During the 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden said he would restore Obama administration policies that granted Americans unrestricted rights to visit family in Cuba and send them money.
President Donald Trump during his first term reversed that policy, making it harder for Americans to visit the island and tightening financial and banking restrictions against the communist regime Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel leads.
Biden took some steps to engage with Cuba, but four experts told us he fell short of reinstating Obama-era policies.
"Biden did not go back fully to Obama's Cuba policy. He did not rescind all of Trump's policies either," said Sebastian A. Arcos, interim director at the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University. "He stayed somewhat in the middle, neither here, nor there."
Biden could have allowed more U.S. travel, investment and financial engagement, Arcos said.
"My guess is that Cuba's repression after the mass demonstrations in July 2021 made it difficult," Arcos said. "On the other hand, he still made important concessions hoping the regime would stop the refugee outflow, by far the biggest in Cuba's history. It did not."
William LeoGrande, a Latin America expert at American University, said although the United States and Cuba signed 22 bilateral agreements during the Barack Obama presidency's last two years, the Biden administration made little visible progress on executing those agreements. It did not restart the bilateral commission Obama created (and Trump disbanded) to oversee progress on these agreements.
"In short, Biden came nowhere near resuming Obama's policy of engagement," LeoGrande said. "His policy was closer to Trump's in both tone and substance."
To return to Obama's policy, Biden would have had to restore individual people-to-people travel and restore the license for cruise ships to visit Cuba.
The Biden administration reinstated some travel by authorizing U.S. airlines to serve Cuban airports beyond Havana, the capital, and reinstated group people-to-people and other categories of educational travel.
The administration also eliminated the cap on family remittances. The Treasury Department said money for authorized remittances to Cuba may be transmitted through digital technology and credit/debit cards. Western Union, which suspended operations in late 2020 under Trump, resumed remittances in 2023, the Miami Herald reported.
But the Herald reported in December that by the time that happened, most of the money Cuban Americans had sent to their relatives had moved to an informal market through people traveling to Cuba or through alternative money-transfer agencies.
"The lobby to establish a new, engaged relationship with Cuba has lost its steam since 2020," said Ted A. Henken, professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at Baruch College. "There is not enough of a constituency to support it and those who wish to obstruct it are emboldened, especially Cuban Americans in South Florida."
The U.S. removed Cuba from the list of countries not fully cooperating to combat terrorism but left the country on the State Department's state sponsors of terrorism list.
It defies conventional logic that a country can be found cooperating in the battle against terrorism while also remaining on the list, said Jason M. Blazakis, professor of practice at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
"The Biden Administration hasn't reverted to Obama era policies. If they had, Cuba would've been removed from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list," Blazakis said. "Cuba on the state sponsor of terrorism list is pure politics and does not have anything to do with terrorism or counterterrorism."
We rate promises not on a president's intentions or effort, but on verifiable outcomes. Biden made some progress to restore travel and remittances, but he did not go as far as Obama's administration did
We rate this Compromise.
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