignments evidently have much to do with the parties’ diverging issue positions on energy issues and other labor and regulatory controversies.

AT: Cuba Lobby Powerful

Cuba Lobby is small- has no political weight - easing of travel ban proves no backlash

(William Vidal, On Two Shores, “The Cuba Lobby represents itself, not the Cuban-American community,” 4/12/13, http://ontwoshores.com/?p=2088, accessed 6/29/13 , IS)

Must-read article by William Leogrande on Foreign Policy about The Cuba Lobby in DC, and their influence over Washington. I have a couple issues with this article:¶ 1) the headline “Castro-hating right wing”. To clarify, they’re not the only ones who hate Castro. An overwhelming majority of Cuban-Americans have no love for Fidel and Raul, and most of us are not right-wing.¶ 2) It depicts the Cuba Lobby as the most powerful lobbying group in America. They are not. Their PAC raised only $500,000 last election cycle, almost a 40% drop from what they raised in 2008, and is ranked 1,206 out of all PACs in campaign contribution amounts by OpenSecrets.org. They are not drawing in new donors who actually care about maintaining the embargo, only donors who care about gaining access to our Cuban-American members of Congress. Their influence is directly proportional to salience and urgency (or completely lack thereof) of Cuba policy within foreign policy circles. In other words, in the list of foreign policy priorities our country faces, Cuba ranks very low, and any fruit borne of reforms implemented today will not be seen for many years. So in the cost-benefit analysis that goes on in every DC bureaucrats head, the immediate cost of having the insufferable Mario Diaz-Balart or Mauricio Claver-Carone jamming their noses up your ass and screaming “communist apologists!” through the halls of Capitol Hill, even if they can’t really do anything to you, is usually higher than any benefit that may come from pushing for changes in Cuba policy. Meanwhile, they’re support in both the Cuban-American and larger American communities has been steadily plumeting over the past decade. The minute Cuba becomes a half-way real priority for the Administration or State Department, you will see the Cuba Lobby’s “influence” drop to a level on par with their OpenSecrets ranking.

Directory: rest -> wikis -> openev -> spaces -> 2013 -> pages

Download 0.7 Mb.

Share with your friends: