Over the last several years, it's gotten easier to travel to Cuba as the U.S. government relaxed a ban on travel and airlines left and right launched direct flights to the island. Slowly and steadily, President Donald Trump's administration has reversed that.
And now The Skift reports that perhaps the biggest crackdown yet is coming – one that could all but eliminate U.S. travelers from visiting Cuba. The U.S. Treasury Department plans to ban all non-family travel to the island, National Security Adviser John Bolton said in a speech Wednesday.
It's unclear when these new restrictions would take place. Nor is it clear whether anyone with a trip to Cuba already booked would be allowed to go.
It's the latest and largest restriction Trump's administration has placed on U.S. travel to Cuba since taking office, reversing former President Barack Obama's decision to repair relations between the two countries and renew tourism.
For several years it was fairly easy for U.S. travelers to visit Cuba, so long as their visits qualified under 12 categories of allowed travel. And it was simple to qualify and visit an island that had been closed off to U.S. tourists for decades.
Yet the Trump administration's latest potential restriction would make visiting Cuba nearly impossible for the average traveler. Bolton and other Trump administration officials have said they want to block U.S. dollars from flowing to the island's regime.
Bottom Line
The details aren't quite clear, but it seems likely that this latest move will halt all U.S. tourism to Cuba.