On January 15, the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the U.S. Department of Commerce unveiled the revised Cuban Assets Control Regulations (CACR) and Export Administration Regulations (EAR), which implement the changes announced on December 17, 2014, by President Obama to the sanctions administered by Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS). The new regulations take effect January 16, 2015, by publication in the Federal Register.
To see the Treasury regulations, which can be found at 31 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), part 515, please see here.
To see the Commerce regulations, which can be found at 15 CFR parts 730-774, please see here.
According to the announcement by the Commerce and Treasury Departments, these measures are designed to:
- Facilitate travel to Cuba for authorized purposes.
- Facilitate the provision by travel agents and airlines of authorized travel services and the forwarding by certain entities of authorized remittances, raise the limits on and generally authorize certain categories of remittances to Cuba.
- Allow U.S. financial institutions to open correspondent accounts at Cuban financial institutions to facilitate the processing of authorized transactions.
- Authorize certain transactions with Cuban nationals located outside of Cuba.
- Allow a number of other activities related to, among other areas, telecommunications, financial services, trade and shipping.
Persons must comply with all provisions of the revised regulations. Violations of the terms and conditions could result in penalties under U.S. law.
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