New rules on gifts and cash to Cuba take effect Thursday
The new rules regulating what gifts and how much cash can be sent to Cuba announced by the White House almost five months ago will finally become official Thursday, The Miami Herald has learned.
In April, President Barack Obama lifted caps on Cuban American travel to the island and the money that can be sent to relatives. But the official regulations that make those changes possible had not been published until now.
That left people who were eager to send money and gifts in limbo, because agencies such as Western Union and shipping companies hadn't received any legal notice of the change.
"When the president made that announcement, people were calling continuously and showing up here with boxes," said Santiago Castro, owner of Mambi International Group, which sends packages to Cuba and books trips to the island. "We had to tell them no, because as far as we knew, we still could not send things like clothes and shoes.
``We expected the president to keep his promise.''
The official U.S. Department of Treasury and U.S. Commerce Department rules will be published in the Federal Register Thursday afternoon, a senior administration official said.
The delay came because the rules were ``not simple to write,'' and the people charged with drafting them were also saddled with other responsibilities, the White House said.
``This gets the U.S. government out of the business of regulating the separation of Cuban families,'' a senior administration official told The Miami Herald.
The new rules also allow people to ship a wider pool of items to Cuba and permit American companies to provide telecommunications services in Cuba. They let Americans pay a Cuban's cellphone bill -- as long as the provider is a non-Cuban company.
Among the changes that take effect Thursday afternoon:
• People with relatives on the island can travel to Cuba to visit a broader range of relatives, with no limit on the number of their visits or how long they stay. Their spending limit is increased to $180 a day.
• The items people can send to Cuba now include things like digital cameras, personal computers, seeds, fishing equipment, TVs and radios. (Before, packages were limited to food and medicine.)
• The limit on the value of those packages was doubled to $800.
• U.S. companies can provide telecommunications between the United States and Cuba, such as fiber optics, satellite radio and TV.
• Anyone in the United States can now send a package to anyone in Cuba. Before, if there were five people in a single household, a person could only send them one package a month. Now Americans can send five.
• The rules that prohibit cash and telecommunications gifts to senior government and party officials remain.
``Part of what you have is removing the U.S. government as an impediment to the kinds of activities people recognize the value of,'' the U.S. official said. ``The real question here now is the Cuban government.
``The Cuban government likes to blame the limited access to information on limited bandwidth, and they blame that on the United States. After these regulations, to the extent there is limited flow of information in Cuba, it will be very clear that those limitations are coming from the Cuban government.''
The Cuban government welcomed the changes but has yet to respond with any notable changes on the island.
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