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US scientists intending to travel to Cuba for a conference on coma and death this week were informed five days before the opening ceremony that they would not be permitted to attend.
The bureau that enforces restrictions on travel to Cuba – the Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) – has yet to give its final ruling on the matter, even though the meeting is underway. But last Thursday (March 4) it issued “guidance” that US delegates would most likely not receive authorization for the trip.
Between 75 and 100 US delegates were due to attend the Fourth International Symposium on Coma and Death, which started on 9 March and runs for four days in Havana. US nationals would have accounted for about half the audience.
“This was a high class-scientific conference,” said Stuart Youngner, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Case Western Reserve University and one of those scheduled to speak in Havana. “The subject was brain death, coma and its relation to organ transplantation, hardly controversial or something that threatened the security of the United States.”
OFAC issues two kinds of travel licenses: a general license and a specific license. Bob Guild, program director of Marazul Charters of Edgewater, New Jersey, the company that was organizing the group's travel to Cuba, said that delegates were rejected under the two categories of general license that apply to conferences in Cuba.
The first allows participation in conferences which are sponsored by an international organization not based in the US. The Cuban meeting is endorsed by the London-based World Federation of Neurology. Yet on March 27, Guild and the US delegates received letters cautioning them that they were not covered by this category.
“In subsequent conversations, OFAC indicated that the symposium did not meet the criteria because it had been initiated and organized by the Cuban Society of Clinical Neurophysiology,” said Guild. “Also, there had been three previous symposia on coma and death and they had all taken place in Cuba.”
The second category allows professionals to travel to Cuba if they are conducting research of an academic, non-commercial nature on a full-time basis in Cuba, as long as the research “has a substantial likelihood of public dissemination,” according to the regulations.
The US researchers were informed last week that they were also likely to be excluded under this category. “[OFAC does] not consider that research can be done at any conference,” said Guild. The specific license was their last resort, and it was this that they were warned they would be unlikely to be granted on the evening of March 4.
OFAC refused to comment on the situation. The decision comes on the heels of another from the same office that US publishers editing texts from embargoed nations could be liable to prosecution.
“This is maddening,” said Mary White of Wright State University, one of the frustrated US delegates. “The director of the coma conference, Dr. Calixto Machado, is a leader in this field. From a professional standpoint, we in the US would like to keep up with what he has to say.”
“The point for us is that this conference deals with important issues for the healthcare of people around the world, including Americans,” she said. “The issues surrounding coma and death have direct implications for organ transplantation as well as the care and treatment of people in persistent vegetative states and minimally conscious states.”
Jeremy Horne, a freelance philosopher working out of Mesa, Arizona, and another of those who hoped to be in Havana this week, wrote to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) asking that the AAAS intervene. As of March 9, the AAAS was still considering its position and Horne had not received a reply.
Guild said the last few years have seen scientists and other academics traveling to Cuba in greater numbers under the general license, particularly since 1999. But in the last year or so the restrictions have been interpreted more severely, and this is not the only conference to be affected.
“This week we have been forced to cancel participation in a neurology conference and later a neurophysiology conference,” he said. “Later this month is the Pan-American Congress of Child and Adolescent Mental Health which may or may not be covered under the new definitions.”
Mavis Anderson, a senior associate at the Latin America Working Group, a watchdog organization in Washington DC, described the decision as a “a blatant misinterpretation of the existing guidelines.” But she said it is in line with the Bush administration's current attitude towards Cuba.
“All indications are that these destabilizing activities will accelerate as the election approaches,” said Anderson. “By all measures, US-Cuba relations have sunk to their lowest point since 1996.”
Editor's note: See a letter on this story.
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