Cuba should prepare for the Trump hard line

President’s vow to roll back Obama-era opening must be taken seriously.

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  • Christopher Sabatini

    Dr. Christopher Sabatini, is a senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, and was formerly a lecturer in the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University. Chris is also on the advisory boards of Harvard University’s LASPAU, the Advisory Committee for Human Rights Watch's Americas Division, and of the Inter-American Foundation. He is also an HFX Fellow at the Halifax International Security Forum. He is a frequent contributor to policy journals and newspapers and appears in the media and on panels on issues related to Latin America and foreign policy. Chris has testified multiple times before the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2015, Chris founded and directed a new research non-profit, Global Americas and edited its news and opinion website. From 2005 to 2014 Chris was senior director of policy at the Americas Society and Council of the Americas (AS/COA) and the founder and editor-in-chief of the hemispheric policy magazine Americas Quarterly (AQ). At the AS/COA, Dr. Sabatini chaired the organization’s rule of law and Cuba working groups. Prior to that, he was director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the National Endowment for Democracy, and a diplomacy fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, working at the US Agency for International Development’s Center for Democracy and Governance. He provides regular interviews for major media outlets, and has a PhD in Government from the University of Virginia.

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After saying he was generally supportive of Barack Obama’s Cuba policy during the Republican primaries, by the time of the US election Donald Trump had changed his tune and promised he would roll back the Obama-era opening to the island.

In the next few weeks, the White House is expected to announce its post-Obama Cuba policy. We will see which one of Trump’s views prevails. There is an accepted — though false — wisdom that Trump owes his election victory in Florida to his shift to the hard line. Thanks to this, we fear it is still likely he will turn back the clock on diplomatic relations, jeopardising the US investment and trade that emerged under the Obama-era changes.

From April 2009, Obama began picking away at the US embargo by relaxing restrictions on travel and remittances to the island by Cuban Americans. This culminated in a dramatic announcement in December 2014 that the US and Cuba would restore diplomatic relations after half a century. By the end of Obama’s term, the former Cold-War adversaries were collaborating on everything from environmental protection to port security and antiterrorism. Meanwhile, Cuba’s private sector workforce has more than quadrupled and there are pockets of commerce and investment on the island by the likes of Google, Sheraton Four Points Hotel and Airbnb.

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