A Growing Number of Americans Are Traveling to Cuba Richard Stradling - News & Observer
go to original March 28, 2014

Patrick Oppmann reports on a gradual rise in the number of Americans visiting Cuba under somewhat relaxed travel rules. (CNN)

There was a time when average Americans were as likely to slip over the DMZ into North Korea or talk their way through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin as they were to visit Cuba.

But the end of the Cold War and President Barack Obama’s easing of some travel restrictions in 2011 have resulted in record numbers of Americans traveling to the communist island about 100 miles south of Key West, Fla.

The Cuban government reported last fall that more than 98,000 U.S. citizens visited the country in 2012, up from 73,500 the year before. The numbers don’t include Cuban-Americans, which Cuba doesn’t count as tourists.

Cuba has been drawing hundreds of thousands of tourists a year since the 1980s, mostly from Canada and Europe. But it’s still not easy for Americans to make the trip across the Florida Strait; U.S. airlines can’t fly to the island nation, and U.S. citizens who want to visit need special licenses from the U.S. government and a visa from Cuba.

Obama made it easier to travel to Cuba by making those licenses available to a larger number of cultural, religious and educational groups, with the goal of increasing “people-to-people” contact between the two countries.

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