If You're Willing to Spend $5,500 You Can Go to Cuba with National Geographic for 10 Days

Things are moving from bad to worse in American travel to Cuba. Last week, Abercrombie & Kent cancelled its program there after it had received word from the Treasury Department that such tours had to consist of continual, never-stopping activity, a jam-packed schedule of meetings and dialogues with Cubans. Some bureaucrat at the Treasury Department has apparently concluded that the exemption from the travel embargo had to defined in the most narrow sense imaginable. Travel will only be authorized for educational, cultural or religious purposes pursued with an almost ridiculous intensity requiring expenditures by the tour operator of unprecedented efforts and money.

One week after news of Abercrombie & Kent's decision, National Geographic Society announced that it will operate such 10 day tours of Cuba, starting in November. And are you ready for the price? In order to comply with the Treasury Department's strictures, the price will be $4,995 per person for those 10 days (based on double occupancy; single persons will pay more), plus a round-trip charter flight between Miami and Havana costing $500 per person. A one-hour flight between Miami and Havana will be priced at the level that some charter operators charge to cross the Atlantic Ocean!

So the news isn't good. And the only tour operator to announce a less expensive (but still costly) tour of Cuba is Insight Cuba ( www.insightcuba.com ), charging a recently-revised $2,495 (off-season), $2,795 (winter) per person for its least-expensive 7-nighter ("Havana plus Pinar del Rio;" other itineraries are $300 and $500 more), plus what it hoped to be an affordable round-trip air price between Miami and Havana (not yet announced). It's apparent that Insight Cuba has also greatly increased the cost of its program (it earlier announced a starting price of $1,550, subsequently abandoned), now that the Treasury Department has announced unusually onerous rules for the continuous, expensive, heavily-escorted activity that must be built into the tour. U.S. programs to Cuba will, for the time being, be exceptionally pricey, as compared with the far less expensive tours available to Canadian citizens from Montreal and Toronto.