While outgoing President Joe Biden’s eleventh-hour changes in U.S.-Cuba policy are being condemned by hard-liners as a capitulation to the Communist nation 90 miles from the Florida Keys, longtime advocates for the shifts are saying they are too little, too late.
Announced by White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre Jan. 14, six days before Biden leaves office, the changes are highlighted by the administration’s decision to remove Cuba from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. Cuba has been on and off the list since 1982, when the Reagan administration first so designated it.
More recently, in May 2015, the administration of Barack Obama rescinded the designation and restored full diplomatic relations with the island nation two months later. These actions preceded Obama’s historic visit to Havana in March 2016. Obama’s rapprochement with Cuba, undertaken in the last two of his eight years in office, proved nevertheless short-lived, as then-president Donald J. Trump relisted it as a sponsor of terrorism eight days before the end of his first term in office on Jan. 12, 2021. In addition, Trump earlier had imposed sweeping new economic sanctions.
In addition to removing Cuba from the infamous terrorism listing, Jean-Pierre announced Biden was invoking a waiver of a provision in a 1996 law that allowed individuals whose properties had been expropriated by the Castro regime to sue for their return in U.S. courts. Until Trump, every president of both parties had triggered the waiver, thus preventing a flood of lawsuits against Havana. Even if such cases had been won by Cuban American litigants, enforcement of the verdicts would have been unlikely if not impossible.
In a third action, Biden also rescinded a 2017 Trump order restricting financial transactions of U.S. citizens, including those of authorized travelers to the island, with a wide array of businesses managed by the Cuban military. These include nearly all hotels and restaurants, which U.S. travelers were forbidden to patronize.
In exchange, the White House announced, the government of Cuba has agreed to release some of the estimated 600 to 900 political prisoners it is holding, many of them given long sentences following show trials after they participated in public protests of governmental policies in July 2021.
The agreement to release prisoners was negotiated directly between the Cuban government and the Catholic Church.
According to a senior Biden administration official who briefed reporters on the matter under a White House ground rule of anonymity, the agreement to release prisoners was negotiated directly between the Cuban government and the Catholic Church. Pope Francis repeatedly has called on Cuba to release all political prisoners and on the United States to end its sanctions on Cuba.
The latter is unlikely to happen beyond the limited measures the Biden administration belatedly announced this week, as the incoming Trump administration is expected to reverse them all.
In an interview with the Washington Post, leading Cuba expert and American University professor William LeoGrande stated: “These are three measures that reverse important sanctions that Donald Trump put in place. They could have had a real benefit in U.S.-Cuba relations and to the well-being of the Cuban people if Biden had done them in the first week of his presidency, instead of the last.”
And although Trump will not be able to reverse Biden’s changes immediately, he is likely to do so at the earliest possible moment. Among those already advocating early reversals is secretary-of-state designate Marco Rubio, who during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Jan. 15 reiterated his long-held, hardline perspective on bilateral relations with Cuba.
Asked if he believes Cuba is a state sponsor of terrorism, the Florida senator replied, “Without a question.” The son of Cuban emigrees who long has advocated for the strongest possible sanctions, Rubio stated further: “The moment of truth is arriving. Cuba is literally collapsing, both generationally in terms of all the young people leaving, but also economically.” He added that Cubans “are now living on 21-hour rolling blackouts and some days longer, because Marxism doesn’t work, because they are corrupt, and because they are inept.”
Stan Hastey
Stan Hastey covered the Supreme Court for the Baptist Joint Committee, Baptist Press and Religion News Service from 1974 to 1988. During the 1990s he was a columnist for Baptists Today. He led the Alliance of Baptists from 1989 to 2009 and has a close relationship with Baptists in Cuba.
Related articles:
Church bodies press Biden on Cuba
Four Cuban Baptist groups find common ground in medical ministry