You Can't Go Home Again

The Department of State has chosen the worst possible time to enforce its ban on travel on U.S. citizens to Cuba, a time when information about the island seems least reliable, and curiosity about it most pressing. American passports, it is true, are not good for travel in East Germany, or in Albania, or in Cuba. But no one has ever been fined five thousand dollars, or sentenced to five years in jail, for going to the first two. Yet that is what awaits the American who goes to the last.

The only restrictions a free government can property place on the right to travel of its citizens are those which protect them from bodily harm. There is no such danger in travel to Cuba; Cuba, unlike China, welcomes American visitors. Freedom of movement is a necessary corollary to freedom of speech, to the freedom to be informed. The democratic process cannot thrive entirely on second-hand news reports and government press releases. Americans must have the liberty to go where they want to, when they want to. travel to Cuba will come inevitably, and it will come

A judicial test on the constitutionality of the ban on soon. Unhappily, the first such test will probably involve the students who leave for Cuba Sunday on the free ride being offered by the Cuban Federation of University Students and the "Ad Hoc Student Committee for Travel to Cuba." There must be a test case--but it would be hard to imagine a worse one. The leader of the Ad Hoc Committee is a frank communist sympathizer, and because of the very nature of the junket, most of those who will accompany him will probably be communist sympathizers too. It is a shame that the State Department has made it necessary that those who care deeply about freedom will have defend it in the persons of so undeserving a bunch.