By Armando Menocal

I've asked myself, would I tell this story if Craig was still alive? A year ago, Craig Luebben was killed climbing in the Cascades. Over the previous decade, he and I had been brought together by our passion for the people and especially the climbing in Cuba. We had been the first to go and returned again and again.

And we shared something else. Our love affair with this special place was totally illegal, exposing each of us to criminal prosecution and up to 10 years imprisonment and a quarter-million dollar fine—more than the usual punishment for robbing a bank! Then and still, Cuba is the only country on earth that U.S. citizens are prohibited from visiting by their own government.

In time, we acclimatized to criminal exposure, just as climbers do to vertical exposure. I created a website on climbing in Cuba, and no U.S. climber ever asked that I suppress credit for his first ascents.
Still, on our early trips, the U.S. prohibition, terrifyingly named the "Trading With The Enemy Act", was a risk we feared more than any climb. When it came time for Craig to write an article about our first two trips in the winter of 1999, he was desperate not to put himself in a ruinous criminal hole, nailing himself in print and in photos.

There were exceptions to the U.S. travel embargo, and I was to become virtuoso at obtaining official sanctions for athletic exhibitions, environmental projects, and people-to-people educational exchanges. All of them, however, required a prior application and a permit.

Craig couldn't claim we had an official go-ahead on the trips he was writing about. There was one other exception. You were not "trading with the enemy" if you went to Cuba invited and fully-hosted by Cubans, since then, you were not paying or "trading" in the eyes of the U.S. Treasury.

We had made an extraordinary effort to hook up with any Cuban climbers, even starting our trip with Craig's slide show in Havana to see if local climbers showed up. Craig brought extra harnesses and shoes just in case we found Cuban climbers.

It had worked. We climbed and explored the entire island with Cuban climbers. Craig however stretched that into the assertion, as he put it in his article, that the Cubans had "arranged for an official invitation" for us to come to Cuba, "with transportation, food and accommodations provided" to us by the Cubans!

Our climbing trips would appear legal to any government official reading the article.
The idea that the Cubans could pay the way for American climbers was the root of ridicule that Craig was to endure, especially from the Cubans, who were still retelling this story in warmhearted eulogies to Craig after his death.

The Cubans were so poor that on our second day in Cuba, when they took us to their local crag just outside of Havana, we reached it by hitch-hiking a ride on a farmer's tractor. A few years later, I was able to bring over a few of the Cubans for guide training in the U.S. One of them was Carlos Pinelo, the Cuban who Craig had credited with securing our so-called fully-hosted invitation. Even though he had a visa, U.S. Customs pulls over any Cuban for search. Carlos' knapsack contained only two bottles of rum and two pair of underwear. Spying the Cuban rum, the officer pointed at his pack and said, "what's this?" "I was told me to expect to stay awhile, so I brought both pair," was Carlos' straight-faced answer.

We could laugh at Craig's expense because we had discovered that the fabrication had been unnecessary. By the end of 1990s and early 2000s, in fact, almost no one was being fined for traveling illegally to Cuba. Americans were not only going with impunity but writing about everything from the visit of 60 Baltimore little leaguers to one advertising an all gay and lesbian trip to Cuba's nightlife and beaches.

The irony was, of course, that we discovered that the U.S. government was giving the official wink to Cuba travel only after President Bush swung the pendulum to the other extreme, and we began the looney days when Dubya had 26 Treasury snoops chasing travel and money to Cuba, but only three dealing with Americans "trading" with to Osama bin Laden and Sadam Husain.

History is repeating itself. And this time around, we don't have to wait until it changes again to diagnose the condition. Travel to Cuba is once again totally and unconditionally risk-free for American climbers.
Actual fines and prosecutions can be tracked now, thanks mainly to the internet. No one has been fined for illegal travel to Cuba for two years. In all 2009, the U.S. Treasury fined only three individuals for travel-related "trading", but these were for attempting to import Cuban cigars. In the same year, Treasury records show an increase corporate focus, netting a huge $772.4 million in fines.

The government has not come out and said so, but it is evident from the lack of any enforcement that there has been a shift of policy from individual travelers to internet and corporate transactions. The bottom line: The Federal government has abandoned the policing of individual travel to Cuba.

Remove the legal hassle, and Cuba could be the best, perhaps the easiest, and certainly the safest foreign climbing destination for U.S. climbers. Over 300 routes on Cuba's high quality limestone, many of them multi-pitch bolted adventures up imposing walls hung with massive tufas and stalactites that look like gargoyles when seen from afar.

Travel, digs, food, and climbing partners are no sweat. Cuba is the karst climbing of Thailand’s Railae, but without drug-wars, banditry, hostage-taking, and terrorism — hazards that far-ranging climbers now face elsewhere.

And crucial for international destination climbing is full-out information at your fingertips. Cuba Climbing, the first print guidebook to Cuba, has just been published and is available at mountaingear.com and Amazon. There is an extensive, factual, and updated website, cubaclimbing.com. For example, it has every published article on climbing in Cuba, 30 in all.

U.S. climbers must still go through a third country. Your U.S. travel agent can’t book your Cuba flight. You can’t use U.S. credit card for it or in Cuba. Pay everything in cash, and Cuba will not stamp your passport. That’s about it.

Don’t wait for U.S. law to change, or you will be like the million of Cubans in Florida who have waited for 52 years for the Cuban government to change. And don’t make the mistake of so many Americans and think that Cuba is isolated from the world. It is only Americans that are isolated from Cuba. Cuba has seen the influx of leading climbers, such as Lynn Hill, Timmy O'Neil, Neil Gresham, and Jim Donini.
In his providential article, Craig Luebben admitted that it had taken fellow Coloradan Skip Harper five years to persuade Craig to discover Cuba. Skip was a Caribbean climbing pioneer, but he had been forced to go to Cuba alone in the 1990s, because as he said, "no one else would make the trip."  He flew in through "back door" on an old DC-3 that had "no copilot and you could see outside through holes left where some rivets had fallen out."

Today, Boeing and Airbus jets fly frequently from Cancun and Canada. Some things, however, have not changed. Skip was "stunned to find a nearly uninhabited tropical paradise, . . . the Cuban people were warm and friendly to me, and yes, there was climbing potential far beyond descriptions."

Armando Menocal was born in the United States, but his roots and heart are in Cuba. His great-grandmother was a cousin of Mario García-Menocal, a rebel who fought to liberate Cuba from Spanish rule and governed Cuba as president from 1912 to 1921. In the 1998, Armando travelled to Cuba in search of his family roots, and chanced on the limestone walls of Viñales instead. Amazed at the potential, he made dozens of return trips to develop routes and bring gear for the locals. A decade of activism has left an independent Cuban climbing community, free of control or dependence, and the primary developers of climbing in Cuba. It also resulted in Armando being banned from Cuba—by the Cuban Government. In 2009, Armando Menocal and Aníbal Fernández published their guidebook, Cuba Climbing (quickdrawpublications.com). In 1990, he founded the Access Fund, and in 2009, Armando started Access PanAm, a grassroots effort of climbers, organizations, and corporate supporters to keep climbing areas open and protect the climbing environment in all the Western Hemisphere.