Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, and I am feeling

really quite annoyed. Nothing to do with you, nothing to do with the travel industry in general,

but I am very, very concerned about the way that many thousands, hundreds of thousands, possibly, of British travellers are being messed around royally by political decisions taken elsewhere.

And, yes, I mean you, India and the United States. Of course, when COVID rules were

relaxed, what, only seven months ago really, and gradually the world got easier to travel, we thought,

well, this is fantastic. Let's get back to the way we were as quickly as possible.

It turns out there are all kinds of impediments to that, in particular,

the inability of airlines to run the schedules that they had promised,

and, of course, the fact that many countries were still imposing restrictions of

many kinds and those continue but we're kind of getting there but now two really serious blockages

have come about and they are imposed entirely, it seems, through political reasons.

So let's start in America.

America has four, oh, how many, about 63 years, absolutely had it in for Cuba, the largest, most

beautiful Caribbean island, of course.

And they've had economic sanctions in place for six decades.

They have also done everything they can to destabilise the island and to, well, basically do it all the harm they can.

The latest, most spiteful gesture was actually administered in the dying days of the Donald

Trump presidency when he put Cuba on the list of state sponsors of terrorism alongside

Iran and North Korea. And that is clearly ludicrous. If you want to have a list of state

sponsors of terrorism, then, well, maybe I would say at the top, you've got Russia.

Cuba, although it does have serious human rights concerns, of course, it is just absolutely

preposterous that it is there. And it's the sort of decision that you might have thought that

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