25 June, 2017
Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) played a "central" role in helping the administration recast the policy, one official said, while other members of Congress were instrumental as well.
President Donald Trump on Friday will sign a directive to reverse parts of the Obama administration's legacy of easing sanctions on Cuba by reinstating some restrictions on travel and commerce, senior White House officials said Thursday.
Godinez is a professor in the department of theatre at Northwestern and the resident artistic associate at the Goodman Theatre, where he is the director of the Latino Theatre Festival. While the 12 categories of authorized travel to Cuba will still remain, a subcategory - individual people-to-people travel - is on the chopping block.
Marriot International, an American multinational diversified hospitality company, who has a hotel set up in Cuba and is on its way to building another, showed major concerns over Trump's decision to restrict travel to the island country.
According to reports by one US official who had seen the president's memorandum on the issue, the rollback will include a tightening of travel restricitons on USA citizens travelling to the island and a restriction on US business dealings with companies tied to Cuba's military.
He will announce that tourism to Cuba is still banned and that enforcement of travel restrictions (so-called person-to-person travel) will not only still be in effect but will be tightened as well. That change would immediately affect some proposed hotel projects in which Cuban entities controlled by the military would be partners.
Trump has long hanged his understanding of the deal between the United States and Cuba on his "Cuban friends" in Florida, whom he said throughout the campaign supported him over Democrat Hillary Clinton.
A tour bus of Transgaviota drives past the USA embassy in Havana, Cuba June 13, 2017.
In addition to the limits on investment, Trump plans to more strictly enforce the ban on American tourism to Cuba, eliminating "people to people" exchanges that have allowed far more visits to the island for recreation, with little enforcement of rules that require trips to have an educational or cultural component.
Proponents of lifting the embargo say that taking a punitive approach toward Cuba has done nothing to bring about improvements in human rights in more than 50 years, and that it is time to try something new.
White House officials say there will be some exceptions.
Those travels and visitors' ability to use Cuba's military-run bank are not believed to be affected by the Trump changes, though the Herald reports that the administration's new policy will include a broad restriction on interactions with the military branch that runs the majority of Cuba's economy.
However, family travel is now authorized and will continue to be.
"We want to empower and we want to strengthen the Cuban people, without strengthening the Cuban military", Rubio said during a Facebook live post. The policy will not directly talk about flights and cruises. Saudi Arabia, like Cuba, is well known for human rights abuses.
Though the move is certainly a move away from Barack Obama's 2015 rapprochement with Havana, it is not a reversal.
