24 June, 2017
The changes could make it more hard for Americans to visit the island and for US companies to do business with Cuba. President Barack Obama's repeal of the special Cuban immigration privileges known as wet-foot/dry-foot will not change, the official said.
Some 300,000 Americans flocked to Cuba in the first five months of 2017, according to new figures. From Obamacare to climate policy to Cuba, he seems intent on overturning whatever Obama did - no matter how great the cost to the American people.
President Trump has promised to roll back some of President Obama's diplomatic policies.
"The previous administration was right to reject a policy that hurt ordinary Cubans and did nothing to advance human rights", said Daniel Wilkinson, the group's managing director for the Americas.
Edi Coba says he is not sure his new rooftop bar in the heart of Old Havana that buzzes at night with hip, tattooed young Americans will survive if U.S. President Donald Trump tightens restrictions on travel to Communist-run Cuba. The newspaper added that this would further isolate the United States and would damage its entrepreneurial interests.
The White House declined to discuss the pending changes. "It is being considered as one of the many options".
Tillerson didn't directly address issues related to the more liberal travel restrictions to Cuba that the Obama administration enacted.
The head of United States diplomacy for the Trump administration spoke of a "dark side" of the effect of the normalization of relations and called for an increase in the pressure on Raul Castro's government to achieve an advance in democratic matters by recovering the intention of the embargo on the Island, still in force but decaffeinated by Obama.
"A first step should be to ban financial transactions with the Cuban military", he said. This is at best what former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes called a "tragic irony", given the Trump administration's "complete lack of concern for human rights around the world". Some 54 percent of Cuban Americans in Miami want to end the Cuban embargo. According to an analysis published in early June by that organization, which promotes the lifting of the economic, commercial and financial blockade that Washington has imposed on Cuba for more than half a century, reversing Obama's measures would cost 6.6 billion dollars to the US economy.
If Trump rescinds Starwood's OFAC license, the hotel chain could sue the federal government to have it reinstated.
"Now, do they see the possibility down the road for more business?"
Twenty percent of the Cuban economy is now in private hands.
In 2014, Obama renewed diplomatic ties with Cuba after more than 50 years of hostility following Fidel Castro's revolution and embrace of Communism.
Trump has yet to indicate exactly what changes, if any, he will make to Obama's Cuba rapprochement.
On Cuba, Trump's company actively pursued doing business on the island in 1998, according to a September 2016 Newsweek article.
While campaigning previous year, Trump said he would create a "better deal" with Cuba than Obama had.
In the campaign, Trump pledged in Florida to overturn Obama's opening. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), both of whom are expected to be with Trump in Miami. The vast majority of Americans and the vast majority of Cuban-Americans support free travel to Cubans.
Flake and like-minded GOP colleagues have been pressing the administration not to punish the Cuban people by rolling back the Obama-era changes. "We understand that", the Cuban official said of Havana's posture toward new negotiations.
"Do we really want to turn back the clock?" he asked.
