Moving to Scuttle Obama Legacy, Donald Trump to Crack Down on Cuba -
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVISJUNE 15, 2017
WASHINGTON — President Trump on Friday will move to halt the historic rapprochement between the United States
and Cuba set in motion by former President Barack Obama, delivering a speech in Miami in which he plans to announce he is clamping down on travel and commercial ties with the island nation to force the government of Raúl Castro to change its repressive ways.
The directive calls for reversing a rule that Mr. Obama put in place last year to allow Americans who are making educational or cultural trips to initiate their own travel to Cuba without special permission from the United States government
and without a licensed tour company so long as they kept records of their activities for five years.
The Trump administration will lay out conditions that the Cuban government would have to meet before the restrictions could be lifted, including holding free
and fair elections, releasing political prisoners and allowing Cuban workers to be paid directly, one White House official said.
He said it would revive an adversarial dynamic between the United States and Cuba
that would harm citizens of both countries while allowing the Castro government to once again cast Americans as the root of all its people’s ills.
Mr. Trump is also directing a broad prohibition against Americans doing business with companies controlled by the military, intelligence or security services in Cuba, which
control large swaths of the economy, including many foreign-owned hotels, through the military’s business arm known as Grupo de Administración Empresarial S. A., or Gaesa.
Mr. Trump plans to cast his decision on Cuba as a matter of human rights, arguing
that the changes will ensure that the United States is not rewarding a government that deprives its citizens of basic rights.
