Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Trump eyes Cuba reversals
President seen rolling back some but not all Obama-era initiatives
The president may roll back expanded travel and trade, continue allowing remittances and keep the embassies open.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is expected to roll back parts of the historic Obama-era opening with Cuba, siding with hawks who oppose detente and rejecting demands from U.S. businesses for whom the island is a ripe potential market.
The decision follows an inter-agency administration review of one of President Barack Obama’s signature initiatives and would represent a throwback to polices that date to the Cold War.
The review is believed to have been completed some time ago, with White House officials waiting for the best time to release it. Trump could make the announcement as early as this week.
The move could dull a boom in tourism by Americans to Cuba and hurt a burgeoning cottage industry of private enterprise on the socialist-ruled island. And it could allow Russia and China to more easily step in to fill the void.
Some Trump supporters argue, however, that President Raul Castro has failed to improve human rights or expand political freedoms and does not deserve better relations with the U.S.
Human rights is “something that’s very strong to him. … It’s one of the reasons that he’s reviewing the Cuba policy,” Trump spokesman Sean Spicer said in a recent briefing with reporters. Yet Trump has had a selective attitude toward human rights, rarely raising the issue with some of the world’s most abusive leaders.
Lobbying Trump against Cuba ties are two CubanAmerican Republican lawmakers from Florida, Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart. Proponents of continued dialogue and trade, including farm states, businesses, the tourism industry and even a group of retired military officers, have similarly lobbied Congress.
“Normalization was never going to create democracy in Cuba overnight,” said Tomas Bilbao, who is active in promoting U.S.Cuban rapprochement. “The idea was to increase the flow of people, resources and ideas and make the Cuban people less reliant on the Cuban state.”
Two years before he left office, Obama took the dramatic step of revealing the results of what had been a long series of secret negotiations: The United States and Cuba were renewing diplomatic ties after half a century of hostility.
In the months that followed, American entrepreneurs, tourists and even congressional delegations beat a path to the islandbarely 100 miles from Florida.
U.S. hotel chains signed deals, and airlines and cruise ships scheduled dozens of tours to Havana and other Cuban cities. Chicken, grain and other agricultural producers in Louisiana, Kansas and other farm states exported tons of products to Cuba.
Cuba and the United States reopened embassies in each other’s capital, diplomatic missions that had been shuttered in 1961.
Ordinary Cubans, long denied access to the internet, suddenly were able to go online. Castro allowed Cubans to travel out of the country more easily, and an estimated 20 percent of the economy is now in private hands for the first time since Fidel Castro consolidated control after the 1959 revolution.
Obama did not end the U.S. embargo imposed on Cuba in 1960. Only Congress can do that. Trump’s actions would stop the momentum to repeal the embargo.
Obama argued that the policy of isolation of Cuba for more than 50 years had failed to oust the Castros, and although Cuba still had political shortcomings, engagement was more effective than hostility. He crowned the new era by becoming, in 2016, the first sitting U.S. president to visit Havana in 90 years.
Fidel Castro died last year at the age of 90, and his brother Raul, 86, has said he will step down next year after a decade as president.
But leading Cuban dissidents say the situation for human rights has worsened. Jose Daniel Ferrer Garcia, head of Cuba’s largest opposition group, said harassment and arrests of dissidents have spiked dramatically in the last year.
“The United States must continue to be the first defender of those who lack rights and freedoms in the world,” Ferrer wrote in an open letter to Trump. He called for sanctions against the Castro regime.
Trump is not expected to reverse all of the Cuba opening, according to people familiar with the review process. He is not likely to close the U.S. Embassy in Havana, nor would he reimpose restrictions on the remittances that Cuban Americans in the U.S. send to their families in Cuba, something that would anger a large Florida voter base.
He would probably also leave in place Obama’s ending of the so-called “wet foot, dry foot” special immigration status for Cubans. Under rules that were in force for two decades, Cubans who reached U.S. shores were automatically given visas and an easy path to permanent residency.
Obama scrapped the policy in January, saying that normalized relations meant Cubans should follow the same rules as other migrants and refugees.
Trump would likely revert to pre-Obama restrictions on travel by Americans to Cuba and on trade and commerce by U.S. companies by restoring regulations that Obama had lifted. A U.S.-Cuban task force that was meeting regularly to work out additional bilateral agreements on issues such as property claims and cargo shipping would likely be discontinued. He could restore limits on the amount of rum and cigars that American travelers can bring home.
Rubio, one of the chief hard-liners on Cuba, has had a couple of intimate dinners with Trump, including one last Tuesday. Two days later, Rubio was among senators questioning fired FBI Director James Comey and seemed to be one of the most supportive of Trump.