President-elect Donald Trump just put Cuba on notice that if it fails to improve on the arrangement that reestablished diplomatic relations with the U.S. in December 2014, he will break it.
So far, Raúl Castro hasn’t criticized president-elect Donald Trump, which is usually the threshold for incurring his wrath, and he has a much different approach to governing than his brother Fidel, who died on Friday at the age 90 after stepping down as president 10 years ago. But that hasn’t stopped Trump from making his threat.
Raúl Castro’s plans to secure the legacy of his brother’s 1959 Cuban Revolution appear to be on a collision course with the incoming Trump administration, whose top members said Sunday that Cuba would have to make significant “changes” in order for the normalization path charted by President Obama to continue. Both Castros have long insisted they would never kneel to American pressure.
Raúl Castro replaced his brother Fidel Castro as president a decade ago and brought with him a new leadership style.
If tensions between Cuba and the United States ratchet up again under a Trump presidency, it would be a new stress test for Raúl Castro and his quieter, more austere leadership style. Cuba will enter the Trump era with Fidel Castro’s one-party socialist state firmly in command but without the supercharged politics and nationalist fervor he relied on to sustain it.
In December 2014 President Barack Obama announced that the U.S. would reestablish diplomatic relations with Cuba which were broken off by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1961. Doing so, he said, would bring about long-term Democratic changes that Washington had failed to produce in more than 50 years. But, on Sunday, representative of the incoming Trump administration said whether those changes would remain was unclear.
On Fox News Sunday, Reince Priebus, Trump’s incoming chief of staff, said, “There’s going to have to be some movement from Cuba in order to have a relationship with the United States.”
Castro would have to take steps to allow more political, economic and religious freedoms, Priebus said. “These things need to change in order to have open and free relationships, and that’s what President-elect Trump believes.”