Cuba

U.S. tourist ordered to pay $6,500 fine for illegal Cuba trip

In the latest twist to the USA's 50-year-old trade sanctions against communist Cuba, a New York man has agreed to pay a $6,500 fine to end a long-running dispute with the U.S. Treasury Department over an unauthorized trip he made to the Caribbean "isla non grata" as a tourist 14 years ago.

Zachary Sanders, now 38, had been living and teaching English in Mexico when he decided to visit Cuba for a couple of weeks in 1998. According to Reuters, Sanders did not obtain the required U.S. Treasury license, and a U.S. Customs agent became suspicious when Sanders returned to the United States through the Bahamas without declaring he had been to Cuba. The agent also seized an undeclared box of Cuban cigars from Sanders' luggage.

In 2002, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) reviewed his case during a Bush administration crackdown on travel to Cuba, notifying Sanders of its intent to fine him for failing to return the form, Reuters says. Six years later, an administrative law judge fined him $1,000 and on the final business day of the Bush administration in January 2009, a Treasury administrator raised the fine to $9,000. He reasoned that the original fine was too low to discourage people from ignoring OFAC forms.

Sanders sued OFAC, the Treasury Department and the Justice Department in federal court in 2009, appealing the fine as arbitrary and capricious, Reuters adds. He lost and then turned to the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York, where Tuesday's settlement agreement was filed.

Sanders' lawyer, Shane Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said Sanders' fine was still far greater than most Americans pay for violating the travel ban, and suggested he had been singled out because he was "an ideological traveler."

n increasing number of Americans are visiting Cuba legally under tightly scripted "people-to-people" programs authorized by the Obama administration a year ago, or through licenses for artists, musicians, humanitarian workers and others. But civil penalties for unsanctioned tourist travel to Cuba can range up to $7,500 for the first trip and $10,000 for subsequent trips. OFAC resolved more than 200 such cases for "a standard $1,000 settlement" from 2001 to 2004, Kadidal said, and dismissed many others with no fine at all.

Indeed, says Cuba travel expert Christopher Baker, "what's interesting here is that (Sanders) is being fined for failure to return the form, not for actual travel to Cuba."

" To my knowledge, only two people have actually been fined for illegal travel to Cuba," says Baker, who addresses the issue on his blog. "Thousands of others have paid up when they received a 'notification of intent to levy a fine,' which is a preliminary stage that can be challenged. Most importantly, no judges arehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif in place to adjudicate any challenge, the sole exception being a brief tenure during the second Bush administration."

"Only a tiny fraction of the many thousands of U.S. citizens who continue to visit Cuba annually without a license are ever identified as such by OFAC," Baker adds. "Under the Obama administration, OFAC has refocused to more urgent priorities and during my 13 visits to Cuba within the past year, only a very small percentage of visitors returning from Cuba are being asked to demonstrate proof of legal travel."

More @ http://travel.usatoday.com/destinations/dispatches/post/2012/07/us-tourist-ordered-to-pay-6500-fine-for-illegal-cuba-trip/812249/1