Biden said to be reassessing Cuban remittances, staffing at embassy
UNITED STATES President Joe Biden on Monday ordered the State Department to create a working group to review US remittance policy to ensure that money that Cuban Americans send home makes it directly into the hands of their families without the regime taking a cut.
He also ordered a review of the viability of increasing staff at the US Embassy in Havana. The White House is hopeful that a boost in staffing could help it better facilitate civil society engagement following one of the communist island’s biggest anti-government demonstrations in recent memory.
The actions were detailed by a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the Biden administration hadn’t yet publicly announced the effort.
It comes a little more than a week after thousands of Cubans took to the streets of Havana and other cities across the island to protest food shortages and high prices during the coronavirus crisis. It’s a level of frustration not seen in Cuba in more than 60 years.
Biden is also calling for the administration to work with Congress to identify options to make the internet more accessible on the island. The regime moved to quickly cut off internet access to stop images of the protests from being broadcast to the world. Republican lawmakers have been urging Biden to make free satellite internet access available to dissidents to help them subvert the Cuban government’s effort to stop activists from getting their messages on social media.
The administration will also look to work with international organisations to increase humanitarian assistance, while the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control will explore sanctioning Cuban officials who committed humanrights violations against peaceful protesters in Cuba, the official said.
Biden senior adviser Cedric Richmond and Juan Gonzalez, a senior National Security Council official, met on Monday with Cuban American leaders to hear their policy recommendations and concerns in the aftermath of the demonstrations, according to the White House.
Biden, who has been under congressional pressure to take action, last week called Cuba a “failed state” that was “repressing their citizens”.
But Biden also suggested that taking effective action was complicated.
“There are a number of things that we would consider doing to help the people of Cuba, but it would require a different circumstance or a guarantee that they would not be taken advantage of by the government,” Biden said. “For example, the ability to send remittances back to Cuba. We would not do that now because the fact is it’s highly likely the regime would confiscate those remittances or big chunks of it.”
The dramatic drawdown of embassy personnel from Cuba began in the spring and summer of 2017 in response to unexplained brain injuries suffered by American diplomats, spies and other government employees posted to the island.
The Trump administration, in its antipathy towards President Barack Obama’s rapprochement with the island, moved to reverse many of the Obama administration‘s initiatives, reimposing restrictions that had barred direct commercial flights by US carriers to multiple Cuban airports and port calls by US-registered cruise ships; sharply curtailed remittances that Cuban Americans were allowed to send to relatives on the island; barred financial and commercial transactions with most Cuban companies affiliated with the government or military; and redesignated Cuba as a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’, in part for its support of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Biden said, as a presidential candidate, that he would revert to Obama-era policies that loosened decades of embargo restrictions on Havana, and is reviewing its Cuba policy.
Some of the more liberal members of the Democratic Party, most notably Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, have criticised the Cuban government, but also called on Biden to lift the embargo, and argued that the embargo policy is contributing to Cuban suffering.