The government agency charged with enforcing the United States' ban on travel to Cuba has notified the Alliance of Baptists that it will be fined $34,000 for allegedly engaging in tourist activities while in Cuba for religious purposes — a charge the Alliance denies.
Meanwhile, a group of Christian aid workers met July 31 with State Department officials to protest a new government recommendation that would further restrict the ways American religious groups can work with their Cuban counterparts.
Both events are taking place against the backdrop of uncertainty about Cuba's leadership, as longtime dictator Fidel Castro ceded leadership to his brother, Raul, July 31 while he recuperates from surgery. Neither man — Fidel Castro is nearly 80, and Raul Castro is 75 — has made any sort of public appearance since.
Critics said the Bush administration's actions are demonstrating political discrimination against groups like the Alliance, which formally has opposed Bush's Cuba policy.
Stan Hastey, executive director of the Washington-based Alliance of Baptists, notified members of the organization's board July 25 he had received the fine notice from the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC. The notice, dated July 5, informed Hastey the organization would receive the fine for violating the terms of its license for religious travel to Cuba.
The Alliance, a fellowship of 117 churches and a budget of $374,000, has a longstanding missions partnership with the Fraternity of Baptist Churches in Cuba, which pairs local Alliance congregations with Cuban churches.
Due to the U.S. economic and travel embargo on the island nation's communist regime, religious groups must use renewable travel permits for religious activity to enable U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba. The permits are granted through OFAC.
More than a year ago, OFAC officials informed the Alliance of Baptists that its license had been suspended pending the outcome of an investigation into allegations that a group from an Alliance church in Alabama had misused the license to visit Cuban tourist sites. Hastey said OFAC did not inform him any further about the investigation's progress. In the meantime, the original license expired.
The July 5 fine notice was the next official communication from OFAC to the Alliance. It informed Hastey the group would be fined not only for the alleged violations by the team from the Baptist Church of the Covenant in Birmingham but also for alleged violations by four other Alliance churches that traveled to Cuba under the license between 2003 and 2005. Those congregations are the First Baptist churches of Washington, D.C.; Savannah, Ga.; and Greenville, S.C.; and Glendale Baptist Church in Nashville.
The Alliance provided the Treasury with copies of group travel itineraries “that did not reflect a program of full-time religious activities,” according to the OFAC letter Hastey received. Government regulations require that such groups traveling in Cuba spend the entirety of their trips engaged in religious, rather than tourist, activities.
When first notified of the license suspension and investigation, Hastey said many of the itinerary items Treasury officials apparently interpreted as tourist activities were actually religious work. For example, the team from Alabama stayed in Varadero, a beach town near Havana, one night. However, Hastey said, that was because a Presbyterian guest house is located in Varadero and is convenient to a nearby Baptist church the team had visited.
Hastey told Associated Baptist Press the way in which Treasury officials have handled the investigation makes him question if the Alliance is getting a fair shake.
“It appears that, within OFAC, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing,” he said. “There was one procedure to suspend our license — one procedure that was never completed properly. And subsequent to that, by over more than a year, with a paper trail, the threat of a fine with an expansion of the violation. I think all of those are due-process issues.”
Treasury Department spokesperson Molly Millerwise said the department does not comment “on individual penalties.” She said she was unaware of any other religious groups that had incurred such fines under the restrictions.
Treasury's fine for the Alliance came shortly after administration officials issued a report calling for further restrictions on religious groups in Cuba with which Americans could work. On July 10, the Commission on Assistance to a Free Cuba made several recommendations for U.S. officials to follow in enforcing the Cuba embargo in ways that, according to the commission, would smooth the transition from Castro's regime to a more democratic one.
They included a specific recommendation that U.S. groups no longer be allowed to provide humanitarian aid through the Cuban Council of Churches, which the commission considered to be controlled by Castro's regime.
That led to a protest from several Christian groups associated with the National Council of Churches, including their humanitarian arm, Church World Service. CWS leaders met July 31 with Treasury and State Department officials on Cuba. However, according to a news release from the group, that meeting “did little to assuage [CWS'] concerns … over new restrictions on its established channel of aid distribution to Cuba.”
Both the administration's recommendations and the Alliance's fine come at a time of new restrictions on the way U.S. religious groups relate to Cuba. A new OFAC interpretation of its own rules has made it much more difficult for any denominational entity or religious organization other than a local church to renew its Cuba travel license — groups such as the American Baptist Churches and the Disciples of Christ had license applications denied in recent months.
Several U.S. Christian leaders involved in Cuba say that's because President Bush's administration is maintaining a hard line on the Cuban embargo to please Cuban-American Republicans in South Florida, who loathe Castro and his regime.
“They're trying to manage and control religious travel to Cuba in ways that they view as promoting the administration's political polices, and we think that that is an intrusion into religious affairs and a violation of religious freedom,” said Martin Shupack, Church World Service's associate director for public policy.
But Eric Watnik, a State Department Cuba spokesman, said Aug. 7 that State officials were simply stating the obvious about their position on such Cuban groups. “[T]he Cuban Council of Churches is controlled by the Cuban government — it is the Cuban government. And the point to the embargo is to deny funding to the Cuban government,” he said.
Hastey said Alliance leaders have until early September to respond to the fine notice. It outlined a procedure by which the group may officially appeal the ruling or negotiate for a settlement. He said the group was exploring “all options” as of July 7 but had not yet reached a decision.