Press. voanews.com
As a candidate,
Donald Trump promised to undo parts of a historic U.S.-Cuba agreement to
re-engage after more than 50 years. He said the 2014 deal forged by Presidents
Barack Obama and Raul Castro was "one-sided," favoring the communist
government. Now that he occupies the White House, Trump is expected to set new
demands for Havana – likely on a visit to Miami planned for Friday.
Secretary of
State Rex Tillerson indicated Tuesday that the Trump administration plans to
restore "pressure on the regime" by tightening some of the trade and
travel loosened under Obama. Speaking at
a Senate hearing on his department’s proposed budget, Tillerson said "the
general approach … is to allow as much of this continued commercial and
engagement activity to go on as possible."
Tillerson noted
benefits to Cuba’s 11 million residents, with some capitalizing on U.S. business
investments and a tripling of U.S. visitors to the island last year. That came
after the United States in 2015 removed Cuba from the list of terrorist
sponsors, reopened its embassy in Havana, and eased restrictions on trade and
travel.
Nonetheless,
Tillerson said, "We think we have achieved very little in terms of
changing the behavior of the regime in Cuba and its treatment of people, and it
has little incentive today to change that."
Likely revisions
could include prohibiting American companies from doing business with Cuban
enterprises linked to the military – which controls much of the communist-run
island’s economy – and restricting Americans’ travel to Cuba, sources familiar
with the policy review said. The administration’s demands for Havana also could
include broader internet access and the release of prisoners, the Associated
Press reported. Obama relaxed the Cuban economic embargo through executive
orders, which Trump can easily reverse. Only Congress can formally rescind the
embargo enacted in 1962.
Pushing tougher
conditions
Two Cuban-American Republican lawmakers from
Florida – home to a large Cuban-American exile community – are pressing for
harsher terms with Havana: Senator Marco Rubio serves on the Senate
Intelligence Committee investigating Russian involvement in the 2016 election;
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart serves on the House Appropriations Committee. Both are
expected to join the president in Miami for his announcement.
"We’ve been
walking through all these issues with the president and his team," Rubio
told El Nuevo Herald in April. "… I am confident that President Trump will
treat Cuba like the dictatorship it is and that our policy going forward will
reflect the fact that it is not in the national interest of the United States
for us to be doing business with the Cuban military."
Diaz-Balart told
VOA earlier this month that he has had "several conversations" with
the president, who "wants to enforce respect for human rights, the
security of the country and certainly also the rule of law." The
congressman purportedly backed House Republicans’ legislation on health care in
March in exchange for Trump’s tougher stance on Cuba, The New York Times and
other news media have reported. The congressman’s office did not respond to
VOA’s phone and email requests for comment.
Bipartisan
support
U.S. Senator Bob Corker, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, said he understood arguments for and against stronger ties with
Cuba. Interviewed last week by VOA, he described himself as "someone who
would like to see progress there." Corker mentioned a visit last year to
the island, where "about 25 percent of the country now is engaged in some
kind of private-sector activity, which is certainly growth."
He also
acknowledged frustration with Cuban officials he’d met: "If they would
just be willing to show some evolution, you know, a momentum could be gained.
But it’s almost as if because America wants them to go in that direction,
they’re going to defy." Most Republicans endorse Cuba trade and travel,
which has strong bipartisan support in Congress and with the public overall.
Last week, seven GOP lawmakers wrote a letter to the president, warning that
restrictions would "further incentivize Cuba to depend on countries like
Russia and China," Reuters news service reported.
A new poll
conducted on behalf of Engage Cuba, a nonpartisan coalition favoring broader
commercial and diplomatic relations with the island, showed almost 64 percent
of Republicans want to continue the rapprochement with Cuba. Earlier this
month, Engage Cuba released a study estimating that rolling back trade and
travel measures could cost the United States more than $6 billion and would
eliminate 12,000 jobs in Trump’s first term.
U.S. airlines,
Airbnb and other travel-related interests also have urged the Trump
administration government not to reverse the new openness. Tech giant Google
joined the chorus on Monday, with Google Cuba official Brett Perlmutter
publicly appealing to maintain a U.S. policy "that allows
telecommunications firms [to] work in Cuba," the Associated Press reported.
Google servers
went online in Cuba in April, enabling quicker and potentially cheaper
communication. International
Telecommunication Union data show that just 37 percent of Cubans routinely used
the internet as of 2015 – but that the user base was growing rapidly.
The biggest
sticking point is Cuba’s poor record on human rights. The international
watchdog group Human Rights Watch, in its most recent annual update, said,
"The Cuban government continues to repress dissent and punish public
criticism," using beatings and job termination to try to silence its
critics.
Dissidents in
Cuba have differing views on the renewed ties’ impact. Rapprochement has
brought the island "an increase of repression, of death threats to the
opposition and to the Cuban people," psychologist and journalist Guillermo
Fariñas said he told Obama in the second of their two meetings. Fariñas, who
has conducted more than 20 hunger strikes to protest the regime’s actions, told
VOA that "negotiating with the Cuban government and asking them nothing in
return was a mistake."
"Alleged
improvements, like the implementation of Wi-Fi zones on the island, have only
served to enrich the monopoly the military has over the country’s
economy," Fariñas added. He said the state-owned telecommunications
company ETECSA controls "all communications inside and outside the
country" and is run by the military.
Reinaldo
Escobar, editor of the independent digital news outlet 14ymedio, told VOA more
openness is "very positive for Cuba," because it improves contact
between Cubans and their relatives and friends in the U.S., and because it
reduces diplomatic "threats, retaliation and misunderstandings."
But he said
economic benefits "haven’t really reached" most Cubans. VOA Spanish
Branch reporter Gioconda Tapia Reynolds,Gesell Tobias, Jesenia DeMoya-C.,
Capitol Hill corresondent Michael Bowman, and reporter Carol Guensburg
contributed to this report.