MIAMI—President Donald J. Trump announced last Friday that he was reversing crucial pieces of what he called a “terrible and misguided deal” with Cuba, and will reinstate travel and commercial restrictions eased by the Obama administration in an attempt to obtain additional concessions from the Cuban government.
During a speech in Little Havana, 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 President Barack Obama in 2014, which he added 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 Artime Theater, named for a former supporter of Fidel Castro who became a leader of Brigade 2506, the land forces that spearheaded the US-led Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
“Effective immediately, I am canceling the last administration’s completely one-sided deal with Cuba,” Trump added.
But Trump’s action fell well short of doing so. After the speech, he signed a six-page directive that ordered new travel and commercial restrictions, while leaving in place some key Obama-era measures that eased sanctions.
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.
US 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 US access.
“We do not want US dollars to prop up a military monopoly that exploits and abuses the citizens of Cuba,” Trump said.
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 US Chamber of Commerce, which argued the move would hurt US 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 US 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 a broad array of rules the Obama administration put in place aimed at making it easier for US companies to do business in Cuba.
But Trump’s speech was a stinging rejection of Obama’s announcement in 2014 that he and President Raúl Castro of Cuba would begin normalizing relations between the two countries. Trump’s speech evoked, instead, the Cold War thinking that dominated the US government’s stance toward Cuba for a half-century.
“To the Cuban government, I say: Put an end to the abuse of dissidents,” Trump said. “Release the political prisoners. Stop jailing innocent people. Open yourselves to political and economic freedoms. Return the fugitives from American justice.”
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”.
Last 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 said.
But critics argued that Trump was returning to a strategy that had been a proven failure.
Benjamin Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser for Obama who led secret negotiations with Cuban officials that led to the rapprochement, said Trump’s moves would undermine his stated objectives, pushing the Cubans into the arms of the Chinese and Russians, who have no restrictions on their dealings there, and emboldening hard-liners in the country who are opposed to moving toward democracy.
“If you want Cuba to change and reform, we are doing the opposite of what would be most likely to bring about reforms inside of Cuba,” Rhodes added.
Image credits: Al Drago/The New York Times