For anyone who remembers the name-calling that characterized the
repartee between “little” Marco Rubio and Donald (Small Hands) Trump
during last year’s Republican primary campaign, it is more than a little
surprising to see them now celebrating a partnership. But Rubio’s sudden
transformation into a Trump loyalist, during last week’s questioning of
James Comey by the Senate Intelligence Committee, hinted that a deal had
been struck between the two men. And so it was.

Today in Miami, with Senator Rubio at his side, President Trump unveiled
his much anticipated review of Cuba policy. The venue chosen for the
occasion was the Manuel Artime Theatre, named after a late leader of
Brigade 2506, the Cuban-exile paramilitary group, backed by the C.I.A.,
which led the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, in 1961. After that disaster,
Artime participated in a number of other C.I.A.-supported efforts
against Fidel Castro, including an attempt to assassinate him. Last
October, a week before the election, at the Bay of Pigs Museum, in
Little Havana, Trump appeared before the Brigade’s veterans association,
which had given him its endorsement. He said, “The United States should
not prop up the Castro regime economically and politically, as Obama has
done and as Hillary Clinton plans to do. They don’t know how to make a
good deal, and they wouldn’t know how to make a good deal if it was
staring at them in the face.”

Trump didn’t make clear what kind of a deal he would make instead, and
it seems unlikely that he knew himself. Indeed, around that time, he was
telling senior Obama Administration officials that he was impressed with
President Obama’s policy, a historic breakthrough, dramatically unveiled
in December, 2014, after two years of secret negotiations with Raúl
Castro’s government. Whatever Trump thought or said privately,
he clearly wanted to make the right sort of noises to potential voters
in Miami.

Trump had pulled a similar maneuver before. In November, 1999, when he
first toyed with the idea of running for the Presidency, Trump spoke to
a crowd of Cuban-Americans at an event in Miami hosted by the
anti-Castro Cuban American National Foundation, and said that he would
never do business in Cuba as long as Fidel Castro was in power. That
wasn’t true; less than a year earlier, a party of Trump’s consultants had
travelled to Havana to look for investment opportunities, a violation of the
restrictions of the U.S. trade embargo.

Upon learning of Fidel Castro’s death, on November 25th, Trump, who
had won the Presidency three weeks earlier, took a harder line, saying, in
a statement, “though the tragedies, deaths and pain caused by Fidel
Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure
the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and
liberty.”

As with most initiatives of the Trump White House, the Cuba policy has
already been widely leaked; the Miami Herald ran a story on Thursday,
based on its reading of an eight-page document that it described as
Trump’s Cuba “policy directive.” In essence, it reintroduces
restrictions on travel by Americans to Cuba and places new curbs on U.S.
investments there. Its stated aim is to deny the Castro government,
which controls a majority of business on the island, through a military
holding company, easy access to American funds. The move will also likely
curtail the numbers of Americans travelling to the island as well, by
obliging them to provide proof that they are following the new rules.
(Under the U.S. trade embargo, which can only be lifted by an act of
Congress, travel to Cuba for tourism is officially banned, but the Obama
Administration had relaxed the rules to permit American travellers to
come and go under a “report yourself” honor system.) The new orders may
well hurt the Castro government’s cash flow, but they seem equally
likely to dent the forward momentum of Cuba’s nascent private sector.

At the Artime Theatre, Trump said that Cuba had not opened up enough
under the Obama guidelines, and so he was “cancelling the previous
Administration’s completely one-sided deal.” America would enforce the
trade embargo rather than seek to relax it, as Obama had done, and,
Trump added, “We challenge Cuba to come to the table with a new
agreement that is in the best interest of their people, of our people,
and of Cuban-Americans.” The President then issued a series of demands
that made his failure to ask anything similar of the Saudis during his
trip to Riyadh, several weeks ago, all the more glaring, calling on
Havana to “end to the abuse of dissidents, release political prisoners,
stop jailing innocent people, open yourselves up to political and
economic freedoms.”

Senator Rubio has been taking credit for helping to draft the new
directive, telling the Herald that he worked on it with input from
Representative Mario Díaz-Balart. (Díaz-Balart, whose district is in
Southern Florida, is a nephew of Fidel Castro’s first wife, and, like
his older brother Lincoln Díaz-Balart, who served eighteen years in
Congress, he is one of the Castro regime’s most bitter opponents.) Rubio
said, “All the pressure comes from American business interests that go
to Cuba, see the opportunities, and then come back here and lobby us to
lift the embargo. I’m trying to reverse the dynamic: I’m trying to
create a Cuban business sector that now goes to the Cuban government andpressures them to create changes.”

