Feed on

The US Government this week announced new restrictions on travel from the US to Cuba, including by cruise ship.

Actually, I gather that travel to Cuba from the US has been generally banned anyway, but there were a couple of ways round the ban that were tolerated by the US government – these easements were introduced during President Obama’s administration. The first was something called “group people-to-people educational” travel, while the other was to allow cruise ships departing from US ports to call at Cuban ports. (You’ll all remember that Carnival Corp set up a new line, fathom, to do this and pinched – er, transferred – Adonia from P&O for that purpose.) Now the current US administration has reversed that easement and as from this week travel to Cuba from the US has once again become very difficult. The reason given in the announcement by the US Treasury Secretary is because Cuba has continued “to play a destabilizing role in the Western Hemisphere, providing a communist foothold in the region and propping up US adversaries in places like Venezuela and Nicaragua by fomenting instability, undermining the rule of law, and suppressing democratic processes.”

Cruise lines are understandably in some confusion over this. Royal Caribbean, for example, is saying on its website that they are “analyzing the details to understand the impact to future sailings”. However, they have already cancelled the calls at Cuba for sailings from ports in Florida today (5 June) and tomorrow. It’s also unclear what effect the new US policy will have on calls at Cuba by cruise lines not based in the US, e.g. Fred. Olsen who do have some cruises that include Cuba.

I’ll keep watching this one. In the meantime, here’s a link to a CNN webpage that carries the story.

Leave a Reply

%d bloggers like this: