Cuba loosens outside travel, but can bar some professionals

Cuba's announcement Tuesday that it no longer would require its citizens to apply for exit permits to travel abroad lifted a widely detested restriction on freedom of movement while maintaining Havana's absolute power to deny departures of top professionals for fear they will defect.

Published in the Communist Party newspaper Granma, the policy change, which takes effect Jan. 14, opens up the world for the first time in a half-century to average Cubans - provided they have passports, the means to travel, and visas from the countries they want to visit.

It extends permission to stay abroad for two years before losing Cuban citizenship and property rights. Currently such rights are lost after 11 months.

At the same time, in a hedge against brain drain, the policy says the government can prevent departures to "preserve the human capital created by the Revolution" of 1959, and "defend itself from the . . . subversive plans of the U.S. government and its allies."

University of Pennsylvania romance language professor Roman de la Campa was born in Cuba in 1948 and came to America when he was 15. "There are always four or five ways to look at changes that take place in Cuba," he said.

On the one hand, it appears that this is part of the reforms that the government of President Raul Castro has been trying to make, such as allowing some private ownership of businesses. At the same time, de la Campa said, Cuba's socialist government no longer is able to sustain welfare benefits at the level it used to, "so one never knows the degree to which 'opening up' is just done out of economic necessity."

Some analysts theorize that the country is easing restrictions on international travel so that Cubans will earn money abroad and inject it into the country's struggling economy.

The announcement also comes at a critical time in the United States, less than a month from Election Day.

"If Romney wins, and given the importance of [anti-Castro hard-liner] Marco Rubio in a Republican administration," de la Campa said, "you can pretty much guarantee that the relationship with Cuba is going to worsen.

"If Obama wins," he said, "then Raul Castro can say, 'Let's move further down the road,' and point to the travel policy as a sign Cuba is willing to make some moves for a potential relationship."

At the State Department on Tuesday, spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that "we obviously welcome any reforms that will allow Cubans to depart from and return to their country freely."

She said the United States would monitor "the flow of travel" after Jan. 14 to see whether it necessitates any changes in U.S. law or policy.

About 20,000 Cubans a year now get permission to permanently enter the United States. Under the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1965, any Cuban who arrives on U.S. soil, by boat, ocean raft, or otherwise, gets automatic asylum under the so-called "wet foot, dry foot" policy.

Holly Ackerman, a Duke University librarian with expertise on Cuba, said the new policy could produce a "migratory crisis" similar to what happened in 1980 during the Mariel boatlift, when 125,000 Cubans were permitted to leave and many came to the United States, flooding Miami.

"It puts the ball in our court again," she said. "If 100,000 people are permitted by Cuba to come visit the U.S. and all of them ask for asylum, what happens then?"

Though somewhat ambiguous, the policy is generally "good news" and "healthy for Cuba," said John Dowlin, 70, cofounder of Taillight Diplomacy, the Philadelphia organization created in 1998 to encourage people-to-people cultural exchanges with the island nation of 11 million population.

Taillight's name is an allusion to the '50s-era U.S.-made cars still common in Cuba after the revolution halted further exports from Detroit. Taillight's first exchanges paired the owners of old Buicks and such, here and in Cuba, for talk about their antique cars.

Juan Guerra, director of Accion Communal Latinoamericana de Montgomery County, a nonprofit known as ACLAMO that serves the Latino community in Norristown, was born in Cuba and has cousins there. He said the "intended and unintended consequences" of Cuba's new policy are yet to be determined.

Still, he welcomed the development.

"Anything that represents an easing of painful restrictions on the people of Cuba is good news for all Cubans," he said, "and all members of the human family."