Trump moves to toughen US policy on Cuba

WASHINGTON (AP) – President Donald Trump has instructed his top Cabinet officers to review U.S. policy toward Cuba, ordering them to examine current sanctions and come up with ways to toughen them within 30 days.

In a memo Monday, Trump said the reviews should focus on Cuba’s treatment of dissidents, its policies directed at dissidents and restricting financial transactions that “disproportionately benefit the Cuban government, military, intelligence, or security agencies at the expense of the Cuban people.”

In one potential significant change, the order said the U.S. should look for ways to shut down all tourism to the island and to restrict educational tours to groups that are organized and run only by American citizens.

The move is not a surprise given that Trump has previously said he plans to rescind the easing of sanctions and other penalties in Cuba that were instituted during the terms of Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. In the days before leaving office, Biden had moved to lift the U.S. designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism.

Trump’s memo “supports the economic embargo of Cuba and opposes calls in the United Nations and other international forums for its termination,” according to a fact sheet.

The Trump administration also has made Cuba one of seven countries facing heightened restrictions on visitors and revoked temporary legal protections for about 300,000 Cubans, which had protected them from deportation.

The administration also has announced visa restrictions on Cuban and foreign government officials involved in Cuba’s medical missions, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called “forced labor.”

In an interview with The Associated Press this month, Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio accused the United States of trying to discredit the medical missions and criticized reversal of policy welcoming Cubans to the U.S.

Rubio, whose family left Cuba in the 1950s before the communist revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power, has long been a proponent of sanctions on the communist island.