An article published Wednesday in the Miami Herald breathlessly announced that the reporter had been told that the new OFAC and BIS rules implementing the changes to the Cuba embargo announced by the administration in April would appear in Thursday’s Federal Register. But that didn’t happen. Late on Thursday afternoon, OFAC’s new regulations appeared at the Federal Register Public Inspection Desk with an indication that they would be published next Tuesday, September 8, but were effective as of September 3 when they were made available to the Public Inspection Desk.

The BIS’s implementing regulations, however, are still missing in action, notwithstanding the newspaper article’s indication that they too would be published on Thursday. And there is no indication at the Public Inspection desk of any future publication date for the BIS’s piece of this action.

The OFAC regulations pretty much track what was promised in the April announcement with some interesting additions. First, the definition of family for purposes of travel to Cuba now includes “persons who share a common dwelling as a family with a licensed family traveler,” which apparently means that common-law spouses and, perhaps, domestic partners are authorized to travel to Cuba with persons who have close relatives in Cuba.

Second, although the new regulations, as promised, increase the amount that can be spent during family visits to Cuba from $50 per day to the maximum per diem rate payed for government travel to Cuba, the comments to the new regulations state that no imports into the United States of Cuban merchandise by returning travelers is allowed. So, for those of you hoping that the war on Cuban cigars might be coming to an end in the foreseeable future, dream on. (By the way, I think that the maximum per diem for Cuba is $180 per day, but I’ll be darned if I can verify that from the link given by OFAC for computing that rate.)

The BIS regulations, when they appear, will deal with authorized exports to Cuba, including increasing the baggage weight limitation for travelers to Cuba. The article in the Herald suggests that the BIS regulations might also be somewhat broader than the description of changes in the April announcement:

Among the changes that take effect Thursday afternoon:

• The items people can send to Cuba now include things like digital cameras, personal computers, seeds, fishing equipment, TVs and radios. (Before, packages were limited to food and medicine.)

• The limit on the value of those packages was doubled to $800.

The April announcement indicated that gift parcels could contain “clothing, personal hygiene items, seeds, veterinary medicines and supplies, fishing equipment and supplies, and soap-making equipment” as well as reasonable quantities of items “normally exchanged as gifts by individuals.” No explicit mention was made of several of the items listed in the news report, namely digital cameras, personal computers, televisions and radios. Perhaps these items are going to added because they aren’t clearly things normally exchanged as gifts and because these items are generally consistent with the goal of the rules to increase and enhance communications by Cubans among themselves and with the outside world.

NOTE:Export Law Blog is taking brief vacation for the Labor Day weekend, so the next new post won’t appear until the end of next week. Comments will be checked periodically to release them from the moderation queue. Have a pleasant and safe holiday, everyone, and we’ll see you all again next week.

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