Obama and Cuba

The Obama Administration’s moves on Cuba policy – mainly, ending travel and remittance restrictions on Cuban Americans, and opening up more diplomatic communication – have in my view been incremental and positive.

Some have criticized the Administration for not moving faster on Cuba policy, and for not having a more developed policy toward the hemisphere as a whole. In fairness, one has to note that the top State Department official for Latin America, Assistant Secretary Arturo Valenzuela, only took office last month.

In a session with reporters last week, Valenzuela talked about Cuba policy and indicated that we might see more actions to expand people-to-people contacts and diplomatic engagement:

QUESTION: Yesterday, you said that you are not – you are thinking – you are going to go slowly on Cuba. And I wanted to ask you, it is because you’re seeing the Cuban Government is on a more open track and you want to give them time, or because you think they are not ready at all? [...]

ASSISTANT SECRETARY VALENZUELA: Well, on the first question, I think we’re moving ahead with the kind of speed that you would want in a situation like this where we’re examining both the situation in Cuba; at the same time, looking as we have done at measures that we can take to do two things – on the one hand, to expand the people-to-people contacts through the various different measures that we’ve taken. And we’re going to look to see whether there’s some other elements of that that we can look at, and then secondly, the engagement that we’ve had on issues that are of mutual interest to both countries. We’ve had these talks on postal matters, on migration questions, and we expect others to come up.