President’s trademark in Cuba is trademark Trump. His tough talk to exiles is all an act
The revelation that President Trump registered his Trump trademark in Cuba in 2010 to build hotels and golf courses on the island confirms one more time what more than a dozen people who know him have told me over the years: He’s a man with no principles.
Before he hired a Cuban attorney to register his business in Cuba, Trump had vowed to a CubanAmerican audience in Miami that we would not invest on the island while the Castro dictatorship remained in power. “I will go when Cuba is free,” he said in a speech to the Cuban-American Foundation in 1999.
But now we learn from an article by my Miami Herald colleague Nora Gamez Torres that in 2008 the Trump Organization hired Cuban attorney Leticia Laura Bermúdez Benitez to apply to register his trademark for “nvestment in real estate, beauty contests and golf courses on the island. The trademark was approved by the Cuban regime in 2010.
It wasn’t by any means the only example of the Trump Organization and Trump’s closest associates looking to do business in Cuba while Trump was making fiery speeches against the Castro regime before adoring Miami audiences. There are many other — and more recent — instances of Trump’s hypocrisy.
In 1988, Trump Hotels & Casinos paid a consulting firm about $68,000 for a business scouting trip to Cuba, according to Newsweek in 2016. The report carried the headline: “How Donald Trump’s company violated the United States embargo on Cuba.”
Later, executives of the Trump Organization visited Cuba to explore investing in a golf course in 2011, 2012 and 2013, according to a Bloomberg Businessweek report. And former Trump presidential campaign manager Paul Manafort — one of several former top Trump aides who have been convicted on fraud charges — went to Cuba to “meet with Castro’s son” in January 2017, after Trump had been elected, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report.
I’ve met Trump only once, when I interviewed him in 2013, so I can’t claim to know him. But since Florida Sen. Marco Rubio famously called Trump a “con man” in 2016 — before becoming one of Trump’s lackeys in the Senate — there have been dozens of similar descriptions of the president.
Trump’s niece Mary Trump secretly taped the president’s own sister, retired Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, saying that, “He’s a man without principles” and somebody “you can’t trust.”
In recent years, I have talked with many people who know Trump well — including former top White House officials, Trump family members and business magnates. They all painted a similar picture.
Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton told me, referring to the president’s stands on Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Russia and China, that, “He’s not guided by philosophy or strategy.” So much so, that Bolton said he would not be surprised if Trump makes friends with the dictators of Venezuela and Cuba if he wins the Nov. 3 election.
“If the president is reelected, and he never needs to face the voters again, once that guardrail is removed, I don’t think it’s safe to predict what he would do,” Bolton told me.
Trump’s former Latin America adviser Fernando Cutz told me likewise: “I fear that the moment the U.S. elections happen and Florida is no longer necessary in his mind, Trump may try to become friends with [Venezuela’s Nicolas] Maduro, like he has done with (North Korea’s) Kim Jong Un.”
Trump’s niece Mary, who has written the tell-all book “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” told me that Trump has “cheated essentially his entire adult life.” He has cheated with his taxes, with his wives, and with his political stands, she said.
If Trump really wanted to free Cuba, or Venezuela, he would put pressure on Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, his buddy, to stop subsidizing these dictatorships. But Trump’s behindthe-scenes dealings with Cuba are just the latest example that he’s a cheat, and that his rhetoric on Cuba is political theater.