Spanish shipping line awaits Washington’s OK to ply U.S.-Cuba routes
The Spanish shipping line Balearia has obtained “the first license needed to operate between the United States and Cuba,” according to a statement from the company, based in Denia, in the Alicante region of Spain.
“This license, granted by the [U.S. Department of Commerce’s] Bureau of Industry and Security, allows the arrival and departure of ships to and from Cuba, but not the transportation of passengers for tourism,” says the press release.
However, Balearia expects that, in the coming weeks, the U.S. government will also grant it the OFAC license that “does regulate the transportation of passengers,” the company said in a press release.
[OFAC stands for Office of Foreign Assets Control, an agency of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.]
“With these two licenses, Balearia will have all the permits required by the U.S. authorities and will only have to await authorization from the Cuban government,” the statement added.
According to the statement, the Spanish shipping company has available “in the Caribbean area the high-speed ship Pinar del Río, which has all the necessary Coast Guard certificates to begin operating.”
“This ship has been servicing the route between Fort Lauderdale (north of Miami) and Freeport (on Grand Bahama Island) that Balearia has operated since 2011 under the name Bahamas Express,” the company explained.
Currently, this is done by the ferryboat Bahama Mama.
Balearia would run two routes between the United States and Port Havana: a high-speed vessel from Key West and a ferryboat from Port Everglades.
In 2014, Balearia transported more than 130,000 passengers between the United States and the Bahamas, a volume that represented an increase of 25 percent over the previous year, the statement said.
Currently, the billings from international traffic (in addition to the Caribbean, Balearia runs a route to Tangiers from Algeciras) make up 15 percent of the company’s total revenue. Management’s goal is to reach 50 percent within five years.
To do this, the company is studying the possibility of opening new routes to other Caribbean destinations, like Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic.
Balearia, a shipping industry leader in passenger and cargo transportation to and from Spain’s Balearic Islands and one of the largest operators in the Straits of Gibraltar, has a fleet of 23 vessels and employs some 1,000 people, the press release points out.
