Punishing Granny Slote

It may sound fictional, but this is a true story narrated by US lawmaker Byron Dorgan in the Senate recently about Joan Slote, a 76-year-old...

It may sound fictional, but this is a true story narrated by US lawmaker Byron Dorgan in the Senate recently about Joan Slote, a 76-year-old grandmother and a champion cyclist, riding about hundred miles a week. She has pedalled through 21 countries. A few months ago, Slote responded to a Toronto-based adventure catalogue for a bicycle trip to Cuba. The ad had incorrectly said that the US law does not ban citizens from visiting Cuba as long as they fly there through Canada. She joined a cycling trip through Cuba.

When Slote returned, she was asked by immigration officials where she had been. She told them she had been to Canada and also to Cuba. It was clear she was not trying to hide any facts. Some time later Slote went to Europe on a bicycle trip, but had to cut short her visit and returned home on learning that her son had a brain tumour. Her son died and when she returned to her own home in Oregon, she saw some letters from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) at the US Department of Treasury. OFAC was upset because Joan Slote had been to Cuba. She was asked to pay a fine of $7,600 plus interest and penalties, adding up to another two thousand dollars. There was the threat that if she did not pay up in time, her social security payments would be attached.

Senator Dorgan, outraged at the harassment of Slote, took up the matter with OFAC and the latter agreed to reduce the fine to $1,900. Slote, who lives on $1,200 a month, paid up the amount in two instalments. Dorgan, while recounting the incident, told the Senate: “The Federal Government ought to be chasing terrorists, not a retired school teacher riding a bicycle in Cuba.”

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In this connection, the senator also mentioned the case of Kevin Allen who travelled to Cuba to bury the ashes of his late father, a church minister in pre-revolutionary Cuba, who wanted his ashes buried in the grounds of the church. Allen faced a fine of $ 20,000 for travelling illegally to Cuba.

“I just don’t understand,” Senator Dorgan said. “We can travel to China. We can travel to communist Vietnam. We can travel virtually anywhere in the world except for three countries: Cuba, Libya, and for now, Iraq. The fact is other communist countries, we are told, will move in the right direction through engagement: engage them in trade and travel and that is the way to persuade them to move in the right direction, towards greater human rights, towards democracy. With Cuba, for some 40 years, we have been telling people: well, you cannot travel there, you cannot trade there, because somehow that would be giving aid and comfort to the Castro government.”

The Senator perhaps did not have the time or inclination to go through the long and dubious record of the US aiding and abetting some of the world’s most oppressive regimes.