The sign at Miami International Airport said American Airlines Flight 5811 was going to Nassau, Bahamas. So why were a dozen South Florida Cubans checking in for the flight with huge duffel bags?
``Vacation,'' snapped one woman in her 60s, wearing two stacked hats, before declining to comment further. ``To Cuba,'' whispered one man in his 40s, winking as he checked his ticket for a connecting Nassau-Havana flight.
One year after President Clinton vowed to restrict contacts with Cuba in retaliation for the shoot-downs of two Brothers to the Rescue planes, the much ballyhooed campaign leaks profusely.
Legal and illegal travel from South Florida to Havana in the past year is estimated at 100,000, the same as in the previous year. Cash seizures stood at $250,000 -- barely higher than the $200,000 averaged from 1992 to 1995.
Enforcement officials in Miami admit the flow is almost impossible to stop, and travel agents in places like Nassau and Mexico gleefully instruct arriving U.S. travelers on how to evade U.S. sanctions on Cuba.
``No problem at all,'' boasted one Nassau agent who detailed the simple switch of U.S. and Cuban travel documents that fool U.S. authorities. ``We get you to Cuba, any time, for as long as you want.''
Travel to the island is a divisive issue in South Florida's Cuban community, pitting a humanitarian drive to deliver aid to relatives against the belief that such aid helps to keep President Fidel Castro in power.
A call for enforcement
Republican Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart demanded last week that the U.S. Treasury Department and its Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) step up enforcement to stem the flow of illegal travelers and dollars to Cuba.
``I haven't seen any enforcement,'' he said. ``If they don't prosecute anyone, if they don't send out any messages that they are serious about prosecuting the law, then the law is going to be ignored.'' But travel agents and others with first-hand knowledge of the dispute say any attempt to limit Cuban exile links to Cuba only drives the contacts underground.
``When they took away direct (Miami-Havana) flights, OFAC lost all controls. They basically taught people how to break the U.S. embargo,'' said Vivian Mannerud, whose company arranges flights to Cuba.
OFAC Director Richard Newcomb warned that penalties are high. ``Anyone who violates the law is subject to prosecution . . . These are very serious matters.''
Violations go unchecked
But beyond such stern warnings, all sides agree it is virtually impossible to halt violations and that with few exceptions, Cuban Americans have to work exceptionally hard to get caught.
Current laws ban almost all money remittances to Cuba and allow Cuban Americans to travel to the island only once per year for ``extreme humanitarian needs'' -- as declared and defined by the traveler.
Clinton also banned direct Miami-Havana charter flights after the Feb. 24, 1996, killings of four Brothers aviators. Miami charter agencies now must route their flights through third countries. Most use Cancun, Mexico.
Because such ``charter'' flights are often checked by U.S. Customs agents at MIA, the 75,000 people estimated to have flown them in the past year are believed to have done so legally -- one time per year, no illegal cash.
This even though the OFAC cards that travelers must sign declaring their ``humanitarian need'' have never been punched into computers. Meaning the Office of Foreign Assets Control cannot quickly check whether travelers are making their first or 10th trip.
Independent bookings
And it is clear, at least by the scene on American Airlines Flight 5811, that thousands more South Florida Cubans are going to Cuba by independently booking flights to third countries and connecting flights to Havana.
Customs has advised MIA airlines that travelers who admit trying to book flights connecting to Cuba must be told they can fly only from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. -- when Customs has agents on duty and can check them.
But the estimate from Mannerud and Francisco Aruca, a former Cuba charter agent: 30,000 illegal travelers in the past year.
And that means more money going to the Cuban government. With direct charter flights, the money went to Miami agencies because Cubana de Aviacion cannot fly into U.S. airports. Now, if travelers connect on Cuban flights, Cuba keeps that portion of the money.
Most Cubans traveling illegally are people like Yvette, 58, a Miami factory worker who left Cuba in 1983 and was flying back last week for the third family visit in nine months.
``I have to bring them medicines, clothes, everything,'' she said, checking in two six-foot duffel bags packed with clothes. ``How can this government prevent me? That's not American.''
On arrival in Nassau at 1 p.m., the South Florida Cubans hefted their luggage to Cubana's 3 p.m. flight to Havana. Most said they planned to stay with relatives about a week.
Many others who travel illegally to Cuba are professional smugglers, ``mules'' who charge U.S. clients $20 per $100 delivered in cash to relatives in Cuba -- more for goods and medicine.
Flights by professionals
Most are foreign citizens living in South Florida -- Mexicans, Colombians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans -- who fly to their own countries and then hop connecting flights to Havana, escaping virtually all U.S. detection.
A Cuban bank official quoted last week in a news report estimated that remittances from Cubans abroad account for 90 percent of all U.S. dollars circulating in the island. Non-Cuban tourists account for the rest.
U.S. agencies imposed civil penalties totaling $992,000 on embargo violators since fall 1994, and federal prosecutors have filed criminal charges in four cases in the past year, OFAC officials said.
With an $875,000 budget boost ordered by Clinton last year, OFAC plans to hire two new staffers for its 1-year-old, two-person office in Miami and seven more in Washington to handle Cuba and other issues. Two Spanish-speaking Customs agents also work out of OFAC's Miami office.
``We are working very actively to educate the Cuban community in the requirements, rights and responsibilities of the Cuba embargo,'' Newcomb said.
A waste, argued Aruca, the former Cuba charter agent and liberal radio commentator. ``You are simply throwing completely out of control something that used to be under control.''
Copyright © 1997 The Miami Herald