The discovery of obsolete Cuban fighter jets, anti-aircraft systems and other military hardware hidden under bags of sugar in a rusty North Korean ship transiting the Panama Canal has angered Cuban-American lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) treated the incident as if it were akin to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and called for Washington to “immediately reverse its January 2011 decision easing restrictions on people-to-people travel and remittances sent to Cuba; as well as immediately halt granting visas to Cuban government officials.”

Fellow Cuban-American Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) said the Castro regime’s involvement in this illicit arms shipment to North Korea “reinforces the necessity that Cuba remain on the State Department’s list of countries that sponsor state terrorism.” 

In addition, a third Cuban exile lawmaker, Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-FL), recently inserted language into the House financial services appropriations bill for fiscal 2014 that would defund the processing of P2P licenses for travel service providers (TSPs) by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

That, along with the bill’s Section 215 requiring OFAC to report details on exile travel to Cuba and on all remittances sent to the island would effectively hamper future U.S. licensed trips to the island.

“All of these measures would reverse two of the major changes that the Obama administration has made to improve relations between the U.S and Cuban people,” said Emily Chow, program associate at the Latin America Working Group.

“Something like this happened two years ago when Díaz-Balart tried to pass an amendment included in the ‘megabus’ appropriations bill,” she told CubaNews. “Obama issued a veto threat, and the amendment was eventually dropped in conference.

“We hope that the same thing will happen this time around. However we’ll have to wait and see because the Senate hasn't even drafted a version of the financial services bill yet, and they probably won’t until Congress comes back from their August break in mid-September.”

Meanwhile, TSPs who had painstakingly acquired OFAC licenses to offer P2P travel to U.S. travelers are still concerned about Díaz-Balart and other lawmakers’ efforts to scrap future U.S. licensed travel to Cuba.

“Hopefully it will be dropped before it gets voted in Congress,” said Peggy Goldman, co-owner of Friendly Planet Travel Inc., a Philadelphia travel agency that got its first P2P license from OFAC in 2011. “It would be horrific and short-sighted if it’s passed. We have an opportunity for Americans from all over the country to interact with real Cubans. It’s not true that Americans are going to the beach. They actually do engage with the [Cuban] people.” Goldman also decried Rubio’s use of the arms scandal to curtail U.S. travel to Cuba.

“If I can travel freely to North Korea, I can’t understand why we can’t travel to Cuba, too,” she said. “I hope we can get a grassroots effort to object to this.”

For the time being, it appears that the Obama administration is resisting Rubio’s calls for action against the Castro regime. On the contrary, previously scheduled migration talks between Washington and Havana took place as planned.

“We have to learn more about what happened, where and what exactly was on the boat, so we reserve judgment until we have made a determination in that regard,” said State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell, assuring reporters that official P2P policy toward Cuba would not be changing.