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Thursday, December 20, 2007

Report faults Cuba embargo enforcement

Report faults Cuba embargo enforcement
Posted on Wed, Dec. 19, 2007
BY PABLO BACHELET
pbachelet@MiamiHerald.com

WASHINGTON --
A U.S. Government Accountability Office report Wednesday criticized
Customs and Border Protection for going overboard in its inspection of
travelers arriving from Cuba, saying the ability to spot other threats
may be compromised.

At the request of Democratic Reps. Charles Rangel of New York and
Barbara Lee of California, both highly critical of U.S. policy toward
Cuba, the congressional watchdog agency examined the resources allocated
by the Bush administration to enforce the decades-old embargo against
the island.

The report said Customs is screening all exports to Cuba from Port
Everglades and that one in five passengers at Miami International
Airport arriving from Cuba were being diverted for secondary inspections.

Customs found export shipments mostly complied with U.S. laws, while
passenger inspections resulted in ''numerous'' seizures, mostly small
amounts of Cuban tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceuticals.

These inspections were ``straining CBP's capacity to inspect other
travelers according to its mission of keeping terrorists, criminals and
inadmissible aliens out of the country.''

The 91-page report also notes that 61 percent of the case load of the
U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control involved Cuba
embargo enforcement, even though the embargo is only one of 20 sanction
programs handled by OFAC.

Cuba embargo violations comprised 70 percent of office's total penalties
in 2000-2005, but dropped to 29 percent in 2006. Most of these were
minor infractions like purchasing Cuban cigars, the GAO said.

OFAC officials told GAO investigators that Cuba investigations required
fewer resources per case than other violations.

Rangel, who this year tried but failed to get some restrictions on U.S.
agricultural sales to Cuba relaxed, said the report showed the embargo
had failed.

''We're making a very serious foreign policy mistake in order to gain
favor with a small group of people that can influence the outcome of
perhaps the presidential election depending on how crucial the electoral
college votes in Florida are,'' he said.

''At the end of the day it makes no economic sense, no diplomatic sense,
no trade sense for us to isolate this group of people,'' he added.

The State Department said in a statement that enforcing the Trading with
the Enemy Act, which prohibits Americans from spending money in Cuba
without authorization from Washington, remained an important tool to
isolate the Cuban regime, according to The New York Times, which broke
the story first.

Other government agencies assigned fewer resources to Cuba embargo
enforcement, the report says.

This is the third recent GAO report on Cuba. The office has investigated
U.S. Agency for International Development programs for Cuba and the
impact of sanctions on agricultural trade.

The report says embargo enforcement is also hampered by the lack of
cooperation by other countries, the difficulty in detecting some
criminal violations and the complexity of sanction rules.

In addition, U.S. public opinion was ``divided.''

''Agency officials said that divided public opinion about the embargo
has contributed to widespread, small-scale violations of restrictions on
family travel and remittances,'' the report says.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/cuba/story/350531.html

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