President Donald Trump on Friday ordered tighter restrictions on Americans traveling to Cuba and a clampdown on U.S. business dealings with the Caribbean island's military, saying he was canceling former President Barack Obama's "terrible and misguided deal" with Havana.
Laying out his new Cuba policy in a speech in Miami, Trump signed a presidential directive to roll back parts of Obama's historic opening to the Communist-ruled country after a 2014 diplomatic breakthrough between the two former Cold War foes.
But Trump left in place many of Obama's changes, including the reopened U.S. embassy in Havana, even as he sought to show he was making good on a campaign promise to take a tougher line against Cuba, especially over its human rights record.
Diplomatic Relations
Trump stopped short of breaking diplomatic relations restored in 2015 after more than five decades of hostilities.
Commercial Flights
He will not cut off recently resumed direct U.S.-Cuba commercial flights or cruise-ship travel, though his more restrictive policy seems certain to dampen new economic ties overall.
Business Ventures
The administration, according to one White House official, has no intention of disrupting existing business ventures such as one struck under Obama by Starwood Hotels Inc, which is owned by Marriott International Inc, to manage a historic Havana hotel.
Limits on goods bought in Cuba
Nor does Trump plan to reinstate limits that Obama lifted on the amount of the island's coveted rum and cigars that Americans can bring home for personal use.
While the changes are far-reaching, they appear to be less sweeping than many U.S. pro-engagement advocates had feared.
Still, it will be the latest attempt by Trump to overturn parts of Obama's presidential legacy. He has already pulled the United States out of a major international climate treaty and is trying to scrap his predecessor's landmark healthcare program.
When Obama announced the detente in 2014, he said that decades of U.S. efforts to achieve change in Cuba by isolating the island had failed and it was time to try a new approach.
Critics of the rapprochement said Obama was giving too much away without extracting concessions from the Cuban government. Castro's government has clearly stated it does not intend to change its one-party political system.
Trump aides say Obama's efforts amounted to "appeasement" and have done nothing to advance political freedoms in Cuba, while benefiting the Cuban government financially.
"It's hard to think of a policy that makes less sense than the prior administration's terrible and misguided deal with the Castro regime," Trump said in Miami, citing the lack of human rights concessions from Cuba in the detente negotiated by Obama.
International human rights groups say, however, that again isolating the island could worsen the situation by empowering Cuban hard-liners. The Cuban government has made clear it will not be pressured into reforms in exchange for engagement.
No comment from government, citizens disappointed
The Cuban government had no immediate comment, but ordinary Cubans said they were crestfallen to be returning to an era of frostier relations with the United States with potential economic fallout for them.
"It's going to really hurt me because the majority of my clients are from the United States," said Enrique Montoto, 61, who rents rooms on U.S. online home-rental marketplace Airbnb, which expanded into Cuba in 2015.
Trump announced his new approach at the Manuel Artime Theater in Little Havana, the heart of the United States' Cuban-American and Cuban exile community. The venue is named after a leader of the failed U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 against Fidel Castro's revolutionary government.
