It’s not yet a drumbeat issue, but the subject of the Cuban embargo is increasingly in the geopolitical conversation these days. The Obama administration is obviously making changes — as in pushing to undo travel and remittance restrictions imposed under President George W. Bush. Beyond that, the administration’s strategy still looks incremental – especially when it comes to the 47-year-old trade embargo.
At a recent seminar organized by the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, retired diplomat Vicki Huddleston underscored some of the embargo’s finer points and their pertinence to a new administration. Some of you may recall that Huddleston is a former chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana (1999-02) and achieved a measure of fame — or notoriety — for handing out those shortwave radios to average Cubans. She is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Huddleston said Obama has numerous options for improving bilateral U.S.-Cuba ties – notwithstanding the 1996 Helms-Burton Act that codified the embargo.
“President Obama has the authority, whether you like it or not, to do just about anything he wants on Cuba,” she stated. “He could negotiate and even give back Guantanamo. He could change the ‘wet foot-dry foot’ policy or negotiate expropriated property claims, but we don’t expect him to do that.”
And while Huddleston underscored that President Obama would need Congressional approval to end the embargo altogether, he could still move to dismantle it in piecemeal fashion.
“What Helms-Burton did in 1996 was codify the regulations of the embargo as they stood then,” she explained. “But it also gave executive authority for the president to modify or change the embargo. So the power to change the embargo was codified along with the regulations.”
For the record, President Obama still says he’s in favor of maintaining the embargo for its value as “leverage” – to encourage democratic reform in Cuba.