Cuba

Entries Tagged as 'Cuba'

Time to LoJack Your Yacht

19 October 2008 · No Comments

Crime

Since I do a little bit of Ocean Marine work, this article caught my eye:

Because it has become so hard to dodge the U.S. Coast Guard and reach Florida to qualify for U.S. residency, Cuban migrants in recent years have been heading for Mexico, then overland to Texas. Last year 11,126 used that route, compared to just 1,055 who landed in the Miami area, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Evidence of this new escape route is stacking up at a Mexican Navy yard in Isla Mujeres, where the dock regularly runs out of space for seized Florida boats. During a visit to the small Navy dock last week, The Associated Press counted eight super-fast boats, all with Florida registration numbers.[…]

The smuggling has spawned new trends in Florida: Now that owners in Miami and the Keys are using tracking devices, chains and motion detectors, boat thefts are shifting up the coast, said Ricky Linale, Miami-area agent of King’s Bay Insurance.

And thieves may now be targeting larger boats: Some smugglers now pack a cabin cruiser with people, wait at sea and smuggle a few at a time to Mexico on faster boats, said David Spahl, an organized-crime investigator with the Collier County Sheriff’s office on Florida’s west coast.

I’m still left wondering – is all the fuss and energy inefficiently expended on immigration today really worth it?  Isn’t it time to adopt a more realistic immigration policy?

Tags: Crime · Immigration · Insurance · · · ·


Treasury Department Censors European Travel Agency Over Cuban Travel

6 March 2008 · Comments Off

Travel / Transportation

So, does anyone else think that our almost 50 year-long temper-tantrum over the nationalization of property owned by Americans in Cuba might sometimes go a bit too far?

From the New York Times:

Steve Marshall is an English travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working, thanks to the United States government.[...]

It turned out, though, that Mr. Marshall’s Web sites had been put on a Treasury Department blacklist and, as a consequence, his American domain name registrar, eNom Inc., had disabled them. Mr. Marshall said eNom told him it did so after a call from the Treasury Department; the company, based in Bellevue, Wash., says it learned that the sites were on the blacklist through a blog.

Note that the European travel agent, whose servers are physically in the Bahamas, apparently doesn’t sell trips to Americans. He just had the misfortune to have used an American domain registrar and to have annoyed the Treasury Department.

Setting aside that it’s long past time for the U.S. to normalize relations with Cuba, doesn’t such an act on the part of the feds seem a bit…overreaching?

Tags: Censorship · Travel / Transportation ·