When Randal McCloy returned to his home after a long stay in the hospital, I got to thinking about the Sago Mine disaster, where McCloy nearly died, and its peculiar connection to Cuba policy.
That's not as far a stretch as it sounds.
When mine operations run afoul of regulations to protect miners, the legal disputes are reviewed by Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) hired to hear cases by the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission. But now, Mine Safety has loaned some of these judges out to the U.S. Treasury Department to hear cases relating to possible violations of the embargo against Cuba. Is this a good idea? To have these judges presiding over cases dealing with the seizure of rum and cigars, or fining grandmas for biking across the island, rather than protecting miners against safety violations that put their lives and livelihoods at risk is a matter worth considering, especially now that mine safety is on our minds.
It's illegal for Americans to travel to Cuba without a license and, under the Bush administration, enforcement of the laws that make it illegal is getting tougher every year. When an American is caught distributing bibles in Cuba, after traveling through Canada to get there, as my friend Joni Scott, the Christian missionary was; or when kids slip in and out of Cuba from Cancun and get caught, as some do, the law provides for fines upwards of $65,000! Violating the Cuba embargo can be serious business.
If you're caught in the Cuba sanctions net, there is a layer of procedural protection; you get a hearing before an ALJ at Treasury. The problem is, Treasury, and it's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), have to borrow ALJs from other agencies in order to hear the cases of citizens asserting their rights to be heard before they're fined for visiting Cuba.
My program, in cooperation with The National Lawyers Guild, tracks the enforcement of Cuba sanctions by the Treasury Department. We know of two such Mine Safety jurists pulling double, even quadruple duty, balancing a big load of mine safety cases along with other dockets belonging to OFAC, Main Treasury, and the IRS. These judges are serious, hard-working people. At the end of February, one had 130 pending mine safety cases, and the other had 203! You'd think their time would be better spent whittling down the backlog and hearing disputes concerning conditions at mines that threaten workers' lives than presiding over possible Cuba sanctions violations.
The United States has had Cuba sanctions for nearly fifty years, and they have never realized their objective of changing the island's government or economic system. Cuba remains a sovereign country following its own path, and is likely to do so for a good long time to come.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress has found that OFAC, by spending so many of its resources enforcing these archaic and useless sanctions, lacks the money and manpower to chase down financial support to Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden. And if this were not enough, the judges needed by Treasury to enforce the rules are diverted from their work hearing cases about violations in our nation's mines.
If I were a miner expecting the federal government to enforce health and safety violations, I'd be more than a little nervous, because the judges are spending time with an old law that doesn't work instead of holding mining companies to account for violating laws that should. The alternative is simple: we should just make travel to Cuba legal and let the judges do what they were hired to do in the first place.
Sarah Stephens runs the Freedom to Travel Campaign, whose website is www.cubacentral.com.