U.S. Taking Tougher Stance On Cuba
The United States’ policy towards Cuba is poised to become even stricter. Yesterday, President Donald Trump signed a memorandum instructing his cabinet to toughen current U.S. policy regarding the island nation, with a directive to find ways to make it more punitive in the next 30 days.
This move will further impede the ability of Americans to travel to the island and will create a larger list of prohibited properties and businesses for Americans. It also will usher in stricter restrictions on approved travel, and seeks to enforce what is described as “the statutory ban on U.S. tourism to Cuba.”
President Trump wrote: “My administration's policy will be guided by the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States, as well as solidarity with the Cuban people. I will seek to promote a stable, prosperous, and free country for the Cuban people. To that end, we must channel funds toward the Cuban people and away from a regime that has failed to meet the most basic requirements of a free and just society.” In a statement announcing the changes, the White House said that this action “restores and strengthens the robust Cuba policy from the President’s first term, reversing the Biden Administration’s revocation that eased pressure on the Cuban regime.”
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, writing on X, said the memorandum "strengthens the aggression & economic blockade that punishes the whole Cuban people and is the main obstacle to our development.”
Among the directives are instructions to toughen the rules on legal U.S. travel to Cuba, with a threat of audit and the expectation of far greater scrutiny by the U.S. government than before, specifically instructing legal travelers to keep “full and accurate records of all transactions related to authorized travel…. and such records shall be available for examination by the Department of the Treasury for at least five years after the date they occur.” The memo also mentioned that there would be “regular audits” of visits.
The United States has not had fully open relations with Cuba for more than 60 years. It came close in January 2015, when then-president Barack Obama ushered in a new policy allowing Americans to travel to Cuba with little restriction and even bring back Cuban cigars from their visits.
When President Trump was elected in his first term, he soon began to reverse Obama-era policies toward Cuba. After President Joe Biden was elected in 2020, he made some changes to Cuba policy but never brought the U.S. as close to normalization with Cuba as Obama had. When Trump was elected in 2024, he began making greater changes, including putting Cuba back on the list of states that support terrorism.
When these changes go into effect in a month, they will usher in some of the most rigid restrictions on U.S. travel to Cuba in modern memory.
Tourism has been a major part of the Cuban economy, reaching a high of 4.7 million visitors in 2018. Tourism plunged during the pandemic, bottoming out at less than half a million visitors in 2021, and has struggled to fully recover due to a host of factors, including tougher U.S. restrictions on travel and persistent power problems on the island. Last year, around 2.2 million people visited Cuba, according to Cuba’s National Office of Statistics and Information.
