A spokesman for the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) told Export Law Blog this morning that discussions between OFAC and the North Pole over Santa Claus’s Christmas Eve itinerary had broken down and were not expected to be resumed before Santa’s scheduled departure on December 24 at 10 pm EST.

The dispute arose from a dilemma that the U.S. sanctions against Cuba posed for Santa’s planned delivery of toys to children in Cuba. If Santa delivers toys for U.S. children first, there will be toys destined for Cuba in the sleigh in violation of 31 C.F.R. § 515.207(b). That rule prohibits Santa’s sleigh from entering the United States with “goods in which Cuba or a Cuban national has an interest.” On the other hand, if Santa delivers the toys to Cuban children first, then 31 C.F.R. § 515.207(a) prohibits the sleigh from entering the United States and “unloading freight for a period of 180 days from the date the vessel departed from a port or place in Cuba.”

A press release from the North Pole announced that the OFAC rules left Santa no choice but to bypass the children of the United States this Christmas. A spokesman from OFAC warned that if Santa attempted to overfly the United States, his sleigh would be forced to land and his cargo seized. He continued:

We know that the outcome is harsh, but we cannot allow Fidel Castro’s regime to continue to be propped up by Santa’s annual delivery of valuable Christmas toys to Cuban children.

Congressional leaders did not return our calls.

This post is an annual Christmas Eve tradition and appeared previously in 2007 and 2008 in slightly altered form. Export Law Blog would like to take the opportunity of this post to extend its best holiday wishes to all of its readers. Posting will be light between now and the end of the holidays due as much to the holidays as to a heartless clerk at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals who established a briefing schedule that requires me to file a brief on December 30.

Last week the New York Philharmonic announced that it had been forced to cancel its planned concert in Cuba at the end of October. Although the Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) granted licenses to let the instrumentalists travel to Cuba, it declined to permit the orchestra’s patrons who were footing the bill for the trip to tag along.

This decision seems at odds with current initiatives by the White House to ease travel restrictions to Cuba. It now appears that the outcome was the handiwork of New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, who threatened to vote against health reform if a single note of Gershwin was heard in a Havana concert hall. Menendez was reportedly infuriated by the recent success of a concert by a Colombian pop-star in Cuba, and didn’t want such a horrifying event to recur if the New York orchestra traveled to the island. Apparently for every note of Beethoven that a Cuban hears, Raúl Castro gets another week in office and Fidel draws another thousand breaths.