Legalize It: Cuba

Those seeking legal travel to Cuba’s best flyfishing waters have been given a glimmer of hope thanks to a loosening of people-to-people tour regulations recently published by the U.S. Treasury Department. People-to-people contacts, designed for educational purposes to bring regular Cubans and Americans together, were approved in 1999 under the Clinton administration. They disappeared in 2004 under Bush.

New guidelines say people-to-people tours must guarantee a “full-time schedule of educational activities that will result in meaningful interaction” with Cubans. A previous requirement to file itineraries ahead of time has been nixed, “possibly making it difficult to police whether tours will follow the spirit of the law.”

According to the Associated Press, more than a dozen travel groups have applied for licenses to operate on the island after details of the change were put forth in April. Waiting for word from Washington, Insight Cuba, for instance, hopes to begin trips in as little as 6 weeks.

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