Six local chambers of commerce have an unusual travel itinerary this year: They plan to visit Cuba, a communist country where U.S. companies are prohibited from conducting business.

But that hasn’t stopped chambers in Pasadena, Culver City, Burbank and other places from signing up groups of 30 to 60 travelers to visit the Caribbean nation.

Randy Gordon, chief executive of the Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce, said the reason for his group’s trip is simple: Its member executives and business owners asked for it.

“We kept polling our members and to our amazement a great deal of interest was shown for Cuba,” Gordon said. “I don’t think anybody expects it to lead to business in Cuba. They want the experience of having that taxicab from the 1950s pick them up at the airport.”

Indeed, the trip the Long Beach chamber is taking May 15-23 quickly filled its 60 slots, prompting the group to offer another one in October that already has about a dozen people signed up.

The U.S. government has maintained a trade embargo against Cuba since the revolution in 1959 that brought Fidel Castro’s communist regime to power. That embargo has largely prohibited U.S. citizens from visiting the island, though Cuban Americans with relatives there have been allowed to visit since the Clinton administration loosened travel rules.

It’s still illegal for individual U.S. citizens to take vacations to Cuba, but a change in federal regulations last year by the Obama administration is allowing “people-to-people” groups, including chambers of commerce, to travel there. Under the regulations, the State Department is licensing organizations such as commercial tour operators, think tanks and universities to organize group excursions for cultural exchanges between ordinary citizens.

The wave of local chamber trips follows a trip to the Caribbean island in September by the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and downtown L.A.’s Central City Association. In fact, that trip was one of the first nationally under the loosened rules.

While there is speculation that the trade embargo with Cuba could fall in the next few years and some believe it would be good preparation for U.S. business owners and executives to get to know the island, what’s odd about the chamber trips is that the rules still clearly state that a trip cannot have business development as its primary purpose.

Gordon at the Long Beach chamber recently returned from a conference of chamber executives from across the country and many of them “are jumping on the bandwagon to go to Cuba,” he said.

Christopher P. Baker, a journalist and Cuba travel expert who lives in Palm Springs, said the chambers are simply responding to a national desire among many Americans to visit the island.

A study by the American Society of Travel Agents predicts that 835,000 U.S. visitors would go to Cuba every year if travel bans were lifted completely. In 2010, the most recent year of available statistics, about 63,000 Americans made the trip, not counting Cuban exiles allowed to visit family under a separate program.

“There is tremendous pent-up demand and the new licenses have opened the floodgates,” Baker said. “Organizations such as National Geographic Society and the Smithsonian Institution have gotten licenses.”

Hemingway’s farmhouse

The latest chamber visits are organized by Chamber Explorations, a travel company specializing in chamber of commerce trips that has one of the State Department licenses. The company is a division of Premier World Discovery, a Redondo Beach operator of group travel tours.

Company executives declined to speak for this story, but a press release from the company said it offers standard nine-day trips to Cuba tailored specifically for chambers with flights directly from Los Angeles International Airport to Havana. The cost is $3,799 a person, including air fare.

“The demand and reservations have been tremendous and we are filling departure dates in a matter of days,” President Stephen Birkett said in the release.

Based on promotional information from the Long Beach chamber, the Cuba itinerary includes visits to castles, cathedrals, museums and the farmhouse where Ernest Hemingway wrote seven of his novels. The main business events: a visit to a family pottery workshop and a cigar factory.

Baker, the Cuban travel expert, said that while the trips aren’t typical trade missions, they aren’t vacations either. To promote democracy, the people-to-people program requires structured activities that facilitate interaction between the travelers and Cubans from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

“Just don’t call them tours,” Baker said. “They are educational exchange programs. You aren’t supposed to have fun. Beach time is out of the question.”

Still, the irony of business groups visiting a country that cannot do business with the United States has not been lost on local business leaders.

Nancy Hoffman Vanyek, chief executive at the Greater San Fernando Valley Chamber, said the board wrestled over whether to approve the trip because of concerns that money spent in Cuba would support the Castro regime. (Although Fidel Castro has stepped down from power, his brother Raul now runs the country and so far has only introduced limited market reforms, including allowing people to work for themselves in certain approved job categories.)

“People want to go there and we figured if the chamber didn’t provide this service some other entity would,” she said. “We’re not doing this as a business mission.”

The decision proved popular with members. The Greater San Fernando Valley and Culver City chambers plan a joint trip for Oct. 9-17 with 30 people from each organization. Based on demand, the Valley chamber may add a 30-person trip in October.

Paul Little, chief executive at the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce, takes a different view. He sees his chamber’s trip as laying the groundwork for future business opportunities in Cuba. Ninety travelers from the Pasadena, Burbank and Glendale chambers are visiting in October.

“This is not strictly a business trip, but it’s a chance to meet people who in the future could facilitate commerce,” Little said. “In the next five years or so, the country will open up to trade and tourism.”

Not trade mission

That’s the view held by Kirby Jones, an executive at Consensus Inc., a downtown L.A. community relations firm that organized the L.A. chamber trip under a license held by the Lexington Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

Jones said he tried to give participants a feel for Cuba’s business climate as much as possible within the people-to-people program guidelines.

Typical trade missions involve meeting with U.S. Embassy or Consulate personnel, but because the United States doesn’t have normal diplomatic relations with Cuba that wasn’t possible. What’s more, trade associations don’t exist on the island nation, and one-on-one meetings between buyers and suppliers are prohibited under the people-to-people program.

During the four-day visit, Jones arranged for an economist to talk about the Cuban economy. The group also visited a cigar factory, walked along a street market and ate at a restaurant where they later talked to the owner about his business. For example, some of the restaurants were privately owned, which the government has only allowed for the past 10 years or so.

“If you sell widgets, you can’t meet with widget people in Cuba. We tried to go as far as we could under the license to give people an understanding of the business climate, but stopped one step short of the widget people,” he said.

Carol Schatz, chief executive at the Central City Association, considered the trip a big success because business people could see Cuban entrepreneurs struggling to make the transition to a free market.

“It was fascinating to see this almost Soviet-style communism in a tropical paradise,” Schatz said. “This is going to be a huge market for U.S. businesses in the not distant future.”