Biden’s Strange Help for Cuba Why aid the struggling anti-American regime in Havana now?
Whatever the humanitarian impulse behind the Biden Administration’s Monday announcement that it will lift some sanctions on Cuba, the timing couldn’t be worse. The dictatorship is under stress, and it remains Russia’s closest ally in the Western Hemisphere. Why would Team Biden take the pressure off Havana now?
Cuba’s regime may be in the most precarious state of its 63 years in power. The economy has collapsed, and hero worship of Fidel Castro is as dead as he is. The July 11 uprising last year, when tens of thousands went to the streets and shouted for freedom, exposed the contempt Cubans have for their government.
Thousands of peaceful protesters were rounded up last summer by paramilitary and secret police, and some 750 are still in jail. This week Havana declared a new law criminalizing basic liberties. Insulting a government official is now punishable with up to five years in prison. A Cuban who engages with an international aid group not authorized by the state is headed for years behind bars.
The Biden Administration’s new policy removes the cap on dollar remittances that Americans may send to Cuba, reopens air travel to cities across the island, and restores travel by so-called educational groups. The practical effect will be to supply the regime, which controls all commerce, with hard currency to keep its repression going.
The Administration says it wants to help the Cuban people. But like the Obama Administration, Team Biden fails to acknowledge that the cause of the island’s privation is the regime itself.
Take remittances. Greenbacks sent from Florida don’t ever get to grandma. They are confiscated by the government. Whether a military entity or the Cuban central bank grabs the money is a semantic difference. Grandma gets worthless pesos she has to trade for marked-up merchandise in government stores. Group travel to the island is tightly controlled to deliver propaganda and earn income for the military.
The new policy allows U.S. financing for “independent” Cuban entrepreneurs, but no such thing exists. Reality isn’t stopping Team Biden, which on May 10 issued a license—from the Office of Foreign Assets Control—authorizing a U.S. company to invest and provide financing to a Cuban company.
The license likely violates the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996, which prohibits the extension of credit to Cuba. The White House urgency to rescue Havana is ripe for Congressional questions.
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