How would you like your business to be threatened by the actions of a foreign government even though you don’t do business there?  That’s what has happened to an English travel agent named Steve Marshall living in Spain.  The story’s a little complex so let’s see if we can break it down:

1. Marshall sells trips to sunny places including Cuba, mostly to Europeans, via lots of different websites that he owns and has run since the late 90s.
2. In October about 80 of his websites stopped working.
3. Some of his websites had been put on a blacklist by the Treasury Department because of the tours he booked to Cuba, including literary themed "Hemingway Tours".
4. His domain registrar, eNom, which is based in the U.S., disabled his sites after being informed that they were on the Treasury blacklist.  They didn’t give him a heads up they were doing it either.
5. eNom has refused to release the domains to the travel agent because they were legally obligated to also freeze his assets.
6. All of Marshall’s sites were hosted on servers in the Bahamas.
7. He still doesn’t have his .com domain names back, but he’s slowly been rebuilding his web business using .net domains registered through European based registrars.
8. Weird exception to the domains on the blacklist is the www.cuba-guantanamo.com site that is still up and running.
9. eNom only acted after discovering Marshall’s blacklisting from a blog.  In other words it sounds like no one from Treasury bothered to contact eNom to disable the sites.

Here’s the quote from the Treasury Department rep about their action:

A Treasury spokesman, John Rankin, referred a caller to a press release
issued in December 2004, almost three years before eNom acted. It said
Mr. Marshall’s company had helped Americans evade restrictions on
travel to Cuba and was “a generator of resources that the Cuban regime
uses to oppress its people.” It added that American companies must not
only stop doing business with the company but also freeze its assets,
meaning that eNom did exactly what it was legally required to do.

Here’s Marshall’s reply:

Mr. Marshall said he was uninterested in American tourists. “They can’t go anyway,” he said.

All sounds kind of absurd doesn’t it?  Read the NYT article and you’ll find that there’s a few lawyers who think that the government has overstepped its bounds.  Huh, go figure.