The Trump administration just slammed the door on an effort by Cuba’s communist government to secure an economic lifeline while appearing to embrace reform. A May 1 executive order expands and sharpens longstanding American sanctions on Cuba, and appears to deliberately target a recent gesture at partially opening the Cuban economy. “All property and interests in property that are in the United States,” the order says, are barred from operating “in the energy, defense and related materiel, metals and mining, financial services, or security sector of the Cuban economy, or any other sector of the Cuban economy,” under the penalty of economic sanctions.
On March 16, in a bid for survival, the communist government of Cuba had announced a series of intended though vaguely executed reforms that would allow foreign investment in the island from Cubans living overseas. The reforms were to include a supposed expansion of private property rights. Deputy Prime Minister Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga said that the country was “open to maintaining a fluid commercial relationship with U.S. companies.”
Asked by email if the May 1 order was a deliberate response to the March 16 Cuban announcement, a State Department spokesman referred The Federalist to comments made on April 27 by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants. In a long discussion with Fox News Chief Foreign Correspondent Trey Yingst, Rubio rejected the possibility of reform under the current Cuban government, describing Cuba as “a failed state.”
Cuba “can get better,” the secretary of state added, but “serious economic reforms are impossible with these people in charge. It can’t happen. And these people in charge aren’t just economically incompetent. They have rolled out the welcome mat to adversaries of the United States to operate within Cuban territory against our national interest with impunity. We are not going to have a foreign military or intelligence or security apparatus operating with impunity 90 miles off the shores of the United States. That’s not going to happen under President Trump.”
On the same day that he signed the new executive order, Trump joked at a speech in Florida that he would be “taking over” Cuba “almost immediately.”
The emerging “Donroe Doctrine,” a 21st-century version of the Monroe Doctrine, focuses American foreign policy on the security of the Western Hemisphere, directing force against threats and insecurity in the Americas.
The Federalist asked the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), an anti-communist organization of Cuban-Americans headquartered in Miami, for a comment on the May 1 executive order, but didn’t get a reply in time for publication. The most recent CANF newsletter, from March, describes the Cuban government in the same terms used by Rubio, calling the Cuban government “a system that cannot correct itself.”
“There is no adaptation. There is no opening. There is only control,” CANF concluded.
American policy now proceeds on that same presumption. While it’s unclear what the endgame will look like, the new policy of the United States government is that Cuba’s communist government can’t be allowed to reform and survive.
