WashingtonPresident Donald Trump has given his top Cabinet officials a 30-day deadline to evaluate U.S. policy toward Cuba, look at existing sanctions, and devise methods to make them more stringent.
According to a memo released by Trump on Monday, the reviews ought to concentrate on how Cuba handles dissidents, its anti-dissident policies, and the prohibition of financial transactions that disadvantage the Cuban people in favor of the Cuban government, military, intelligence, or security services.
The directive stated that the United States should find measures to stop all tourism to the island and limit educational tours to organizations that are exclusively run and coordinated by Americans. This is one possible major alteration.
Trump has previously stated that he intends to reverse the relaxation of sanctions and other penalties in Cuba that were put in place during the administrations of Democratic Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, so the decision is not surprising. Biden made an effort to remove Cuba’s status as a state sponsor of terrorism in the final days of his presidency.
According to a fact sheet, Trump’s memo backs the economic blockade on Cuba and opposes requests for its lifting in the UN and other international fora.
Bruno Rodriguez, Cuba’s foreign minister, reacted quickly to the text.
“The Presidential Memorandum vs #Cuba released today by the US government strengthens the aggression & economic blockade that punishes the whole Cuban people and is the main obstacle to our development,” the president wrote on X. An entire nation’s #HumanRights are being violated by this illegal behavior.
Additionally, the Trump administration rescinded interim legal safeguards that had shielded roughly 300,000 Cubans from deportation and placed Cuba among the seven nations subject to stricter visitor restrictions.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has referred to the limits the administration has placed on Cuban and foreign government officials participating in Cuba’s medical missions as “forced labor.”
Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio blasted the reversal of policy welcoming Cubans to the United States and accused the United States of attempting to undermine the medical missions in an interview with The Associated Press this month.
Rubio has always supported sanctions on the communist island; his family fled Cuba in the 1950s, prior to the communist revolution that installed Fidel Castro.
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This report was written by Andrea Rodriguez, an AP writer in Havana.
