Helping the people of Cuba ?

Obama should help Cubans, not Castro

by Roger F. Noriega

Touted as a historic shift in US-Cuba relations, ironically, the Obama administration’s latest initiatives serve to reinforce the status quo — legitimizing and benefiting a regime that has a 55-year track record of opposing change.

President Obama’s new Cuba policy is taking shape this week as his administration announced high-level talks on diplomatic recognition of the Castro regime and released new regulations to liberalize travel to and transactions with the island. Touted as a historic shift in US-Cuba relations, ironically, all of these initiatives serve to reinforce the status quo — legitimizing and benefiting a regime that has a 55-year track record of opposing change. Accepting that this is not what the president intended, he must get serious about engaging the 11 million people of Cuba rather than placating the regime that torments them.

The State Department has announced that Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson will travel to Cuba this month to advance the normalization of diplomatic relations. The highest-level US official to visit the island in 50 years, Jacobson will lead the latest round of migration talks — which may touch on the remarkable 117 percent increase in the number of Cubans fleeing their homeland in the month since Obama’s rapprochement with Castro.

This week, the Treasury Department announced new regulations to make it easier to travel to Cuba to visit family members or for other broadly defined purposes — journalism, research, humanitarian aid, cultural exchange, and more. These regulations do not authorize tourism, per se. However, recent history has shown that even specific licenses for so-called people-to-people exchanges were routinely abused to include rum tastings, golf outings, and sailing regattas. The agencies that oversee these licenses have no strategy for policing abuses, according to congressional staff. The problem is that US tourism could represent a billion-dollar windfall to Cuba’s hospitality sector — all of which is co-owned by the regime, with most of the industry operated by the military, and much of it located on property confiscated from US nationals.

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