Tough talk, or just talk?
The Arkansas agriculture community, which wants to sell rice to Cuba, is distraught. President Trump declared Friday that he was undoing President Obama’s relaxation of relations with that little communist rice market 90 minutes from Florida.
But the state’s farmers should take heart.
Trump suffers from an addiction to faux-grandiose pronouncements made in the tightly constrained context of a megalomaniacal need for cheers. But what he says for instant gratification might not bear greatly on reality afterward.
Occasionally, then, there can be a bright side to the general oppression of a president utterly lacking in credibility.
Sometimes it can be good that we can’t believe anything he says.
In this case, as usual, Trump’s rhetoric sounded bolder when delivered in a moment of bluster to a carefully selected chorus—in this case, Cuban-Americans in Miami and others opposed to normalization of Cuban relations—than in detailed examination.
Trump really didn’t do that much other than lambaste Barack Obama for being a wuss and declare that he forthwith was undoing Obama’s pitiably negotiated overtures to Cuba.
He did very little substantively other than say we’d now begin a 30-day period to write regulations reflecting his newly declared toughness.
Administration sources explained that these regulations would try to define continued permissible American business and commercial activities in Cuba, but in a way that would keep Americans from effectively enriching the Cuban military.
Trump will leave the nation’s embassies in place. Cruises and flights to Cuba will continue.
But the new policy will provide that, while Americans couldn’t continue traveling individually to Cuba without some special permission, they could continue do to so in groups.
Altogether, it seems the Trump administration is seeking to slice and dice this Cuban issue about as finely as Bill Clinton sliced and diced the word “is.”
The trade embargo against Cuba is a matter of law that already was in place. Food and medicine have always been exempt from it. The problems for Arkansas farmers have been the tightness of regulations and a prevailing mood not to do business in Cuba.
Obama relaxed the mood, and agriculture sales had picked up in the last couple of years.
What farm officials fear, then, is that Trump’s rhetoric—empty though it usually is—might restore the old prevailing mood and, in turn, affect sales volume.
That seemed to be the main concern of the state’s two most agriculturally conscious delegates in Washington—U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford and U.S. Sen. John Boozman. Last week they published an op-ed article in the
Washington Post advocating that the nation begin allowing farm sales to Cuba on a credit basis rather than the strictly cash one now applied.
They and others support legislation to do that. It could still be passed. And Trump has such a disconnect between what he says for cheers and what he accedes to as policy later that he might sign it.
Trashing the idea of Cuban trade before an anti-Cuban audience and then allowing more of it in a farm-credit bill would be vintage Trump.
Let me tell you about a leading Arkansas Republican who seems to get that. He continues to be the state Republican official making the most consistent sense by seeing and expressing issues with pragmatic balance. He seems to know that Trump is nuts, but he accepts Trump’s stylistic appeal in Arkansas and tries to fashion a method from his president’s madness.
The reference, of course, is to Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who issued the following statement about Trump’s folderol on Cuba: “I have continually stated that lifting the Cuban embargo isn’t an all-or-nothing approach. The Cuban government has violated human rights for more than 50 years, and I applaud the president’s efforts to maintain political pressure on a regime that stands in contrast with the very values of the United States. As President Trump pointed out … he intends to keep the U.S. embassy open … . This is the right decision. I would urge the administration and Congress to focus on constructive policy that would benefit Americans, especially Arkansas-based agriculture … . The lifting of credit restrictions on agriculture is a logical first step.” Speaking of slicing and dicing … Let me condense what Hutchinson is saying: Let Trump talk tough for cheers and let Arkansas sell rice for money.
Everybody gets what they want.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@ arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.