With its advertising and subscription revenue insufficient to support its news staff and still provide an acceptable return on capital to shareholders, the Times is turning to new areas of business, including organizing trips for tourists. A "Times Journey" to Iran guided by a Times journalist was the topic of a report here last month that attracted a lot of attention.
Now the Times has added Communist Cuba to the list of destinations of its "Times Journeys." For the sum of $6,495, you too can enjoy nine days and eight nights on a trip that the Times says is "permitted by a special People-to-People license for The New York Times from the Department of Treasury's Foreign Assets Control."
The itinerary includes a meeting with the U.S. government's interests section in Havana, but no visit to Cuban prisons such as the one in which the American Alan Gross is being held for the "crime" of bringing communications equipment into Cuba.
Readers of the extraordinary recent series of editorials about Cuba in the Times — including one calling on the United States government to make it harder for Cuban doctors to immigrate to America — are entitled to wonder whether the editorials had anything to do with the Cuban government's willingness to work with the Times on the trip. The trip raises revenue for both the Times and Cuba's Communist government: two aging, family-run socialist institutions trying with limited success to update their operations for modern times.