> Subj: I Have Been Accused of Using the Internet to Advocate Travel to
> Cuba
> Date: 12/7/02 6:29:58 PM Pacific Standard Time
> From: warner at scn.org (Tom Warner)
<snip>
> This is the answer that my attorneys have prepared for me to avoid a many
> thousand dollar fine for non-response.
>
> 9 December 2002
>
> U.S. Department of the Treasury
> Office of Foreign Assets Control
> Attn: Martin O. Odenyo
> 1500 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W. (Annex)
> Washington, D.C. 20220
>
> Re: FAC No. CU-201336
>
> Dear Mr. Odenyo:
Since when, and under what theory, does the Treasury Dept. regulate the right of US citizens to travel to Cuba? Wouldn't that be a State Department matter if anything?
<snip>
> As you are undoubtedly aware, there are a variety of Treasury Department
> regulations which authorize travel to Cuba B 31 C.F.R. 515.420 (fully
> hosted travel), 515.575 (humanitarian projects), 515.574 (support for
> the Cuban people), & 515.567 (public performances, clinics, workshops,
> athletic and other competitions). See also 31 C.F.R. 515.560
> (Travel-related transactions).
Part of why I ask is because there was an obituary a few weeks ago about a famous case of an activist who was arrested for travelling to Cuba and the Supreme Court threw it out. I got the impression that this case established that the federal government has no right to tell its citizens where they can travel. So did they somehow get around this by saying the Treasury has the right to say where dollars are spent or something?
Here's the obituary, for what it's worth.
New York Times November 23, 2002
Helen Travis, Activist Who Won Case on Right to Travel, Dies at 86
By WOLFGANG SAXON
Helen Levi Travis, a peace and social activist and the subject of a 1967 Supreme Court ruling that upheld her right to travel abroad, died on Nov. 14 in San Pedro, Calif. She was 86.
Born in Manhattan, Mrs. Travis graduated from Barnard College in 1937. A student trip to the Soviet Union in 1934 impressed her with the promises of socialism, and after graduation she started traveling extensively with her first husband, Abbott Simon, a leader of the radical left-wing American Youth Congress.
In the wake of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, the German-Soviet treaty of 1939, the couple established a clandestine "safe house" outside Prague to hide anti-Fascist activists from Spain, Italy and Czechoslovakia.
She returned to the United States, where she taught English, worked in an automobile assembly plant and wrote for the Communist Party organ, Daily Worker. Her brief marriage ended in divorce, and she met and married Robert C. Travis, a principal organizer of the bloody 44-day sit- down strike in Flint, Mich., of 1936-37, which forced General Motors to accept the United Automobile Workers as the strikers' bargaining agent.
Mrs. Travis had her encounter with the government in the 1960's, when the federal courts were inundated with suits trying to sort out who might be permitted to travel where. She was charged with visiting Cuba twice in 1962 without a passport stamped valid for that destination.
She was found guilty, given two suspended six-month sentences and fined $10,000. A federal appeals panel upheld her conviction, but the Supreme Court threw it out in 1967 along with a docketful of similar travel- curb cases.
The Travises had moved to Southern California in the late 1950's, where Mrs. Travis was a caseworker for the Los Angeles Department of Social Services. She also headed the Fellowship for Social Justice of the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles and was active for many years in El Rescate, a private legal and social-services group for Central American refugees.
Mr. Travis died in 1979. Mrs. Trav is survived by a stepdaughter, Carole Travis of Chicago. Also surviving is Mr. Simon, a resident of Brooklyn.