Commentary | Lissa Weinmann: An open letter to President-Elect Trump on Cuba | Opinion

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Dear President-Elect Trump,

Ten years ago, the US and Cuba announced the start of normalization between our two countries. Americans and Cubans alike could see a bit of light through a crack in the wall of US restrictions and regulations that, for six decades, have blocked normal interaction between close neighbors.

While potent in symbolism, the brief opening was largely ceremonial. Only Congress can end the unilateral US policy, the world’s longest running embargo. After the 1989 fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s benefactor, Congress passed two laws meant to kick Cuba when it was down. The laws stripped power from the executive while adding “extraterritorial” regulations meant to punish other countries doing business with Cuba.

Some 30 years later, Florida US Senator Marco Rubio, your pick for Secretary of State, is making the same old arguments as Cuba faces another period of crisis: punish Cuba, stoke chaos and civil unrest, and government collapse will lead to freedom and change.

As far back as JFK, US presidents got trapped in this irrational family feud that empowers hardliners in both governments while holding citizens here and there hostage to a bureaucratic status quo. Now is the time for you to make a deal.

Two years of limited opening had a positive impact and was supported by a majority of Cuban Americans. Buoyed by Cuban government reforms and cash from families in the US, the island’s private sector boomed. Internet access widened, social media exploded with honest voices. American tourists, “Ambassadors of Freedom” as President Reagan called them, flocked to Cuba.

Compare that to what happened when you reversed course, bowing to Rubio’s argument that the opening was helping the Cuban government. Ironically, Rubio’s argument mirrored that of Cuban government hardliners who use embargo tightening to put the brakes on the economic and political reforms being pushed by pragmatic colleagues. One Cuban official described how difficult it is to argue for change while “the US boot is on our neck.”

Rubio wanted “maximum pressure” on Cuba, so you rolled back the opening as much as any President could. But it was your final act, made about a week before you left office, that really put the screws on: putting Cuba on the ‘List of State Sponsors of Terrorism.’

The fact that you hadn’t done this before is credit to your instinct to preserve the power of that designation, knowing there was no evidence of Cuba actually supporting terrorists. Backlash was fierce. Then Vermont US Senator Patrick Leahy blasted the “blatantly politicized designation” that “makes a mockery of what had been a credible, objective measure of a foreign government’s active support for terrorism.”

Like others before you, perhaps you felt the ‘end’ was near, that the banking, insurance, and shipping blocks the terrorist label triggers would finally provoke enough misery to cause Cubans living on the island to overthrow a government that, despite its many deficiencies and odds against it, has achieved high levels of development for its citizens.

Ten years after that brief glimmer of hope, Cubans are suffering. Hardliners have stopped the economic reform process. Confusion plagues new leaders transitioning from the Castros’ dominance. COVID gutted tourism. Storms and flooding ravaged crops. Cheap Venezuelan oil no longer powers a crumbling electric grid plunging Cuba – literally – into darkness.

Results are predictable and distasteful at this time of anti-immigrant sentiment. An exodus from Cuba has surpassed all migration since the imposition of the embargo in 1962. Half a million have migrated since your terrorism designation. And more are on the way.

A July 2021 protest in Cuba led to a previously unseen level of police brutality with 500 jailed. Some Cuban American hardliners urged a military intervention thankfully ignored by the Biden administration. Since then, things are quieter, perhaps due to Cuba having lost 10 percent of its population in the last decade. But under the surface, resentment and anger are roiling.

Hardliners in Cuba are seeking support from China and Russia and if we don’t move quickly, they may get it. We saw how that went when Soviets put missiles in Cuba in 1962 and pushed us to the brink of nuclear war.

Last year in Medium, Rubio called on Biden to sanction Mexico for selling oil to Cuba. His final words threatened: “The worst is yet to come.”

Mr. President, we need a family intervention. Break Rubio and his followers of their addiction to this big government policy that blocks the rest of us from engaging with Cuba and a swell of support will elevate you above all other presidents in modern American history.

Reformers within the Cuban government will quietly applaud you. Cuban political dissidents, human rights activists, religious leaders and others will salute your checkmate move after decades of begging America to end the Cuban government’s excuse for its failures by ending the embargo.

Forget about half measures. A bipartisan majority in Congress will back a full lifting of the embargo. Gulf Coast states who took the big hit in the '60s when they lost a top trading partner - Cuba - will be especially delighted to renew those relations once again. ”In a scenario of unrestricted trade, the aggregate of food and medical exports alone could amount to $1.6 billion with 20,000 associated US jobs,” former International Trade Commission Chair Paula Stern PhD found in a 2000 study presented to Congress..

Healthcare companies like Roswell Park in Buffalo, who had to jump through hoops to bring a groundbreaking Cuban-developed lung cancer vaccine to people in the US, and other healthcare companies, would finally be able to economically partner with world-class Cuban scientists on new medical advances.

Five National Summits on Cuba from 2000 to 2005, co-hosted by the US Chamber of Commerce, convened leaders from every sector of US society to call for this change. The Pope would bless you. The world would praise your courage and vision. Avoid bloodshed. Ease the pain. Light the way to a new era in US-Cuba relations.

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