Trump’s rules on Cuba travel leave winners, losers

President Donald Trump's new policy on Cuba travel has winners and losers: Group tour operators hope to sell more trips, but bed-and-breakfast owners in Cuba say they're losing business.

Five of 12 private bed-andbreakfast owners in Havana and Cuba's southern colonial city of Trinidad told The Associated Press that they received cancellations after Trump's June 16 announcement.

“It's contradictory that (Trump) says he want to help civil society, the Cuban people, but what he's doing is hurting them, hurting bed-and-breakfast owners in this case,” said Tony Lopez, who rents rooms for $30-$50 nightly in a threebedroom, 16th-floor apartment in Havana's trendy Vedado neighborhood. Those canceling included two Americans worried about legal requirements, including documenting their spending.

“We get a lot of Americans. We're alarmed,” said Eliset Ruiz, manager of a nine-room bed-and-breakfast in Trinidad. “We've had a lot of cancellations for June and July.”

Alex Bunten of Charlotte, Vt., hoped to go to Cuba with his girlfriend in August “without the hassle of tour groups and schedules and such. We like watching the world go by, eating good food, not being herded by an umbrella-holding, annoyingly interesting tour guide.”

But Bunten nixed the idea because under the new rules, only licensed tour operators can take Americans to Cuba on “people-to-people” trips. That's “too much of a hassle,” Bunten said.

Small bed-and-breakfast owners plan to create informal associations of neighboring businesses so they can accommodate larger American groups.

Meanwhile private entrepreneurs worry the government may not allow U.S. tour groups to simply shift their business from state-run hotels to the private sector, at least not without hefty commissions. In the decade since President Raul Castro began allowing more privatesector activity, the government has viewed entrepreneurs as both vital sources of economic growth and as dangerous competitors for sluggish state-run businesses.

Visits to major tourist attractions like Ernest Hemingway's estate and the Tropicana nightclub shouldn't be affected by the new U.S. rules, since neither falls under military auspices. U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, a Cuban-American who supports travel restrictions, suggested in tweets that he'd like to ban attractions run by other Cuban government agencies, like the ministries of culture and tourism. But it will be months before the U.S. Treasury Department announces details on which sites are off-limits.

Rubio also suggested that independent travel might continue. Rubio tweeted that the new rules allow “individual Americans” to “travel to Cuba under Support for the Cuban people category” as long as they use “privately owned lodging.”