2010-03-26 / AP Wire Service
CANCUN, Mexico — A U.S. senator urged Cuba on Thursday to free a jailed American contractor to help persuade Congress to lift a travel ban that ended American tourism to the Caribbean island in 1962.
Cuban officials have been holding Alan P. Gross, a Maryland-based U.S. contractor, since December, accusing him of spying. The man's family says he is a development worker helping Cuban Jewish groups.
A 1962 travel ban sharply restricts visits by U.S. citizens to communist-governed Cuba. The law requires U.S. government permission to spend any money there.
Sen. Byron Dorgan, a Democrat from North Dakota, said he would like to see that ban lifted, but said the detention of Gross is problematic.
"I think it's just plain wrong that Cuba is the only country in the world that the U.S. government says it's criminal to visit without a license," Dorgan said at a U.S.-Cuba tourism conference in Cancun.
President Barack Obama has indicated interest in easing restrictions, as he already has for Cuban-Americans traveling to the island — but in exchange for human rights improvements.
Cuban officials say 2.4 million tourists, including about 41,000 Americans, visited the island last year. They anticipate 1.7 million U.S. citizens would come if restrictions were lifted.
2013-04-22 / The Miami Herald
Cuba saw a record number of “politically motivated and at times violent short-term detentions” during 2012, according to the U.S. State Department’s “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,” which was released Friday...more
2013-04-18 / The Washington Post
Members of Cuba’s Ladies in White opposition group will finally pick up Europe’s top human rights prize from 2005 in person next week in Belgium, the European Union and the daughter of the group’s former leader said Wednesday...more
2013-04-16 / The Washington Post
Cubans were relieved Monday by the announcement that the late leader Hugo Chavez’s hand-picked successor had been elected Venezuela’s new president, apparently allowing their country to dodge a threatened cutoff of billions of dollars in subsidized oil...more
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