Contact: Michael Avery, NLG President, tel. 617-573-8551

Heidi Boghosian, NLG Executive Director, tel. 212-679-5100 x11

June 15, 2004. The National Lawyers Guild announced today that it is calling upon the U.S. Treasury Department to reject proposed new regulations with respect to travel to Cuba that are scheduled to go into effect soon. The Lawyers Guild denounced the regulations as an "Un-American" interference by the government with freedom to travel. The Lawyers Guild noted that the new regulations would substantially increase the discretionary authority of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and allow for political censorship of foreign travel by U.S. nationals.

The Lawyers Guild specifically opposes President Bush's proposal to drastically reduce the ability of U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba for educational purposes. The President's proposal would eliminate general licenses for almost all university-sponsored educational visits to Cuba of less than one semester. This will mean that persons seeking to engage in professional and educational travel to Cuba for shorter periods will have to get a specific license from OFAC. Basing freedom to teach and study on some government official's evaluation of the content of an academic program is the very opposite of American tradition, a tradition of academic freedom and the values of the First Amendment.

The Lawyers Guild described the President's proposal to limit visits by Cuban-Americans to family in Cuba to one 14-day visit every three years and to limit the ability of U.S. residents to send money to Cuban families as a humanitarian outrage. The Lawyers Guild also condemned the President's proposal to eliminate travel for amateur and semi-professional sporting events and clinics, unless specifically authorized by the OFAC. The Lawyers Guild characterized as "ridiculous" the notion that running track and playing baseball with Cubans could constitute any threat to U.S. national security.

NLG President Michael Avery stated, "These proposals to limit travel to Cuba even more severely than the current law allows are the product of a closed-minded ideological approach to international exchange that has no place in America. The United States has nothing to fear and everything to gain from allowing our citizens to travel freely abroad. This is precisely a time in which we should be learning more about other cultures and ways of life, rather than eliminating dialogue with people in other countries."

The Lawyers Guild noted that the proposed regulations are not justified by economic arguments. NLG President Michael Avery noted that business and agricultural groups in the U.S. have increasingly spoken out in favor of travel and trade to Cuba. Avery pointed out, "If we opened the doors to travel and trade with Cuba there is no reason to think there would be a negative flow of dollars from the U.S. to Cuba. On the contrary, the United States could become a supplier of goods and services to Cuba, with a likely balance of trade in favor of the U.S." Avery criticized the new regulations as nonsensical, noting that the proposals would eliminate "fully hosted" travel to Cuba, a category now allowed, in which U.S. citizens do not spend any dollars in Cuba and all expenses must be paid by Cuba or third country nationals.

Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director of the Lawyers Guild, suggested that the average American would be shocked to learn that his or her freedom to travel anywhere in the world could be limited by our own government. She noted that the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas had warned that "once the right to travel is curtailed, all other rights suffer." Justice Douglas understood that for some, travel would always be an indispensable key to "knowing, studying, arguing, exploring, conversing, observing, and even thinking." Boghosian concluded that the Lawyers Guild believes that preventing U.S. citizens' travel to Cuba does not make either Cuba or the United States more free, but less.

 The Guild has a long history of representing individuals whom the government has deemed a threat to national security, including helping expose illegal FBI and CIA surveillance, infiltration and disruption tactics (COINTELPRO) that the U.S. Senate "Church Commission" hearings detailed in 1975-76 and that led to enactment of the Freedom of Information Act and other limitations on federal investigative power.

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