A New York man finally agreed to pay a fine of $6,500 to settle a long-running dispute with the U.S. Treasury Department against a trip that he made to Cuba as an unauthorized tourist 14 years ago.
On Tuesday, 38-year-old Zachary Sanders said he was working as a teacher in Mexico when he decided to go to Cuba for a couple of weeks in 1998. Sander's was 23 at the time.
"I wanted to learn about how a socialist country worked in practice," Sanders said in an interview. "I had no illusions. ... I'm not like some diehard supporter of the (Cuban) government or anything like that."
Against the Cuban communist government, the United States restricted U.S. travel to Cuba as part of a 50-year-old trade restriction.
The actual restrictions vary with different U.S. administrations and with evolving state of U.S.-Cuba relations.
When Sanders visited Cuba he did not obtain all the required documents and U.S. Treasury license. A U.S. Customs agent became suspicious when Sanders returned to the United States through the Bahamas without declaring that he had been to Cuba.
The agent also recovered a box of Cuban cigars from Sanders' luggage which he had not declared. Two years later, Sanders received a letter from the Treasury Department asking for details of his expenditures in Cuba.
He got away saying he had lost all the receipts of his expenses. His lawyer, Shane Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights confirmed that Sanders had a constitutional right not to provide incriminating evidence against him.
When the fine was issued, Sanders had successfully battled cancer and completed law school and was practicing in New York. He was denied admission in New Jersey's state bar though he had passed the bar exam. This was because he acknowledged that he had gone to Cuba knowing it was illegal.
Sanders sued OFAC, the Treasury Department and the Justice Department in federal court in 2009, on the grounds that the fine as arbitrary and capricious. He lost and then turned to the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York.
Kadidal said Sanders' fine was still way more than most Americans pay for violating the travel ban, and hinted he had been singled out because he was "an ideological traveler."
Kadidal further added that OFAC resolved more than 200 such cases for "a standard $1,000 settlement" from 2001 to 2004. Some also got away with no fine at all.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
