Exit stage left: Biden's curious Cuba move

President Joe Biden’s January 14 removal of sanctions imposed on Cuba during the first Trump administration could have been a major step toward restarting Barack Obama’s policy of engagement if Biden had done it in his first week as president instead of his last.

But done at the last minute, they are unlikely to have much impact. Two of the three will not even take effect until after Trump’s inauguration.

Senior members of Trump’s incoming foreign policy team, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and Special Envoy for Latin America Maurico Claver-Carone, have criticized Biden’s actions, noting that they can be quickly and easily reversed by the incoming administration.

“No one should be under any illusion in terms of a change in Cuba policy," Waltz said.

Nevertheless, within hours of the White House’s announcement, the Cuban government announced that, in response to appeals from the Vatican, it would gradually release 553 prisoners, many of whom were involved in the nationwide protests on July 11, 2021. The deal was the culmination of three years of Vatican shuttle diplomacy.

Biden’s package includes three measures: (1) It rescinded Trump's National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) 5, of June 16, 2017, the basic framework for Trump’s policy of regime change; (2) It suspends Title III of the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, which gives U.S. citizens, including naturalized Cuban Americans, whose property was nationalized by Cuba’s revolutionary government the right to sue in U.S. Federal Court anyone making beneficial use of that property; and (3) It initiated removal of Cuba from the State Department’s list of State Sponsors of International Terrorism.

Trump’s 2017 NSPM included several sanctions limiting travel to Cuba and, most importantly, prohibiting doing business with Cuban companies managed by the armed forces, including many of the hotels where U.S. visitors typically stayed. However, Biden’s recission of NSPM-5 does not reopen those hotels to U.S. visitors because another, separate, sanction imposed by Trump in 2020 prohibits U.S. visitors from staying in any hotel owned by the Cuban government. That prohibition remains in place.

A suspension of Title III of the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act only takes effect 15 days after the president notifies Congress of his intention to suspend it, in this case, on January 29. President Trump could either lift the suspension, like he did in 2019, or simply wait six months at which time the suspension will expire automatically unless renewed.

In Congressional testimony on May 22, 2024, Secretary of State Tony Blinken admitted that there was no factual basis for Cuba being designated a state sponsor of terrorism, and that the reasons cited in the State Department’s annual report on terrorism were no longer valid. When the administration finally undertook a formal review of Cuba’s designation, it concluded— predictably—that Cuba should be removed from the list.

But Cuba’s removal does not take effect for 45 days, giving Congress and the Trump administration plenty of time to block it. The Republican majority in Congress can vote to nullify Biden’s action or Trump can simply put Cuba back on the list at his discretion — just as he did in January 2021.

Moreover, even if Biden’s measures survive long enough to take effect, no company, U.S. or foreign, is going to invest the time and resources necessary to take advantage of reduced sanctions when there is a better than even chance that President Trump will reverse them sooner or later, just as he reversed Obama’s in 2017.

So why would the Biden administration bother to take such ineffectual and probably ephemeral steps to reduce sanctions, and why would the Cuban government release more than five hundred prisoners in response?

Winning freedom for the prisoners was obviously the main motivation for Biden, but for years the administration was loathe to engage Cuba in negotiations to free them. However, after Bob Menendez’s departure from the Senate, the Democrats’ loss in November, and the ruby red hue of Florida politics, Biden no longer had any reason to subordinate Cuba policy to domestic politics.

Perhaps entreaties from both Congressional Democrats and the Vatican that Biden do something to alleviate the deepening humanitarian crisis on the island finally broke through. Or perhaps there was some guilty pleasure in complicating Trump’s forthcoming Cuba policy — poetic justice for Trump putting Cuba on the terrorism list as a parting shot just days before Biden’s inauguration in 2020.

Cuban officials were equally resistant to freeing the protestors, whose tough prison sentences served as a warning and deterrent against future protests. Yet they agreed, despite there being slim chance that Cuba will gain any economic relief from Biden’s measures. But even in the worst case — that Trump scuttles all of Biden’s measures immediately — Cuba would still reap some political benefit. By releasing so many political prisoners — the most since the 1970s — Havana addresses a major point of friction in its relations with the European Union, an important source of desperately needed humanitarian assistance.

Havana’s prisoner release demonstrates to the international community at large its willingness to compromise and desire to reduce conflict with Washington. It puts the United States government on record acknowledging that Cuba is not a state sponsor of terrorism. And it puts the Trump administration in the awkward position of having to choose between leaving the new measures in place or reneging on an agreement to release 553 people from jail.

President Biden’s four years in the White House were a colossal missed opportunity in U.S.-Cuban relations — four years in which domestic political aspirations overrode foreign policy interests, advancing neither. And the Cuban people paid the price as Washington stood idly by while their standard of living plummeted, partly as a result of sanctions Trump imposed and Biden left in place.

Barack Obama took bold action to normalize relations with Cuba. Donald Trump took bold action to destabilize it. Nothing about Joe Biden’s Cuba policy was bold, and it accomplished nothing. Cuba is poorer and less open today than it was four years ago, China’s and Russia’s influence there is greater, a million more Cuban migrants have fled to the United States, and Democrats are less politically popular than ever in Florida.

As Joe Biden leaves the White House, there are many accomplishments he can be proud of. Cuba is not one of them.