Cuba Scraps Exit Visa Requirement, Eliminating Major Impediment For Travel Overseas

Cuba Scraps Exit Visa Requirement, Eliminating Major Impediment For
Travel Overseas
By ANDREA RODRIGUEZ and PETER ORSI 10/16/12 01:15 PM ET EDT AP

HAVANA -- The Cuban government announced Tuesday that it will no longer
require islanders to apply for an exit visa, eliminating a much-loathed
bureaucratic procedure that has been a major impediment for many seeking
to travel overseas for more than a half-century.

A notice published in Communist Party newspaper Granma said the change
takes effect Jan. 14, and beginning on that date islanders will only
have to show their passport and a visa from the country they are
traveling to.

It is the most significant advance this year in President Raul Castro's
five-year plan of reform that has already seen the legalization of home
and car sales and a big increase in the number of Cubans owning private
businesses.

"These measures are truly substantial and profound," Col. Lamberto
Fraga, Cuba's deputy chief of immigration, told a morning news
conference. "What we are doing is not just cosmetic, and requires 90
days to properly establish a series of regulations ... so it works well
and there are no problems."

The notice in the newspaper said that the Cuban government had decided
to "update the current migratory policy" and "eliminate the procedure of
the exit visa for travel to the exterior."

Migration is a highly politicized issue in Cuba and beyond its borders.

Under the "wet foot, dry foot" policy, the United States allows nearly
all Cubans who reach its territory to remain. Granma published an
accompanying editorial blaming the travel restrictions on U.S. attempts
to topple the island's government, plant spies and recruit its
best-educated citizens.

"It is because of this that any analysis of Cuba's problematic migration
inevitably passes through the policy of hostility that the U.S.
government has developed against the country for more than 50 years,"
the editorial said.

It assured Cubans that the government recognizes their right to travel
abroad and said the new measure is part of "an irreversible process of
normalization of relations between emigrants and their homeland."

On the streets of Havana, the news was met with a mixture of delight and
astonishment, after all the previous times over the years when officials
spoke of their desire to lift the exit visa, but talk failed to turn
into concrete change.

"No! Wow, how great!" said Mercedes Delgado, a 73-year-old retiree when
told of the news that was announced overnight. "Citizens' rights are
being restored."

"Look, I ask myself how far are we going to go with these changes. They
have me a little confused because now all that was done during 50 years,
it turns out we're changing it," said Maria Romero, a cleaning worker
who was headed to her job Tuesday morning. "Everything they told us
then, it wasn't true. I tell you, I don't understand anything."

Cuba-born U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen referred to the measure as
"so-called reforms" that are "nothing more than Raul Castro's desperate
attempts to fool the world into thinking that Cuba is changing.

"But anyone who knows anything about the communist 53- year-old Castro
dictatorship knows that Cuba will only be free when the Castro family
and its lackeys are no longer on the scene," the South Florida
Republican said.

The Cuban government's decision to eliminate exit visas likely won't
mean that Cuban immigrants can freely fly directly to the United States.

Kathleen Campbell Walker, an immigration lawyer in El Paso, Texas, said
Cubans who fly to the United States are still required to get a State
Department-issued visa. Homeland Security officials who review passenger
lists for U.S.-bound flights are likely to order an airline to deny
boarding to anyone who doesn't have that permission.

Cubans who do make it to the U.S., regardless of whether or not they
have a visa, are generally admitted to the country.

Tomas Bilbao, executive director of the Washington-based Cuba Study
Group, said he is cautiously optimistic that the move will reduce the
isolation of the Cuban people and increase interaction between the U.S.
and Cuban civil society.

"The important story is the Cuban government has taken a step that has
long been demanded by the Cuban people," he said.

Omar Lopez, human rights director of the Miami-based Cuban American
National Foundation, welcomed the elimination of the exit visas, but
said it remained unclear whether the change will allow more Cubans to
get passports.

"Now, Cubans don't have to pay and get a permit from Cuba to go as a
tourist or a visitor, but they say that in order to get a passport you
have to comply with some requirements of the law," Lopez said.

Dissident Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez expressed concern that officials
might now control travel merely by denying passports.

Cuba has on occasion denied exit visas to government detractors when
they sought to travel abroad, and Sanchez she has been turned down 20
times over the last five years.

"I have the suitcase ready to travel. ... Let's see if I get a flight
for Jan. 14, 2013, to try out the new law.

The move eliminates a restriction in place since 1961, the height of the
Cold War, requiring Cubans to get approval from their government for
permission to leave their own country.

Cubans now will also not have to present the long-required letter of
invitation from a foreign institution or person in the country they plan
to visit.

The measure also extends to 24 months the amount of time Cubans can
remain abroad, and they can request an extension when that runs out.
Currently, Cubans lose residency and other rights including social
security and free health care and education after 11 months.

Still, the notice said Cuba plans to put limits on travel within
unspecified sectors.

Doctors, scientists, members of the military and others considered
valuable parts of society currently face restrictions on travel to
combat brain drain.

"The update to the migratory policy takes into account the right of the
revolutionary State to defend itself from the interventionist and
subversive plans of the U.S. government and its allies," the note in the
newspaper said. "Therefore, measures will remain to preserve the human
capital created by the Revolution in the face of the theft of talent
applied by the powerful."

Granma's editorial said the measure will help address the needs of the
Cuban diaspora.

More than 1 million people of Cuban origin live in the United States,
and thousands more are in Europe.

___

Associated Press writers Anne-Marie Garcia in Havana, Alicia A. Caldwell
in Washington and Jennifer Kay in Miami contributed to this report.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/16/cuba-scraps-exit-visa_n_1969188.html