HAVANA — Efforts to catch Americans who sneak into Cuba without U.S. permission or bring home cigars, rum and other souvenirs from legal trips could be distracting authorities from stopping terrorists and drug smugglers, according to a government audit released Wednesday.
The 90-page study by the Government Accountability Office said that nowhere is the U.S. embargo on Cuba more aggressively enforced than at Miami International Airport, where charter flights carry authorized passengers back and forth to Cuba.
Customs and Border Protection officials in Miami conduct extra inspections on 20 percent of passengers arriving from Cuba, compared with just 3 percent of passengers landing from other countries, the report said.
“Customs and Border Protection officers suggest that the high rate of secondary inspections of arrivals from Cuba and the numerous resulting seizures (mostly small amounts of Cuban tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceuticals) occupy a majority of the agency’s inspection facilities and resources at Miami’s airport,” the report concluded.
It said the extra searches strain efforts to “inspect other travelers according to its mission of keeping terrorists, criminals and inadmissible aliens out of the country.”
The nearly 46-year-old embargo was designed to choke off funds to Fidel Castro’s government in an effort to force a change in the communist system. Between 2000 and 2006, suspected Cuba embargo violations constituted 61 percent of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control’s investigative caseload. But Treasury officials insist that enforcing the Cuba embargo requires fewer resources per case than other investigations.
