End the Cuba Travel Ban

WFP delegates visit the Oncology Institute The House of Representatives will soon vote on HR 4645, the bill to reinstate our freedom to visit Cuba. We need 10-15 more votes in the House to pass HR 4645 and end the decades-old Cuba travel ban once and for all.

Please call and email your representative today to end the travel ban and jumpstart a more just chapter of U.S.-Cuba relations. Enter your zip code below to get your rep's phone number. Upon calling, simply ask that the representative vote for HR 4645. Feel free to use any of the talking points that appear in the letter below. Then edit the prepared letter as you wish, enter your information, and hit send. (If your rep has already sponsored the bill, the letter heading will say "Already a Sponsor" and the content will express thanks.)

Why travel?
Cuba is the only country in the world that our government bars us from visiting. We now have the historic chance to reverse decades of this bullheaded policy. Two out of every three people in the U.S. oppose the anachronistic ban on travel to Cuba, including 67% of Cuban-Americans. This vast majority recognizes the ban for what it is: a senseless Cold-War-era infringement on our right to exchange experiences and ideas with the Cuban people. But the need to transform U.S.-Cuba policy obviously does not end with travel. For years we have worked with Cuban partners to dismantle the cruel U.S. embargo that has restricted Cubans' access to food and medicines. The travel ban is widely seen as the linchpin for the embargo. If we succeed in removing this backwards ban, we move much closer to unraveling the embargo. To get there, we need to take the first step: please call or email your representative today and ask that she or he vote for HR 4645.

What's in the Bill?
Click here to read the text of HR 4645. Introduced by Rep. Peterson (D-MN) and Rep. Moran (R-KS), HR 4645 builds on the momentum of last year's widely-supported bill to end the travel ban, which netted 177 co-sponsoring representatives thanks to your advocacy. The language on travel is similar to last year's bill: it would end the travel ban for all U.S. citizens. HR 4645 also includes agricultural provisions to facilitate greater agricultural trade with Cuba. These provisions place us in a better position to garner the votes to make free travel to Cuba a reality. According to our friends at the Latin America Working Group, the agricultural portion of the bill would do two things:

Allow banks in Cuba to wire payments for ag purchases directly to the U.S. bank of the producer, rather than making the payment through a third country, which adds time and cost;
Restore the traditional definition of "cash in advance," which transfers title of the product (after payment is received) once the shipment has arrived in the Havana port, rather than while still in a U.S. port, which leaves the commodity vulnerable to being confiscated.

While this bill is not what we had originally envisioned, the economic and political moment means that Congress is focused on creating jobs. The Peterson-Moran bill will achieve our goal of ending the travel ban on Cuba, but it will also create jobs here at home in the agricultural, travel, hospitality, dairy, and other industries that have been hard hit by the recession.