Cuba travel ban: White House poised to ease restrictions

An announcement now would reflect a sentiment in the White House that a decision to ease travel to Cuba would not cause much of a political storm, some US-Cuba experts say. The White House, they add, also wants to act in the context of movement on Capitol Hill in favor of a full lifting of the travel ban and toward a further easing of conditions for agricultural trade with Cuba.

Action now would be aimed in part at “creating momentum for ending the travel ban,” says Jake Colvin, vice president of the National Foreign Trade Council, a Washington business organization that favors ending the Cuba embargo. More broadly, he says, administration and congressional action reflect a growing “consensus” that it’s time “to do something different on Cuba.”

Energy development is one area where pressure is expected to grow for “something different” in Cuba policy. Cuba has begun exploratory drilling in search of oil in its territorial waters, with some reports estimating the island could become a major oil producer – and refiner – over the next five to 10 years.

“Cuba is thinking about energy economically [in the region] in not a small way at all,” says Lisa Margonelli, director of energy policy at the New America Foundation in Washington. “That’s something the US should consider as we look down the road.”

Experts who favor developing energy ties with Cuba say the US needs to consider that other hemispheric sources of oil, including Mexico and Venezuela, face increasingly difficult production conditions. With Cuba just off US shores, they say, locking the US out of a new market makes no sense. Proponents also point to the recent Gulf oil leak and say the US has a keen environmental interest in working with Cuba in its offshore development.

Such reasoning runs up against the arguments of anti-Castro stalwarts like Senator Menendez and US Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R) of Florida –the latter having proposed legislation targeting foreign oil companies involved in oil exploration and development in Cuba. (Those oil company executives might, for instance, be denied visas to the US.)

“The big corporate interests behind the push to relax the embargo couldn’t care less about whether the Cuban people are free or not,” Menendez said in his statement. “They only care about padding their profits by opening up a new market.”

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