Beyond this, I understand that the American authorities have in the past decade put in place a fairly tiresome investigative program to ferret out surreptitious Cuba visiting Americans. I seem to recall some American woman being snagged, if memory serves due to a border official identifying “travel patterns”? Or some such.
In any case, on one hand, it does seem Cuban officials try to be accommodating to Americans visiting Cuban contrary to government wishes, and American governmental entities (at least during the prior Administration) grew rather investigative. That I find sad and wrong-headed (presuming the reports I read in the press are true, I confess it is not something of great import to me, ergo noted merely in passing), as it positively plays the communists game, sneaking up on your own citizens’ for the dubious sin of having visited somewhere with a government you don’t care for, and that the home government doesn’t approve of?
Bother, I say let every one who wants to visit go, the only restrictions should be for safety (thus I would say North Korea is right out due to an unacceptable threat of own-citizen visitors being seized as hostages by the NK gov).
Hm. Interesting. Reminds me (again) of the restrictions in the Middle East on visits to Israel - I understood that if someone wanted to go to Lebanon, it would be best not only not to have any Israeli stamps in one’s passport, but also not to have any stamps from the Allenby Bridge border control in Jordan and whatever the analogous border crossing in Egypt is, as sometimes people were denied entry based on those stamps.