Obama said to be considering visit to Cuba
HONOLULU — President Barack Obama might consider visiting Cuba this year if the country’s regime bolsters its human rights record and opens its doors more fully to American business in the coming weeks, a senior adviser to the president said Saturday.
The president would likely make such a decision in the next couple of months, as his national security team evaluates the tentative warming of relations that began with the reopening of a U.S. Embassy in Havana last year.
“The key test,” said deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, is “whether the president’s going to Cuba would help advance those priorities” and, in particular, whether a visit would “improve the lives of the Cuban people.”
The controversial and historic possibility — the only sitting U.S. president to visit the island was Calvin Coolidge in 1928 — arose in a preview of Obama’s foreign policy plans for his final year in office. By far, the “overarching” foreign policy challenge of the new year will be the fight against the Islamic State terror organization, Rhodes said.
Toward that end, Obama plans to seek a new authorization for the use of military force.
But while Rhodes ranked the campaign against Islamic State first in every mention of Obama’s foreign policy priorities, he also made clear that the president plans a full-court press on several projects critical to his legacy of foreign policy.
That includes the Iran nuclear deal and normalization of relations with Cuba.
Both initiatives have critics. Some want new sanctions imposed on Iran, and others believe that Cuba’s Raul Castro will not greatly expand the freedoms of his people and that Obama will go down in history for doing business with a despotic regime.