Cuba slams new US limits on travel

HAVANA - Cuba would not be "intimidated or distracted" by Washington's new restrictions on US travel to Cuba, the island country's President Miguel Diaz-Canel said on Tuesday.

"They have not been able to asphyxiate us, they will not be able to stop us, we will continue to live and we will conquer," he wrote on Twitter.

The US State Department said earlier on Tuesday the United States will no longer permit visits to Cuba via passenger and recreational vessels, including cruise ships and yachts, as well as private and corporate aircraft.

The US Commerce Department told Reuters the ban would be effective from Wednesday, giving cruise lines no grace period to change destinations and creating confusion among cruise passengers.

The tightening of the decades-old US embargo on Cuba will further wound its crippled economy, as well as hurt US travel companies that had built up Cuban business during the brief 2014-2016 detente between the two countries.

The move could constitute a heavy hit for Cuba, which saw more than a quarter million US visitors in the first four months of 2019, almost double the figure from a year earlier.

Royal Caribbean Cruises announced that ships sailing on Wednesday and Thursday would no longer stop in Cuba and it would provide updates on future cruise destinations.

Carnival Corp said it would have additional information in "the very near future". Norwegian Cruise Line likewise said it was monitoring the situation.

The US will also no longer allow so-called group people-to-people educational travel. Travel experts said some groups may get around that by instead using one of the 11 other categories still allowed.

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez also tweeted that he strongly rejected the new sanctions against Cuba, adding that the US restrictions are "aimed at suffocating the economy and harming the living standards of Cubans in order to forcefully obtain political concessions".

US-Cuba ties have deteriorated under the administration of US President Donald Trump, which has rolled back the detente initiated by his predecessor Barack Obama.

People-to-people educational travel was a category created under the Obama administration to allow US citizens to visit Cuba on organized thematic tours to promote cultural exchanges between the two countries.

This is the second time the US government has tightened its travel restrictions on Cuba. While the measures are designed to hit government coffers, they are also hurting Cuba's fledgling private sector, which the US has said it wants to support.

Xinhua - Reuters

(China Daily 06/06/2019 page11)