Tag: U.S.-Cuban relations

[fblike]

Since 1960, the United States has maintained an economic embargo on Cuba, an island nation just ninety miles off the coast of Florida.  The embargo was an instrument of Cold War policymaking, as Cuba became a communist nation under Fidel Castro and seized American economic assets without compensation.  Even after the Cold War ended, the United States maintained the embargo as a political instrument in hopes of weakening the Castro regime.  However, in the 1990s and 2000s, the embargo came to be seen by other Latin American nations as an unjust extension of American imperialism and some pundits allege that the embargo came to isolate the United States from the rest of the Western Hemisphere just as much as the embargo isolated Cuba from the American mainland.  Last week, President Obama announced that he was taking executive action to weaken the long standing Cuban embargo and that he would move to normalize relations with Cuba.  The President’s action received bipartisan support from those who believe that the embargo harms America’s relations with other Latin American nations, yet also received bipartisan criticism for rewarding a dictatorial regime that abuses the rights of its citizens.  The President’s actions have forced 2016 presidential contenders such as Hillary Clinton, Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio to weigh in on the issue and depending on how well the President’s normalization push goes, it could become a significant issue in the Republican presidential primaries and the 2016 general election.

This topic brief will highlight some of the important steps taken to get Cuba and the United States to the negotiating table, discuss what actions President Obama will take to weaken the embargo, and the political impact that normalizing Cuban relations may have over the next two years, especially with regards to presidential politics.

Readers are also encouraged to use the links below and in the related R&D to bolster their files about this topic.

Read More