As with much else that Trump has done since assuming the Presidency,
his Cuba directive appears to be a deliberate attempt to dismantle Obama’s
legacy. Although there were Cubans, including the late Fidel Castro, who
were skeptical of the sincerity of U.S. intentions, many others were
elated at the possibilities promised by the Obama Administration’s
rapprochement. Already, that policy has helped to speed up economic and
cultural reforms in Cuba initiated by Raúl Castro, who took over as
President from his ailing older brother, in 2008, and fuelled a
private-enterprise boom. It has also spurred a foreign-investment boom,
and an increase in the number of American tourists visiting the island in the two years since diplomatic relations were restored; last year, more than six hundred thousand Cuban-Americans and other U.S. travellers went to Cuba, an increase of a third since 2015. Several U.S. cruise
lines have begun ferrying Americans to Havana, and six U.S. airlines,
including American and JetBlue, fly regularly scheduled flights to nine
airports across Cuba. Airbnb now lists fifteen thousand apartments and
houses for rent. A hotel-building boom has also begun, but this is an
area in which Trump’s directive may cause a slowdown. One business
likely to be affected is Havana’s new Four Points Sheraton, which opened,
last year, under the management of the U.S. hotelier Starwood; the owner
of the hotel property is the Cuban military holding company GAESA, Grupo
de Administracion Empresarial.

Obama visited Cuba in March of last year, and, in an interview in the
Oval Office after his return, he told me that his operating theory about
Cuba had been based, in part, on “the belief that if you are interested
in promoting freedom, independence, civic space inside of Cuba, then the
power of things like remittances to give individual Cubans some cash,
even if the government was taking a cut, that then allowed them to start
a barbershop, or a cab service, was going to be the engine whereby
individual Cubans—not directed by the United States, not directed by the
C.I.A., not through some grand conspiracy—can now have their own little
shop and have a little bit of savings and start expecting more.”

Earlier today, Benjamin Rhodes, who was one of Obama’s lead negotiators
with Cuba, told me, “The Cubans need to have greater access to U.S.
business and other economies, not less, to be able to take the extra
step toward openness. By shoving them back into the penalty box, it’s
only going to be more likely they turn to Russia and China, and keep
them frozen in time. It’s going to reinforce the narrative of the most
retrograde forces in Cuba that the U.S. relationship is necessarily one
of conflict.” Rhodes added that the timing of Trump’s directive is
particularly bad. Raúl Castro plans to step down in February of next
year, which means that, for the first time in six decades, Cuba will not
be governed by a Castro. “Rather than having a chance to change the
dynamic with a policy of continued openness,” Rhodes said, Trump’s
measures risk “isolating us once again on this issue, not to mention
isolating the Cuban people.”

Trump’s initiative is also in direct opposition to the thinking of a
number of influential Cuban-Americans, some of whom helped to shape the
Obama policy. Mike Fernandez, a Miami-based health-care billionaire and
a major Republican donor, overcame his own misgivings about engagement
with Cuba to become an ardent supporter of greater openness as the best
possible instrument for change. He and a number of others formed the
Cuba Study Group, which lobbied for an end to isolation. Trump’s
reliance on Rubio and Díaz-Balart for his Cuba rollback is a direct
riposte to the group’s efforts.

In an op-ed in the Herald this week, Fernandez wrote, “Because of our
willingness to allow an exchange, a quiet revolution has been happening
inside Cuba without a shot being fired. What is clear is that progress
has been made these past two years; progress that we have not seen in
the previous 58. Why would we want to change an American cruise line for
a Russian or Chinese warship in Havana’s harbor?” Fernandez reminded his
readers of something that Rubio had said about Trump during the
campaign: “He called Trump ‘a con man.’ If you believe anything Rubio
says, believe that.”

Ana Dopico, the director of the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, at
New York University, and a Cuban-American herself, said that, in her
view, Trump’s initiative amounted to little more than an act of
political theatre. “It’s the last gasp of the Cold War, a nod to the
generation that supported hard-line politicians who no longer have a
large base of support,” Dopico said. “There is a new generation of
Cuban-Americans who are more pragmatic in their attitudes toward Cuba.
Their hearts and their pocketbooks are with their relatives on the
island, and they don’t want to see them hurt with tightened
restrictions.”

In an e-mail exchange with a senior Cuban official, I asked what he
thought about Trump’s directive. He replied, “We’ve been through the worst of times during the past
fifty-eight years, and any new setback we suffer can’t be comparable to
what we’ve already been through.”