Organizers appear to call off Norah Jones’ concerts in Havana, delete booking website

Two concerts by singer-songwriter Norah Jones in Cuba that would have cost Americans who wanted to attend up to $8,000 appear to be off, after the Miami Herald reported that the Havana hotel offered by the U.S. company organizing the trip is owned by the Cuban military.

After the Herald reported last week on the concert trips that Dreamcatcher Events LLC organized trip for February next year, the company, based in New York, took down its booking website and scrubbed references to the performances from its social media accounts. Jones´ video and statement announcing the trip were also eliminated from the performer’s official website and social media.

Jones’ manager, John Silva, and Dreamcatcher Events did not reply to emails asking if the trip and concerts had been canceled. A person hung up after the Miami Herald called a phone number associated with Dreamcatcher Events.

The Herald reported last week that Americans who wanted to buy a trip to attend two private concerts by the Grammy-award winner in Cuba in February would be staying at the Hotel Grand Aston in Havana, which is owned by Gaviota, the largest military-owned hotel chain in Cuba, which is under U.S. sanctions.

Gaviota appears on the U.S. State Department’s Cuba Restricted List because it is owned by GAESA, a business conglomerate owned by Cuba’s military. But the Hotel Grand Aston, inaugurated in March 2022, is not explicitly named on the list, which, according to State Department’s rules makes it legal for Americans to book a stay.

The State Department created the list in 2017 to ban transactions with Cuban entities with links to the island’s military and security forces. But a State Department’s spokesperson said the list has not been updated since Jan. 8, 2021.

On Tuesday, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken to “immediately” update the list “to account for new hotels and facilities opened since January 2021 and close this glaring gap in our nation’s sanctions policy on the communist regime in Cuba,” Rubio wrote in a letter obtained by the Herald.

Because Hotel Grand Aston, managed by the Indonesian group Archipelago International, is not included on the list, “it is possible for people, like Norah Jones, to organize so-called ‘educational visits’ for American tourists to pay considerable sums of money to Gaviota and thereby fund the ongoing repression, the detention and the torture of Cuban children and political prisoners,” Rubio added.

The senator echoed criticism by Cuban activists who took offense with Jones’ trip to Havana at a time when the government is holding about a thousand political prisoners, including minors, according to estimates by human-rights organizations.

“There is no reason for Americans to be complicit in the ongoing human rights violations against the Cuban people,” Rubio wrote.

Dreamcatcher Events LLC marketed the trip, capped at a hundred people, as a “once-in-a-lifetime event” with prices between $3,000 and $8,000 for four nights at the Grand Aston and tickets to two private concerts by Jones at the Teatro Martí in Old Havana.

Traveling for tourism in Cuba is prohibited, but the organizer said the trip, which would include activities like a tour in an old American car and sightseeing in Old Havana, is an “educational and cultural exchange” that complies with regulations set by the Department of the Treasury.

Those regulations require that group travel for educational purposes, which is currently authorized, “must be for the purpose of engaging, while in Cuba, in a full-time schedule of activities that are intended to enhance contact with the Cuban people, support civil society in Cuba, or promote the Cuban people’s independence from Cuban authorities; and will result in meaningful interactions with individuals in Cuba.”