Cuba flies into frenzy to sign trade contracts
Country works to secure business deals in case Trump slams door
Two years into its new relationship with the United States, the Cuban government is racing to sign as many contracts as possible with American businesses to solidify the pact and convince the Trump administration not to overturn it.
The Cuban government has been slow to approve U.S. business proposals since President Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro announced Dec. 17, 2014, that the countries would end more than 50 years of isolation. President-elect Donald Trump vowed to undo some, or all, of that opening, so Cuban officials are scrambling to cut deals and expand the pool of U.S. businesses that could lobby the Trump administration to maintain relations.
Royal Caribbean and Norwegian cruise lines put in requests more than a year ago to run ships to Cuba. They were approved last week. Google waited months for Cuba’s state-run telecommunication company to allow the California Internet giant to store data on Cuban servers to speed up loading times for Google products. Google CEO Eric Schmidt signed the deal Monday in Havana.
“After the election, all of a sudden, the Cuban side has seen that they ought to do their part to make this opening irreversible, and they are trying to sign deals that had been languishing,” said Geoff Thale, program director of the Washington Office on Latin America. “We’re going to see a number of agreements on the commercial side between now and Jan. 20.”
Thale led a delegation of U.S. security analysts this week to meet with Cuban justice officials about law enforcement cooperation between Washington and Havana. Thale, who has taken multiple delegations to Cuba since the opening in 2014, said Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Relations has always been welcoming and responsive. This time?
“They have been incredibly preoccupied trying to work their role in these commercial agreements,” he said.
That rush to ink deals has infuriated opponents of renewed relations with Cuba who want Trump to strike down the economic openings until Cuba improves its human rights and changes its communist government.
“It’s not surprising, though it is sadly disappointing, that U.S. businesses are rushing to sell out and finalize deals with a decrepit Castro regime in the waning days of the Obama presidency instead of waiting for a day when Cuba will be governed by the rule of law,” said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., a Cuban-American among the most vocal critics of Obama’s policy.
The last-minute push caps a busy two years of major changes in the relationship between the longtime enemies. Embassies have reopened in Washington and Havana, President Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Cuba since 1928, and dozens of American businesses have worked to sign deals.
Ten U.S. airlines now fly regularly scheduled commercial flights to Cuba, U.S. cruise ships dock in Havana, four U.S. cellular carriers offer roaming service on the island and scores of U.S. businesspeople, politicians and curious travelers have flooded the island.
But Obama has seen little success in two important areas: human rights and Cuba’s one-party political system. Cuba made 9,484 political arrests through November 2016, higher than the annual figure each of the past six years, according to the Havana-based Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation.
“Rather than seeing an improvement in their day-to-day lives, ordinary citizens on the island have only seen an increase in the dictatorship’s fierce oppression against them and the continual denial of their most basic human rights,” Ros-Lehtinen said.