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 News from Around the Americas | February 2006 
US Administration Pledges Enforcement of Cuba Trade Embargo
 Martin Crutsinger - Associated Press
| | The Mexican Movement of Solidarity with Cuba protest in front of the Sheraton Hotel in Mexico City. The hotel could be fined or even closed for expelling Cuban guests at the behest of the U.S. Treasury Department, Mexican officials said Tuesday. (AP/Marco Ugarte) |
Washington – A diplomatic rift with Mexico will not result in any changes in how the United States enforces laws that prohibit U.S. companies from doing business with Cuba, the Bush administration said Monday.
But an organization of U.S. businesses said the administration should rethink how it enforces the Cuban trade embargo following a recent incident in which a Mexico City hotel expelled a Cuban delegation attending an oil conference.
The order came after the hotel received a warning from the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control that it could be in danger of violating a four-decade trade embargo against the regime of Cuban President Fidel Castro.
After receiving the warning from OFAC, the Hotel Maria Isabel Sheraton in Mexico City expelled a Cuban delegation that was meeting with U.S. energy executives in early February.
That action prompted a leadership body of Mexico's lower house of Congress to express the country's “absolute rejection” of the U.S. trade embargo with Cuba. Mexican regulators announced they would seek fines against the hotel for violating Mexican investment and trade protection laws.
William A. Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council, which represents hundreds of U.S. businesses, said the threatened use of U.S. sanctions “undermines government-to-government cooperation on important security and economic issues and damages the goodwill of the United States among the people of Mexico.”
“Given the wholly negative backlash from the extraterritorial application of U.S. sanctions, I hope that OFAC will refrain from applying such measures in the future,” Reinsch said in a letter to Treasury Secretary John Snow.
But Treasury Department chief spokesman Tony Fratto said Monday that the administration was not considering any changes in enforcement activities following the latest incident.
“No one wants to see these kinds of international tensions over these issues,” Fratto told reporters. Fratto said OFAC was simply trying to enforce the laws that are on the books in a uniform way.
“The law is the law and OFAC is an enforcement agency and it is statutorily required to enforce the laws,” Fratto told reporters.
The trade embargo against Cuba began in 1963 when Cuba was added to a list of countries covered by the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act. The law prohibits Americans and American companies from doing business with countries on the list.
Jake Colvin, the director of USA{PI:EF}Engage, an affiliate of the foreign trade council, said that the administration “has continually looked for ways to step up enforcement and to apply new sanctions involving Cuba.”
By contrast, there are efforts in Congress to loosen the trade embargo against Cuba by lawmakers who argue that it has not resulted in the ouster of the Castro regime and is only hurting ordinary Cuban citizens.
In 2000, Congress passed a law that allows cash sales of food and other agricultural products to Cuba. |
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