The Philip DeFranco Show - PDS 6.28 Why It Matters That US Cuba Relations Are Tense Again and How It Happened...

Episode Date: June 28, 2019

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Sup you beautiful bastards, hope you're having a fantastic Friday. Welcome back to the Philip DeFranco Show and if you're new here on Fridays we like to try and do something a little bit different. And today we're going to be diving into a country that was largely isolated from the United States for more than half a century and of course I'm talking about Cuba. Southern neighbor to the United States just 90 miles off the coast of Florida, Cuba. Now in pop culture Cuba is probably most widely known for its cigars. Cuban? Everybody! Oh, that is a fine cigar. This is a Cohiba cigar. Each one is worth 10,000 francs.

10,000 francs? These are Cuban. Bolivar, Belicoso. So is this. Miami, my friend, is not Cuba. And one of the reasons that Cuban cigars were so sought after and they popped up in movies is that because in the United States, they were outlawed for more than five decades.

And that's because the United States has imposed an almost complete embargo on Cuba since 1959, effectively cutting off the island from a potentially big trading partner and attempting to discourage other countries from doing business with a one-party communist country. But over the last 10 years or so, the US-Cuba relationship has been a bit like a seesaw.

Obama warms Cuban relations by reestablishing an embassy there and ease some of the embargoes restriction. Although Trump has decided to reimpose some of those restrictions and added pressure onto Cuba in the last couple of years. And naturally there's been a lot of disagreement over the right course of action. While some believing that isolation and embargo keeps the

Cuban government from threatening us interests, but others see it as a failed tactic from the cold war that hasn't actually done anything to make Cuba adopt meaningful reforms. But even with that said, of course, as usual, before we get to the outlawed cigars and how Cuban society and US policy has changed, we need to back up a little bit. So in 1959, Fidel Castro carries out

a communist revolution in Cuba. Quickly after that, the Cuban government created policies that were unfriendly to the United States. The government took control of all foreign assets, increased taxes on imports from the United States, and since the island was communist, they established a trade deal in strong relationship with the United States. The government took control of all foreign assets, increased taxes on imports from the United States, and since the island was communist, they established a trade deal in strong relationship with the Soviet Union.

And we then saw the Eisenhower administration responding with measures of their own, going after Cuban exports and Cuban money in the United States, cutting diplomatic ties with Cuba, and of course, imposing a nearly total trade embargo. Then things got worse in the 60s. In 1961, the CIA tried to overthrow Castro

by landing exiled Cubans in the Bay of Pigs. That did not work out so well. So the CIA then came up with a few other assassination plans and none of those worked. Then in 1962, we saw President Kennedy signing Eisenhower's embargo into law rather than just leaving it as an executive action. And again, things got way worse

with the world even coming very close to nuclear war. And in October of 1962, President Kennedy made this announcement when American spy planes discovered Soviet missile launch sites in Cuba. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western hemisphere.

This all led to a two-week standoff in naval blockade, which ended in an agreement to remove the launch site. And while this missile crisis was probably rock bottom as far as relations between the United States and Cuba go, that also doesn't mean that things got better over the next few decades. In 1980, the embargo was still on, and the Cuban economy was so hurt

that 125,000 Cubans fled the country in something called the Mariel Boatlift. We then jump ahead to 1991, when the Soviet Union falls apart, and when that happened, Cuba lost a big financial supporter and trading partner in the next couple of Administrations in the states basically just increased the pressure on Cuba because they lost their biggest supporter But then by 2008 both the embargo and the Castro government were still in place right after nearly 50 years of US administrations pressuring Cuba to enact these reforms same thing

But by that time then candidate Obama Signaled that the United States policy towards Cuba needed to change. And here he is speaking at a Cuban American National Foundation event in 2008. The situation has changed in the Americas, but we've failed to change with it. Instead of engaging the people of the region, we've acted as if we can still dictate terms unilaterally. And three months after entering office,

Obama took that first step. His administration removed or changed several regulations, this including how many family visits Americans could make to Cuba, how much money they could send, and the value of gifts they could send. This was kind of the first sign of what was to come. Also, we saw Cuba make significant changes of its own

from 2008 onward. Fidel Castro had become too sick and old to govern by 2008 and handed off power to his brother Raul. In 2011, at Cuba's sixth Congress of the Communist Party, around 300 reforms were up for approval, which of note, both the Communist Congress and Cuba's National Assembly had approved. And some of the most Party, around 300 reforms were up for approval, which of note, both the Communist Congress and Cuba's National Assembly had approved. And some of the most important reforms there

included recognizing certain forms of private property, like allowing citizens to buy and sell homes and cars. There were also big increases in allowing bank lending, which offered opportunities for small business and self-employment. Right, and remember, this is a massive deal there because nearly everything was state owned, from the restaurants to the salons to whatever.

