Nov. 9, 2004

For immediate release

Contact: Peter Swanson, editor@cubacruising.net

Rio Communications launches web magazine for cruising the Cuban coast
‘at the exact worst time in history’

Rio Communications, a Florida-based marine news group, has launched an online magazine dedicated to cruising the coast of Cuba despite current regulations that effectively ban U.S. citizens from traveling there by boat. The website address is cubacruising.net, a name intended to evoke the various radio “nets” that provide community and essential information to expatriate cruisers throughout the Caribbean.

The Cuban coast, with its 2,000 miles of coastline, 1,600 cays and dozens of bays and inlets, comprises some of the finest cruising grounds on the planet precisely because of 40 years of enforced isolation. If you want to travel back in time to see what the Bahamas and the Caribbean were like in the days of Ernest Hemingway, you could do no better than a voyage to Cuba. The sheer size of it—and in such a state of preservation—combined with Cuba’s rich history and culture and her friendly people surely elevate Cuba to one of the top three cruising grounds in the world.

Right now, European and Canadian cruisers are enjoying these waters with impunity. To them, cubacruising.net will strive to be both a source of information and an outlet for the stories they have to tell. It is axiomatic that once cordial relations are reestablished coastal and marine infrastructure will develop at a blinding pace. The goal of cubacruising.net will be to chronicle these changes from the coastal cruiser’s point of view, providing timely intelligence to the tens of thousands who will make the crossing from Florida.

For now, cubacruising.net is committed to baby steps. It has posted an excellent series of stories by Canadian writers David Allester and Eileen Quinn, not to mention a rueful account by author Bruce Van Sant. Valuable and hard-to-find sources of information about Cuban winds, currents and weather have also been posted. Additionally, Rio Communications has applied for a Treasury Department permit to mount an expedition along the Cuba’s north coast in 2005 to populate cubacruising.net with homegrown content.

Cubacruising.net’s editor and publisher is veteran newspaper editor and marine journalist Peter Swanson. Swanson likes to joke that the website was launched “at the exact worst time in history” because of stricter measures enacted by the Bush administration against Cuba. Swanson stresses that cubacruising.net will strive to avoid politics, reporting on them only to the degree that they affect cruising sailors and powerboaters. That is not to say that cubacruising.net is totally silent about politics; it supports the right of U.S. citizens to travel by boat to a nation that poses no threat to the security of our American homeland.

In the “Our View” section of the site, the equivalent of a newspaper’s editorial page, Swanson writes:

“Obviously, given the nature of the Cuba Cruising Net, we would be pretty silly not to support the end of the trade embargo with Cuba. Fidel Castro and his government will be judged by history. Whatever you think about this man and the government he controls, you have to admit that the 40-year U.S. trade embargo against Cuba has failed to accomplish its goal of regime change, while imposing decades of hardship on a population that is largely blameless and powerless.

The editorial concludes with a question: “Most recently, the Bush administration has taken America’s longstanding failed policy toward Cuba to its illogical extreme. It has managed to build a wall around Cuba that is 10 miles high but only an eighth of an inch thick. Such a structure, thinly built of sheer nonsense, surely must shatter and fall, and soon. Besides, doesn’t America have bigger fish to fry right now?”

Cubacruising.net aims to be a self-sustaining endeavor in the short run and to eventually turn a profit through advertising and sponsorships. The full potential of the Cuban cruising marketplace was described in the 1994 report “The Potential Impact on Florida Marine and Boating Based Industries of a Post-Embargo Cuba: An Analysis of Geographic, Physical Policy and Industry Trends.” This 147-page document was written by the University of Florida and marine industry experts, who describe Florida’s waterways in terms of an interstate highway to Havana.

“Anybody in the marine industry who seeks to reach these southbound sailors will have a venue with cubacruising.net. Eventually, as marinas and other marine services grow and expand in Cuba itself, cubacruising.net will be their voice,” Swanson says.

Swanson is a former senior editor at Yachting magazine and former editor of PassageMaker magazine. During a 20-year journalism career in New Hampshire, including four presidential primaries, he served eight as editor of the statewide New Hampshire Sunday News. In 1998, he was a principal figure in the launch of a new Sunday newspaper in New Hampshire; as such he was the first editor of Foster’s Sunday Citizen, sister paper of Foster’s Daily Democrat, a regional newspaper group spanning from the Lakes Region to the Maine-New Hampshire coast.

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