Republicans target Beyonce and Jay-Z's Cuba visit

Beyonce and Jay-Z leave their hotel in Havana on April 4. (REUTERS/Enrique De La Osa)

Musical power couple Beyonce and Jay-Z are in the Republican crosshairs today after celebrating their fifth wedding annivesary with a trip last week to embargoed Cuba.

Two Republican members of Congress are demanding that the U.S. treasury department investigate whether the couple broke U.S. law in making the journey. 

"Despite the clear prohibition against tourism in Cuba, numerous press reports described the couple's trip as tourism, and the Castro regime touted it as such in it's propaganda," South Florida Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Mario Diaz-Balart wrote in an open letter to the U.S. Treasury Department.

Beyonce and Jay-Z, famously, support President Barack Obama with money and not just mouths. Last September, you may remember, the couple hosted a $40,000-a-head reception/fundraiser for Obama at Manhattan's 40/40 Club, steering an estimated $4 million into the president's 2012 re-election campaign.

Penalties for U.S. citizens visiting Cuba without permission include fines of up to $250,000 and jail time. But it is rarely, if ever, enforced, despite the thousands of Americans who visit Cuba via Canada and other countries in defiance of the decades-old ban.

Mitch Potter is the Star's Washington Bureau Chief, his third foreign posting after previous assignments to London and Jerusalem. Potter led the Toronto Star’s coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he won a 2006 National Newspaper Award for his reportage. His dispatches include datelines from 33 countries since 2000. Follow him on Twitter: @MPwrites 

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HAVANA, Cuba—It was a gut-check moment.

In the middle of interviewing a controversial Cuban journalist in a tree-lined Havana park last month with a photographer/translator from Miami’s El Nuevo Herald, a police car pulled up a few metres away.

In retrospect, it wasn’t the ideal location for meeting with Ivan Garcia, a vocal critic of the Cuban government, to discuss the incendiary political issue of child sex tourism.

But a park bench is where we ended up, the photographer’s small video camera poised inconspicuously on his lap, shooting upwards to capture Garcia’s responses to questions I was posing about Canadian sex tourists and their involvement with young Cuban girls.

We knew in advance Garcia was a risky interview subject.

He is followed by police from time to time ­— surveillance he believes is triggered by his blog posts and reports for newspapers in Florida and Europe.

Among those stories have been accounts of Cuba’s child prostitution market — candid assessments of what the 45-year-old father believes to be a troubling sex trade targeting the country’s most vulnerable.

It’s not the kind of journalism that endears Garcia to a Cuban regime that ranks 171^st out of 179 countries on Reporters Without Borders’ 2013 World Press Freedom Index.

As two police officers emerged from the car, we stared at each other, cameras and notepads quickly tucked away.

For the endless seconds that passed next, I recalled the warnings and the news stories I’d read before landing in Cuba about the country’s arrested and imprisoned journalists.

Then, I watched as the two officers looked our way, paused and went into a nearby home.

“They’re not here for us,” Garcia said. “Relax.”

Easier to say than do.

My photographer colleague and I spent a week in Cuba mostly sleepless, wondering what knocks might come at our hotel room doors in the middle of the night and what explanations we might offer should they seize the material in our hidden cameras and laptops.

“Deny everything,” he advised. “We are tourists.”

How we explain why tourists are recording interviews about Cuban child sex tourism with a dissident journalist and an equally outspoken independent lawyer was never clear to me.

On the way out of the country, I couldn’t find the small visa card I was given upon entry. The Air Canada desk directed me to a corner of the airport to speak with Cuban authorities.

Clumsily explaining the problem I was told to wait. A half hour passed. Heads from inside a small office occasionally ducked out to look at me. A surge of anxiety rose as my flight departure time got closer.

“You’re free to go,” a border official finally told me in Spanish, handing me the required paperwork.

On the flight home to Toronto I watched the film Argo with a deep emotional appreciation for the climax scene in which the plane carrying the undercover American diplomats lifts off the tarmac with Iranian police in hot pursuit.

I love that movie.

Read the Star’s Child Sex Tourism series here.

Robert Cribb is a foreign affairs and investigative reporter at the Toronto Star. Follow him on Twitter: @thecribby.