There was also a slimming down of the bureaucracy with aims to cut around a million government jobs and a plan to have about 40% of the workforce employed outside of the state by 2016 compared to just 10% in 2010. But the government also deciding to phase out some state subsidies for goods and services. In the following couple of years,

Cuba also initiated some reforms and freedom. In 2013, Cubans were no longer required to have an exit visa with prior approval to leave the country which in the first year increased travel by 35%. And at the end of 2014, Obama announced the most significant changes to US Cuban policy that we've seen since the embargo. And these changes were designed to bring the two countries

into friendlier terms. First, the two countries exchanged prisoners. The US also made it easier for Americans to travel to Cuba, allowing them to visit Cuba under general license rather than requiring pre-approval. And the licenses included things like family visits, journalism, professional research, education, public performance, support for the Cuban people, and a few other things. And even though tourism was still technically illegal, many did travel essentially as tourists.

And then it took us a while to get back. Remember those famous Cuban cigars? Well now, American travelers were allowed to bring home up to $100 worth of tobacco and alcohol products. And that was also along with the lesser important than the cigars, Obama and Castro announcing the restoration of diplomatic ties. And the next year, both countries reopened embassies and the Obama administration removed Cuba from the terrorism list.

Then in 2016, the US and Cuba signed an agreement to allow commercial flights between the two for the first time in more than 50 years. And in a significant gesture, Obama became the first sitting US president in nearly 90 years to visit Cuba. And there he met Raul Castro and other Cuban nationals. But, notably here, none of his actions alone could have actually repealed the embargo itself since it's a congressional law.

And so there were questions of, well, why would the Obama administration try to do all of this? And actually, when Obama visited Cuba, he tried to explain one of the biggest reasons. What the United States was doing was not working. We have to have the courage to acknowledge that truth. A policy of isolation designed for the Cold War made little sense in the 21st century. The embargo was only hurting the Cuban people instead of helping them. And also, we spoke with Ricardo Herrera, who is the executive director of the Cuba Study Group, to give us further insight into U.S.-Cuba relations.

Instead of trying to pile on the pressure on the Cuban regime and punish them for their human rights abuses and all their economic failings and hoping that that would bring change, what the Obama policy sought to do was empower the Cuban people, expand the flow of resources, context, information, capital from the United States to the Cuban people so that they can be in a better position to demand changes from their own government. And so maybe one of the biggest arguments against the embargo and the policy of isolation is that critics claim that it actually hurts

both the Cuban people and the US economy. For example, the US Chamber of Commerce actually opposes the embargo saying that it hurts business interests. As far back as 2001, they said that it costs American exporters up to $1.2 billion in lost sales each year. There's also evidence that suggests that Obama's relaxed policies,

coupled with Raul Castro's reforms, have resulted in economic benefits for Cubans. International tourism arrivals went from 2.2 million in 2006 to roughly 4.7 million in 2017, with American travel specifically rising by 50% in the first two years of Obama's reforms. And when talking with Herrera, he also described how the private sector as a whole has changed

with those Cuban reforms and U.S. policy shifts. You have approximately 500,000 Cubans working in the private sector as Cuenta Probistas. We are talking about approximately 30 to 35 percent of the total labor force has some sort of income stream coming in from the private sector. That private sector was largely fueled by access to American tourists, American visitors, American dollars. But like we mentioned at the beginning, what we're talking about is a seesaw situation. When the Trump administration took over, they had a different idea for how Cuba should be treated. In November of 2017 Trump enacted

some rollbacks of President Obama's policies specifically targeting travel to the island and financial transactions. We saw the Treasury Department publish a list of nearly 200 entities in Cuba that are considered connected to the Cuban military intelligence or security services and those range from hotels to stores to entire marinas. US citizens are also currently prohibited from buying anything from those establishments. The Trump administration also removed people-to-people non-academic educational travel from the list of approved travel reasons. And regarding this, when we spoke with Eric Lorber, senior director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracy Center on Economic and Financial Power, he explained one of the reasons that the Trump administration restricted people-to-people travel in certain financial transactions. What you ended up seeing though, and I alluded to this in our conversation a little bit earlier, was that some of the primary beneficiaries of that increased in increase in person to person contact and in the increase in U.S. visitors going to Cuba ostensibly for legitimate reasons, was that a number of Cuban military and intelligence entities benefited disproportionately.

