“Everybody was happy,” said Al Fox, president of the Tampa-based Alliance for Responsible Cuba Policy Foundation. “The American people were happy, the Cuban government was happy, the private sector was happy. The only people who weren’t happy were the crazies in Miami.”
Then, last November, the Great Orange Nightmare descended on America intent on reversing every rational policy decision his predecessor put in place. Last month, in one of his signature pompous displays of political theater, he scraped the bucket of generic Cold War rhetoric to promise a roomful of geriatric Miami Cuban hardliners that his new executive order would stand with the Cuban people by “strengthening the policy of the U.S. toward Cuba” and “exposing the crimes of the Castro regime.” (Capitalism Good. Communism Bad. Just in case anyone wasn’t paying attention over the past 50 years.) Rick Scott, Marco Rubio, and the few dozen Cuban hardliners all stood and clapped robotically. No sooner had Obama’s Cuban thaw begun than Trump’s refreeze turned it into a half-melted, half-frozen sloppy mess.
For example, Trump claims that the return of travel restrictions will benefit the Cuban people by keeping American money from flowing into the hands of the Cuban military, which has a stake in almost every sector of the island’s economy. Yet the restrictions on individual travel stand to threaten the livelihood of the 22,000 Cuban households that rent out their apartments and rooms through AirBnB Casa Particulares. According to AirBnB, the network of homestays across the island has brought over $40 million in income directly to Cuban families since 2015 — an enormous amount in a country where the average income is between $18 to $25 a month.
Anticipating that Trump was about to make things shitty again for Americans hoping to visit Cuba, I went down to the forbidden island last month with my wife and 2-year-old daughter to see for ourselves what all the mysterious commie intrigue was about. We went independently under the people-to-people visa category — a category that under the new restrictions will likely make independent travel again illegal and require you to go with a large, expensive tour operator. We stayed in people’s homes in Havana and in the countryside, slowly decompressing from the 21st-century smartphone-addicted first-world culture. (Imagine a place where millennials live their lives completely offline and there’s not a single damn fidget spinner around for miles! Total insanity!) Over the span of 10 days we discovered a land full of warm, proud, generous and educated people with a vibrant culture and sense of community who doted upon and danced with our daughter and spoke openly about their odd predicament, their frustration with an anachronistic dictatorship, their love of Americans and their bafflement as to how we allowed a big dumb racist sexist chunk of cheddar cheese to rise to power. Just about every other person I met had a cousin or uncle in Miami or Tampa whom they would very much like to see again.
And of course, everyone was sick and tired of the the embargo. The thing is, as decades of the American travel ban have made abundantly clear, restricting Americans from going to Cuba doesn’t do squat to help the Cuban people, but it does provide the Cuban government with a reliable scapegoat for their economic problems. But as a 22-year-old named Jorge told me at a trendy rooftop bar in Havana Vieja, ”Cubans are fed up, we are moving forward with or without America. It’s just so stupid that America wants to keep standing in the way.”
Of course, it’s also quite likely that Trump’s political pandering in Miami isn’t about human rights or Cuba at all. If Rick Scott hopes to win Bill Nelson’s long-held Senate seat in 2018, he has to hold and build on the 54 percent of Cuban-Americans who voted for Trump in 2016. “Donald Trump doesn’t know the difference between Batista and Arturo Fuente,” says Tampa’s Al Fox. “He just talks a lot of crap that ultimately will hurt the private sector more than the Cuban government. It makes no sense.”
But despite the chest-puffing bluster on the federal level, there are signs that the warming of relations Obama set in motion aren’t going to be reversed very easily. On June 9, Cuban ambassador José Ramón Cabañas Rodriguez sent an invitation to the Tampa City Council welcoming an official delegation to visit Cuba. “We must remain hopeful,” the letter stated, “that the day will soon come when barriers that exist between us will come down.”
The Council voted unanimously to accept the invitation because, as Chairwoman Yolie Capin said, “it’s the right thing to do.”
This article appears in Jul 6-13, 2017.