Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder and I'm delighted to say I'm joined by my colleague Charlotte Hindle who handles a lot of the questions that come into me who is going to pick up on a subject which is really exercising a lot of people and Charlotte that subject is.

Yeah the subject is about visiting Cuba, having a Cuban stamp in your passport, and then getting into the US and what the rules and regulations are around Estes.

Well, let me tell you how we got here.

President Trump had a final act of vengeance against Cuba before he left office.

So this was January 2021 and he decided that he was going to put Cuba on the list of state

sponsors of terrorism. Now, compared with many other countries around the world,

which are most definitely state sponsors of terrorism

and which don't appear on the US,

this is absolutely absurd.

But he decided to put it along the Caribbean's largest island,

alongside Iran, North Korea and Syria.

Now, that's ridiculous from my point of view. Yeah, there's lots wrong with Cuba and its political

system and its totalitarianism, but it is not a state sponsor of terrorism in any recognisable way.

However, the fact that it has been so designated

and the fact that President Joe Biden has decided not to remove Cuba from the list

has really serious implications.

Unbelievably, and bear in mind that the US absolutely despises Cuba and for decades has been

doing everything it can to destabilise the country.

So therefore, attacking its tourism sounds like a really good idea, but they've done it

in a way which is actually penalising people who

went to Cuba nearly 11 years ago. The US State Department keeps repeating to me. If you're British

and you have been to Cuba since the 1st of March 2011, you cannot use the very swift, the very cheap,

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