Old Havana

Having wondered whether Russia’s president might become his “best friend” and entrusted its foreign minister with his misgivings about the former FBI director’s sanity, President Trump makes for an unlikely Cold Warrior. And yet he is beating a reactionary retreat toward half a century of failed postwar Cuba policy, rolling back his predecessor’s overdue reopening of commerce and diplomacy with the communist island.

Calling former President Barack Obama’s rapprochement with Cuba’s Raul Castro a bad “deal” — the gravest imaginable sin in Trump’s transactional worldview — the president last week announced renewed restrictions on American travel to and trade with the island. While his stated goal is to prevent enrichment of Cuba’s regime, the policy is more likely to hurt regular Cubans’ prospects and Americans’ freedom to travel.

To the president’s credit, he did not reverse Obama’s decisions to reopen diplomatic relations with Havana, allow direct flights and cruises to the island, and enable Cuban Americans to travel and send money to their homeland. Trump is also maintaining Obama’s less laudable crackdown on Cuban refugees, which rescinded a long-standing policy allowing those who reach U.S. soil to remain.

Castro and his late brother, Fidel, have led a repressive and indefensible regime, but America’s experiment in isolating them had more than enough time to work. It didn’t.

Furthermore, as Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., pointed out, Trump just finished an arms-trading, line-dancing, orb-groping love-in with the medievally oriented Saudi royals. What makes Cuba so different? Trump’s decision to announce his policy among Cuban American hard-liners in Miami provides another clue to the answer: The president’s posture is designed not to secure human rights for Cubans so much as to secure electoral votes for Trump.