1963 August 1

President Kennedy Denounces U.S. Travelers to Cuba as “Communists”

 

President John F. Kennedy on this day labeled as “definitely Communists” some of the 58 Americans who traveled to Cuba in defiance of a U.S. ban on travel to that country.

The group had left the U.S. on June 28 and reached Cuba by way of London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Prague. As soon as they returned to New York City, their passports were seized by federal authorities. The ban on travel to Cuba infringed on Americans’ right to travel and to visit parts of the world and form their own opinions about those places.

It was completely inappropriate for the president of the United States to publicly smear private citizens regarding their political views or affiliations. It is almost certain that the information he used came from FBI surveillance of alleged Communists and radicals. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover had a long career of labeling as communists people with leftist or liberal views or associations even where there was no clear evidence of communist membership or beliefs. Kennedy came into office as a hard line anti-Communist, and his statement on this day was fully characteristic of his political outlook.

On December 17, 2014, after decades of hostility between the two countries, President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro announced that they would begin the process of normalizing relations between the two countries. In November 2017, however, President Donald Trump reversed Obama’s actions and placed new restrictions on travel to and business with Cuba.

Read: Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (2000)

View a timeline on U.S. – Cuba relations, 1959-2021 here

Read: Richard Gott, Cuba: A New History (2004)

Learn more about the history of U.S. restrictions on travel to Cuba: https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL31139.pdf

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