It’s not every day that you see 50 American volunteers dressed in T-shirts and shorts assembling a state-of-the art playground in the working-class neighborhood of Santa Amalia.
But there they were late last month, straining to finish the climbing wall and monkey bars as a crowd of astonished schoolchildren, teachers and residents looked on.
Among the volunteers building four playgrounds around Havana was Mike Mazza, a 27-year-old landscaper from Chicago’s Roscoe Village neighborhood who joined the project to help Cuban children while relishing the opportunity to visit a country that is increasingly off-limits to Americans.
“How many chances in your life are you going to be able to come to Cuba?” Mazza asked. “It’s just a unique opportunity to get to know the people and the country.”
American humanitarian organizations such as the one building the playgrounds are permitted to operate in Cuba under an exemption to the 43-year-old trade embargo if they can secure a special license from the U.S. government.
For years such groups delivered medicine for HIV/AIDS patients, wheelchairs and walkers for the disabled, bicycles for hospital workers and other goods that are in short supply.
But two years ago, President Bush tightened trade and travel restrictions to Cuba in an effort to cripple the local economy and topple President Fidel Castro.
While it is impossible to quantify the impact on the amount of American humanitarian aid delivered to Cuba, many aid groups say the current environment has hindered their ability to operate on the island.
“We’ve been working in Cuba for 10 years, and this is the most difficult time we’ve had,” said Rusty Price, president of World Reach, a North Carolina-based group that ships donated medical supplies to Cuba.
Price said it took eight months to get his latest license from U.S. authorities to ship goods to Cuba. In previous years it usually took 60 days. On the Cuban side, Price says he senses a “change in climate. There’s more scrutiny at customs and immigration.”
The air of distrust was underscored in July when Castro rejected an offer of U.S. government assistance after Hurricane Dennis plowed into Cuba, causing about $1.4 billion in damage and killing 16 people.
Last month U.S. officials turned down Castro’s offer to send more than 1,500 Cuban physicians to Gulf Coast areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
“There were two hurricanes and two offers of aid and they both got turned down for political reasons,” said Philip Peters, a Cuba expert at the Lexington Institute, a Washington-area think tank. “That’s too bad.”
Cuban officials blame the increased tensions on the Bush administration, which has sharply curtailed the number of U.S. visitors to Cuba while increasing support for the island’s struggling opposition movement.
U.S. visitors, aid down sharply
In a report issued last month, Cuban officials said the number of American visitors fell to about 108,172 last year from 200,859 in 2003.
But Cuban authorities say the tightened sanctions also have cut U.S. medical, food and other humanitarian assistance from $10 million in 2000 to about $4million this year.
The number of U.S. groups providing assistance to Cuba also has fallen, from about 160 to about 20 during the same period, according to Cuban authorities.
“There has been a lot of repression against these groups,” said Raciel Proenza, an official at Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Investment and Economic Cooperation. “We consider that these measures are part of a hardening of the blockade taken by the Bush administration.”
Molly Millerwise, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Treasury Department, which issues humanitarian licenses to Cuba under the Office of Foreign Assets Control, denied that the Bush administration is restricting aid to Cuba.
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Millerwise said authorities only act against organizations that are abusing the humanitarian licenses by allowing Americans to travel to Cuba as tourists, which is illegal under the embargo.
“The Bush administration supports the export of humanitarian aid to Cuba, much of which they are starved for under Castro’s rule,” Millerwise said. “We of course want to ensure that aid is benefiting the Cuban people and not the Castro government.”
But John Kavulich, senior policy adviser at the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, a private group closely monitoring trade between the two nations, said he believes the goal of U.S. officials is to eliminate all contact between the U.S. and Cuba.
“They knew they couldn’t do that, but they seized on the abuses of humanitarian licenses to substantially restrict and hinder a lot of legitimate groups,” he said.
David Wald, co-founder of the California-based non-profit USA/Cuba InfoMed, said U.S. officials told him last month that he no longer could ship used computers to Cuban medical facilities after his humanitarian aid license expires at year’s end.
Wald said old computers no longer qualify as a humanitarian item even though he has sent about 3,000 of them to Cuba, with U.S. approval, during the last decade.
“They’ve been saying it’s a medical device for years, and now they’re saying its not,” Wald said. “Computers are essential in medical institutions throughout the world.”
Bob Schwartz, executive director of the New York-based Disarm Educational Fund, said his group no longer can bring surgeons to Cuba to teach pediatric reconstructive surgery–something it has done since 1997 under a humanitarian license.
Oxfam America said the Treasury Department last year rejected a proposal to rebuild about 25 Cuban homes damaged by a hurricane, even though Oxfam had done similar work in Cuba with U.S. approval.
“This is a change in policy,” said Don Zarin, a lawyer representing Oxfam America. “The view was that this was the responsibility of the Cuban government and that U.S. projects to fund infrastructure would free up money for the Cuban government to spend on repressing its own people.”
Group cuts off donations
A Cuban group affected by the stepped-up U.S. enforcement is ACLIFIM, a cash-poor agency representing 66,000 disabled people across the island.
Ana Ibis, a spokeswoman for the group, said a major source of goods ranging from office supplies to medicine to wheelchairs came from the Cuban American Alliance Education Fund, a Washington-based non-profit organization.
But the donations ended last year after Delvis Fernandez, president of the U.S. group, said U.S. officials requested an accounting of the scores of Americans who traveled to Cuba under the group’s humanitarian license over the last five years.
“It was just beyond what we could supply. I felt what they were doing was a witch hunt,” said Fernandez, an outspoken critic of the U.S. trade embargo.
Millerwise said she could not comment on individual cases but noted that Treasury Department regulations require licensed organizations to keep financial records for five years and produce them on demand.
In addition to increased scrutiny from the U.S., some aid workers say Cuban authorities also have made it more difficult for them to provide assistance.
Costa Mavraganis, coordinator of the New Jersey-based Cuba AIDS Project, said that for a decade his group carried an unlimited supply of donated medicine to HIV/AIDS patients throughout the island.
But Mavraganis said Cuban officials told him last year that volunteers no longer can visit hospitals and AIDS clinics and limited the amount of medicine each volunteer can donate to 22 pounds.
“Why would you want to limit people bringing in medicine that they are going to give away to AIDS patients?” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Proenza, the Cuban government official, said the country does not need as much donated medicine as it did in the past and needs to control goods entering Cuba.
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