A step back
Trump’s partial reversal of Obama’s Cuba initiative isn’t good for U.S. businesses.
President Donald Trump’s new Cuba policy, unveiled on Friday to a wildly cheering Cuban American crowd in Miami, will make it harder for most Americans to travel and do business in Cuba at a time when we should be building on predecessor Barack Obama’s historic opening to the island.
Fortunately, the changes are only a partial reversal of the Obama initiative. Perhaps that is because they are less about real policy than they are paying off a political debt to Cuban American voters whose support gave Trump a narrow victory over Hillary Clinton in the key battleground state of Florida.
It’s worth noting that now most Americans will have to jump through bureaucratic hoops again to go to Cuba. Those barriers were largely eliminated by Obama, but Cuban Americans will still be able to travel freely back and forth and send unlimited money to relatives.
We won’t know how extensive the hoops are until the government publishes the new standards.
Not all the news is bad: U.S. commercial flights and cruise travel will continue and the U.S. embassy in Havana will remain open, meaning diplomatic relations will continue.
As for business, Trump has created a significant barrier by prohibiting commerce with the Cuban military, which has companies that control much of the island’s socialist economy.
Our view is that the only thing this will accomplish is hurting U.S. businesses eager to tap into the long-forbidden market of 12 million people.
Why do we say that? Because after almost 55 years under a U.S. trade embargo aimed at destroying them, Cuban leaders have learned how to adjust and survive.
For them, Trump’s policy is just another variation of a long attempt to use trade, or the lack thereof, to bring the communist-led government to its knees.
Obama chose a different, better path of acknowledging that the embargo had failed, that Cuba would determine its own future, and it was time for the U.S to exert its influence in a more intelligent way, which is to say through its people, not politics.
Trump, as he is wont to do, classlessly blasted Obama several times, telling the cheering crowd, “It’s hard to think of a policy that makes less sense than the prior administrations’s terrible deal with the Castro regime.”
We would just make this point: Our policy toward Cuba has been a disaster from the beginning and served only to harden the resolve of Cuban leaders Fidel Castro and brother Raul to maintain independence from the U.S. and chart their own path.
If Obama tried to change that, it was probably because he realized that the long-held notion that the Cuban government will succumb to U.S. economic or political pressure in any way is a fantasy.
Maybe one day Trump will understand, too. Maybe he already does. We can only hope.
As for business, Trump has created a significant barrier by prohibiting commerce with the Cuban military, which has companies that control much of the island’s socialist economy. Our view is that the only thing this will accomplish is hurting U.S. businesses eager to tap into the long-forbidden market of 12 million people.