New Yorker pays fine for 1998 Cuba trip
Source: Agencies |
July 26, 2012, Thursday
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Print Edition
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A NEW York man has agreed to pay a US$6,500 fine to settle a long-running dispute with the United States Treasury Department over a trip he made to Cuba as an unauthorized tourist 14 years ago.
Zachary Sanders, now 38, said he was 23 and had been living and teaching English in Mexico when he decided to go to Cuba for a couple of weeks in 1998.
"I wanted to learn about how a socialist country worked in practice," Sanders said in an interview. "I had no illusions. ... I'm not like some diehard supporter of the (Cuban) government or anything like that."
The US has long restricted Americans from traveling to Cuba as part of a 50-year-old trade embargo aimed at punishing Cuba's communist government. The actual restrictions and the degree of enforcement have varied with different US administrations and with the evolving state of US-Cuba relations.
Sanders did not obtain the required US Treasury license to visit Cuba and a US Customs agent became suspicious when Sanders returned to the US through the Bahamas without declaring that he had been to Cuba. The agent also seized an undeclared box of Cuban cigars from Sanders' luggage.
Two years later, Sanders received a letter from the Treasury Department asking for details of his expenditures in Cuba. He said he was scared, had lost the receipts and missed the deadline to return the form.
Another two years went by and the department's Office of Foreign Assets Control reviewed his case during a Bush administration crackdown on travel to Cuba, notifying Sanders of its intent to fine him for failing to return the form. In 2008, an administrative law judge fined him US$1,000.
Both sides appealed, and on the final business day of the Bush administration in January 2009, a Treasury administrator raised the fine to US$9,000. He reasoned that the original fine was too low to discourage people from ignoring OFAC forms.
Zachary Sanders, now 38, said he was 23 and had been living and teaching English in Mexico when he decided to go to Cuba for a couple of weeks in 1998.
"I wanted to learn about how a socialist country worked in practice," Sanders said in an interview. "I had no illusions. ... I'm not like some diehard supporter of the (Cuban) government or anything like that."
The US has long restricted Americans from traveling to Cuba as part of a 50-year-old trade embargo aimed at punishing Cuba's communist government. The actual restrictions and the degree of enforcement have varied with different US administrations and with the evolving state of US-Cuba relations.
Sanders did not obtain the required US Treasury license to visit Cuba and a US Customs agent became suspicious when Sanders returned to the US through the Bahamas without declaring that he had been to Cuba. The agent also seized an undeclared box of Cuban cigars from Sanders' luggage.
Two years later, Sanders received a letter from the Treasury Department asking for details of his expenditures in Cuba. He said he was scared, had lost the receipts and missed the deadline to return the form.
Another two years went by and the department's Office of Foreign Assets Control reviewed his case during a Bush administration crackdown on travel to Cuba, notifying Sanders of its intent to fine him for failing to return the form. In 2008, an administrative law judge fined him US$1,000.
Both sides appealed, and on the final business day of the Bush administration in January 2009, a Treasury administrator raised the fine to US$9,000. He reasoned that the original fine was too low to discourage people from ignoring OFAC forms.
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