Cuba travel policy voids Obama rules
New restrictions ban private trips, military dealings
MIAMI — President Donald Trump announced Friday that he was reversing crucial pieces of a “terrible and misguided deal” with Cuba and will reinstate travel and commercial restrictions eased by the Obama administration so he can obtain additional concessions from the Cuban government.
During a speech in Little Havana, Fla., the epicenter of a Cuban exile community that enthusiastically supported him in last year’s election, Trump said he was keeping a campaign promise to roll back the policy of engagement begun by former President Barack Obama in 2014, which he said had empowered the communist government in Cuba and
enriched the country’s repressive military.
“We will not be silent in the face of communist oppression any longer,” Trump said at the Manuel Ar time Theater, named for a former supporter of Fidel Castro who became a leader of Brigade 2506, the land forces that spearheaded the U.S.-led Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
“Effective immediately, I am canceling the last administration’s completely one-sided deal with Cuba,” Trump said.
After the speech, he signed a sixpage directive ordering new travel and commercial restrictions.
As part of the new policy, Americans will no longer be able to plan their own private trips to Cuba, and those who go as part of authorized educational tours will be subject to strict new rules and audits to ensure that they are not going just as tourists.
U.S. companies and citizens will also be barred from doing business with any firm controlled by the Cuban military or its intelligence or security services, walling off crucial parts of the economy, including much of the tourist sector, from U.S. access.
“We do not want U.S. dollars to prop up a military monopoly that exploits and abuses the citizens of Cuba,” Trump said.
‘Battles of the past’
Despite his grandiose description, the president’s policy represents a middle ground between hard-liners in Congress, including Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, both Florida Republicans who have called for a complete reversal of Obama’s Cuba policy, and business leaders, human rights groups and many of Trump’s own advisers who wanted to preserve it.
It drew swift condemnation from diverse quarters, from congressional Democrats and a handful of Republicans who support greater engagement with Cuba, to business-minded conservatives like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which argued the move would hurt U.S. businesses and jobs.
Still, Trump’s action allowed him to claim credit for taking a tough stand while leaving in place many of the changes made by Obama, which polls have shown are broadly supported, including by most Republicans.
Under Trump’s directive, embassies in Washington and Havana will stay open and cruises and direct flights between the United States and Cuba will be protected under an exception from the prohibition on transactions with military-controlled entities.
Nor does the measure affect the ability of Cuban-Americans to travel freely to the island and send money to relatives there, or abroad array of rules the Obama administration put in place aimed at making it easier for U.S. companies to do business in Cuba.
Just over one year ago, Obama took the stage at a theater in Havana, with Castro in attendance, to reject that thinking and declare that he intended to “bury the last vestige of the Cold War” and“leave behind the ideological battles of the past.”
‘We remember’
On Friday, Trump sought to revive that struggle, listing the misdeeds of the Castro government over more than five decades. “We will never, ever be blind to it,” Trump said. “We remember what happened.”
His audience of Cuban exiles and their families, including Rubio and Díaz-Balart, roared its approval.
“President Trump will treat the Castro regime as the malevolent dictatorship that it is,” Díaz-Balart exulted.
Under Trump’s directive, the departments of Treasury and Commerce will have 30 days to begin writing new travel and commercial regulations. They are instructed to reverse a rule Obama put in place last year to allow Americans who are making educational or cultural trips to initiate their own travel to Cuba without special permission from the U.S. government and without a licensed tour company, as long as they kept records of their activities for five years.
Such trips will now only be possible through a U.S. governmentapproved tour company, as was the case before 2016. The move shuts down what amounted to a backdoor way to allow American tourism in Cuba, despite the decades-old embargo that prohibits it.
Trump is also directing a broad prohibition against Americans doing business with companies controlled by the military, intelligence or security services in Cuba, which own large swaths of the economy through the military’s business arm known as Grupo de Administracion Empresarial SA.