Trump’s U.S.-Cuban reversal
Regrettably, the remarkably important relations between the United States and Cuba, currently under review, will not escape the disruptive gaze of the Trump White House.
Sooner than we think, the Trumpistas will move to upend the enormous progress made by former U.S. President Barack Obama to rebuild a respectful and constructive bilateral relationship.
After having dinner recently with Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida — who is a staunch critic of Raul Castro’s Cuba — President Trump indicated that the two are in sync on U.S. policy toward Cuba.
That obviously spells bad news for any hope of a deepening rapprochement between the two erstwhile Cold War foes.
While initially approving of a U.S.-Cuba normalization under Obama, Trump changed his mind in September of 2016. Reading the political tea leaves, he then started talking about halting the warming of bilateral relations and even reinstating Washington’s decades-long Cold War stance toward Havana.
It is worth mentioning that Donald Trump garnered 54 per cent of the Cuban-American vote in Florida (compared to Hillary Clinton’s 41 per cent) in the November 2016 U.S. presidential election. Interestingly, former U.S. President Barack Obama won 53 per cent of Cuban-American voters in the 2012 presidential campaign (to Republican Mitt Romney’s 47 per cent).
Many pundits had predicted that the increase in the Latino vote in Florida—especially among Puerto Ricans and younger Cuban-Americans in the Orlando area, would tip the battleground state into Clinton’s win column. But it is entirely possible that undecided Cuban-American voters, who generally dislike any notion of a U.S.-Cuba thaw in bilateral relations, voted for Trump because of their disapproval of Obama’s December 2014 diplomatic opening to Cuba.
The Republican nominee, for the first time, even gained the endorsement last October of the hardline association representing the veterans of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.
He went on to pledge taking a tougher line toward Cuba unless the Castro government altered its political system and guaranteed “religious and political freedom for the Cuban people and the freeing of political prisoners.” All of this, of course, is a political non-starter for the Cubans.
I suspect that the heretofore productive U.S. negotiations with the Cubans will now come to a screeching halt. And all the heavy diplomatic lifting that has been done to this point will be all for naught.
Trump will also likely move to rescind many, if not all, of Obama’s previous executive orders on unwinding the U.S. government’s five decades of Cold War-like policies toward Cuba. In addition, he will do precious little to remove the ineffectual U.S. economic blockade against the tiny Caribbean country.
The one area, though, where the Trump administration might be wary of tinkering with is the Obama measure to expand people-to-people contacts through increased travel to the country.
Tens of thousands of Americans, aboard numerous daily U.S. flights to various parts of Cuba, have already grown accustomed to visiting the “forbidden” island destination.
Turning back this travel clock, then, would not be without risk.
Moreover, U.S. businesspeople are presently positioning themselves and scouting out viable commercial opportunities in Cuba — not the least of which are U.S. cruise line companies located in Miami. Trump may well be aware of the political backlash that would come from rolling back the travel opening, though he could substantially reduce the number of categories that currently permit such visits to the island.
By doing so, it will mark the beginning of a return to a failed U.S. policy of isolation, hostility and punishment. And it will leave the United States alone among the community of states that have long ago normalized relations with Havana.
Accordingly, a Trump administration will undermine gradually improving U.S. relations with the rest of the Americas. Indeed, by reversing Obama’s embrace of Cuba, President Trump will create diplomatic tensions with countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, squander a tremendous amount of hemispheric goodwill and open up greater political and economic opportunities for its Russian, Chinese and Iranian competitors.
Clearly, this is one “enemy” that Donald Trump does not need to resurrect. For purposes of hemispheric stability and comity, he would be well advised to leave the Cuba file as is for a few years.
But if his first chaotic month in office is any indication, we all know the value of the advice that he is being given these days. So get ready for a return to a U.S.-Cuba relationship trapped in a Cold War time warp.