White House Pushing to Allow Flights to Cuba by Year End

In this photo provided by the Florida Keys News Bureau, Key West December 30, 2013: Mayor Craig Cates, right, waves goodbye as he boards a chartered aircraft at Key West International Airport that flew to Havana, Cuba. The trip was the first legal commercial passenger flight from Key West to Cuba in more than 50 years and carried passengers who will remain until Jan. 3, 2014. (AP/Florida News Bureau)
The Obama administration reportedly is working to reach a deal with Cuba that would allow regularly scheduled commercial flights between the two countries by the end of this year.
The Wall Street Journal reports that a possible agreement would allow airlines to establish service between the U.S. and Cuba as soon as this December. Administration officials tell the Journal that one aim of completing an agreement would be to make Obama’s thaw toward Cuba so much an extent of U.S. policy that it would be impossible for his successor to reverse.
If agreed to, the deal would constitute the most prominent exception to the five-decade-old congressional ban on Americans traveling to Cuba. Only Congress can fully repeal the travel and trade embargoes levied against Cuba in the 1960s after Fidel Castro took power. However, the president can make exceptions to them. Late last year, for example, President Obama allowed Americans to use credit and debit cards in Cuba, which would have previously violated a rule against unlicensed monetary transactions in Cuba.
Currently, American citizens are only allowed to visit Cuba for specific purposes, such as business trips, family visits, or so-called “people-to-people” cultural exchanges, the last of which requires traveling as part of a tour group. Americans who are authorized to visit the island take charter flights. The Journal reports that Washington and Havana are working toward an arrangement that would allow authorized travelers to book through airline or travel websites.
Obama’s move to normalize relations with the communist country has been heavily criticized by the contenders for the Republican nomination, most notably Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, whose parents are from Cuba.
“In the eyes of Barack Obama … the Cuban people are suffering because not enough American tourists visit the country, when the truth is the Cuban people are suffering because they live in a tyrannical dictatorship,” Rubio told an audience in New York last week as the U.S. reopened its embassy in Cuba 54 years after diplomatic relations were severed.

Source: White House reportedly pushing for deal allowing flights to Cuba by year’s end