But this 2017 rollback wasn't the only way that the Trump administration decided to pressure the Cuban government. In May of this year, the administration took advantage of a 1996 law. We're talking, say it with me, Title III of the Helms-Burton Act or Libertad Act. Oh, that was fun to do together.

Which allows Americans to sue companies that use quote, trafficked property the Cuban government took during the revolution. But every president before has waived that part of the act, believing that it would hurt business in Cuba and a future settlement in the Cuban government. That is until Trump decided to enforce it, allowing some to sue businesses using property taken

during the Cuban revolution. And then finally, in June of this year, the Trump administration further restricted travel to Cuba, barring cruise liners like Carnival from docking there. And of course, as expected, these policies effectively put a dent into Cuba's growing tourism industry. So these are new things that are happening.

And of course there's the question of, what is the reasoning behind these policies? And when speaking with Eric Lorber, he described what he believes are the two main reasons that the Trump administration pulled back some of the Obama policies. The undue benefit to the Cuban military that was coming from the Obama administration winding,

and then Cuba's support for Venezuela. I think those two things are driving the hardening position of the administration. And the Trump administration has been very, very vocal about Cuba's support for Venezuela. John Bolton, Trump's national security advisor, specifically had this to say last year, "'This troika of tyranny, this triangle of terror

"'stretching from Havana to Caracas to Managua "'is the cause of immense human suffering, "'impedance of enormous regional instability, "'and the genesis of a sordid cradle of communism in the Western Hemisphere. But on the other hand, we had Herrero arguing that Trump's policies against Cuba are largely counterproductive, even if they're trying to get at Venezuela. Instead of actually trying to drive a wedge between Cuba and Venezuela, try to bring the Cubans to the table to be part of the solution in the Venezuelan crisis. All you're seeing is really a rehash of old sanctions that have zero track record of success.

But also in this situation, some have argued that Cuba hasn't been enough of a reformer on human rights and political freedom. For example, Human Rights Watch found that between 2010 and 2016, the Cuban government actually detained more critics for their views, going from 172 per month to 827 per month. And although those numbers did drop in 2017 and 2018, there are still more than 2000 reports of arbitrary detention from just January to August, 2018. Now still after both Obama and Trump's policies, the embargo itself has been essentially untouched.

So aside from the embargo, these policy differences towards Cuba seem largely driven by what people think will push the island to make significant reforms. And if Bolton and Pompeo's comments are any hint, the policy towards Cuba might only get more restrictive. So I don't see there being a significant change in the administration's position on Cuba

to relax some of the new restrictions that this administration has put into place. I don't think there'll be sufficient reform within Cuba for that to happen. With that being said, however, I do think there's the potential for real increased pressure on Cuba. I think that's what Mike Pompeo and that's what John Bolton have made very clear. The old policy, the policy that the Trump administration is embracing once again, is a policy that tries to micromanage a transition in Cuba from Washington

and Miami. It doesn't work. We have almost six decades to show for it that it doesn't work. But with all of that said, with everything we have covered, that's essentially where we are right now. We'll have to wait to see how each side decides to act in the coming weeks, especially as conditions in Venezuela change. But as we always try to do, I wanna pass the question off to you. What do you think about both administrations policies towards Cuba? Do you think that we should be pressuring Cuba still?

Or no, we've seen what this does after many, many years. And really just any and all thoughts on this. And hey, while you do that, or before you go to the next video, if you like this video, let us know. Take a second to hit that like button. Also, if you're new here, you want these videos delivered straight

to your beautiful face, hit that subscribe button, ring that bell to turn on notifications. Also, if you're new here, you want these videos delivered straight to your beautiful face, hit that subscribe button, ring that bell to turn on notifications. Also, if you're not 100% filled in, maybe you missed one of the last two videos we put out. You can click or tap right there to watch either of those. But with that said, of course, as always, my name's Philip DeFranco. You've just been filled in. I love your faces and I'll see you Monday.