United States citizens do not have special status to visit Cuba legally, so long as they go with a licensed operator.
The Treasury Department is once again granting so-called “people-to-people” licenses for Cuba-bound American visitors. The licenses, created under President Bill Clinton in 1999, stopped being issued in 2003 under travel restrictions imposed by President George W. Bush. The new policies under President Obama reverse this.
The silliness is that it is still illegal for ordinary American vacationers to hop on a plane bound for Cuba, which has been under a United States economic embargo for nearly 50 years. While a lot of folks have “snuck” around the US rules (via more rational countries like Mexico or Canada, Americans, traveling to Cuba is technically illegal since the United States prohibits its citizens from spending money in Cuba.
Legal exceptions to spending money exist for students, journalists, Cuban-Americans as well as educational groups traveling to Cuba. Travelers joining an educational trip must still receive credit toward a degree.
“All a U.S. citizen has to do is sign up for an authorized program and they can go to Cuba. It’s as simple as that,” said Tom Popper, director of Insight Cuba, a travel company that took more than 3,000 Americans to Cuba between 1999 and 2003, and was among the tour operators to apply for a license under the new rules earlier this year. It received its license at the end of June, and has planned 135 trips of three, seven or eight nights over the next year.
Demand for Cuba is so strong that tour operators say that many of the trips already have long waiting lists. Learning in Retirement, an educational program associated with the University of Wisconsin in La Crosse, which is offering a 10-day people-to-people trip in April, said more than 65 people have already expressed interest for its 35 spots. “That’s just through word of mouth,” said Burt Altman, a retired professor who organized the trip. “We haven’t even put out the itinerary.”
“It’s the forbidden fruit,” said Mr. Popper of Insight Cuba. “It’s 50 years of pent-up demand for a country that 75 percent of Americans really, really want to travel to.”
Following is a list of planned people-to-people trips to Cuba.