U.S. travel to Cuba gets easier
Deal comes year after Cuba ties renewed
Booking a trip to Cuba is
MIAMI about to get a whole lot easier.
Under an agreement announced Thursday — the oneyear anniversary of the historic shift in relations between the United States and Cuba — airlines can begin operating regularly scheduled commercial flights between the two nations. That means Americans will soon be able to hop online, click a few buttons and head to Havana.
U.S. interest in the long-isolated island peaked this year after President Obama announced that the United States would begin normalizing relations with the communist government. That diplomatic change did little to ease the onerous process Ameri- can citizens go through to get there, including the complicated charter flight system that has been the only way to legally travel between the two countries.
Thomas Engle, the U.S. State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for Transportation Affairs, said there could be up to 110 round-trip flights a day under the new agreement, nearly quadrupling the current flow. That includes 20 flights a day between the USA and Cuba’s capital city of Havana, and 10 a day between the USA and nine international airports spread across the island.
Engle said the United States pushed for unlimited flight opportunities, but the Cubans want- ed to establish a limit, concerned that their airports could not handle such a high volume of passengers.
Traveling as a tourist is forbidden under U.S. law, but Americans flooded the island this year under 12 categories approved by the government, including humanitarian, educational and people-to-people trips designed to increase communication. Jeffrey DeLaurentis, head of the U.S. Embassy in Havana, said this week that U.S. travel to the island was up 50% in 2015.
Airlines operating charter flights to Cuba say there’s demand for more. “Interest in Cuba has reached levels not seen for a generation,” said Scott Laurence, senior vice president of airline planning for JetBlue, which operates charter flights from Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa.
American Airlines shared its excitement with a tweet showing a pilot holding a Cuban flag out the window of one of its planes.