(EFE).- The president of the United States, Joe Biden, has infuriated the exiles of those countries in Florida with a relief from the heavy-handed policies towards Cuba and Venezuela inherited from Donald Trump, which may leave the Democrats still electorally underdogs in a state dominated by conservatives.
In an election year in which Republicans seek to regain a majority in the House of Representatives, changes in policies towards Cuba and Venezuela, announced a day apart in the middle of the campaign, can be an extra help for candidates. rivals of Biden’s coreligionists in Florida.
“Biden’s plan to prop up the Cuban dictatorship represents yet another failure when it comes to defending freedom in our hemisphere,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said Tuesday in a message similar to that of Cuban exile leaders. , mostly aligned with the Republican Party.
“Biden’s plan to prop up Cuba’s dictatorship represents yet another failure when it comes to defending freedom in our hemisphere,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said Tuesday.
DeSantis, who will seek re-election in November, starts as the favorite and, according to voting intention polls, is well ahead of contenders for the Democratic nomination, such as former Governor Charlie Christ and state Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried.
The current governor is even considered a possible contender for the Republican nomination in the 2024 presidential election, in which — if held now — he would lead Biden by more than 10 points, according to a recent Rasmussen poll.
In the 2020 presidential elections, Biden was defeated in Florida by Republican Donald Trump, who took him almost 3.5 points ahead. However, Biden was the most voted candidate in Miami-Dade, a Democratic stronghold, but received fewer votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016.
It is in this county, the most populous and richest in Florida, where the changes in the policy towards Cuba and Venezuela can harm the Democratic Party the most, since the largest communities of Cubans and Venezuelans, as well as Nicaraguans, are concentrated here.
The alleged risk of a “socialist” USA if Biden won, with which the Republicans sought “the vote of fear” in 2020, was an argument that resonated well with Floridian voters from Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua and others from Latin American countries.
Congressmen and senators of Cuban origin, who have kept the specter of “socialism” alive ever since, have reacted in unison with most of the exile groups after the Biden Administration’s announcements on Cuba and Venezuela.
“President Biden’s unilateral concessions are a betrayal of the cause of freedom in Cuba,” Representative Mario Díaz-Balart wrote on Tuesday.
Ramón Sául Sánchez, from the Democracy Movement, was the dissonant voice in exile by supporting the existence of more flights to Cuba, that Cubans can receive more money from their families in the United States.
Rosa María Payá, daughter of the late Cuban opposition leader Oswaldo Payá, described as outrageous the “ineptitude of an Administration that prefers the approval of the dictatorship and gives in to its migratory blackmail, even against the clamor of the people.”
Ramón Sául Sánchez, from the Democracy Movement, was the dissonant voice in exile by supporting the existence of more flights to Cuba, that Cubans can receive more money from their families in the United States and that those who live here will be able to “reclaim” to their relatives on the Island under a reunification program that will be reactivated.
Even so, he reproached Biden for not consulting the exile forces as, at the beginning of his term, he had promised to do when making decisions about Cuba.
The announcement that the Biden Administration will lift the sanctions on Venezuela to promote the resumption of dialogue between the Government and the opposition also produced the rejection of Venezuelan exile organizations.
An influential Democratic senator, Bob Menéndez, of Cuban origin, warned that “history shows that negotiations based on unilateral concessions do not entail feasible changes in the actions of authoritarian regimes.”
But, as Juan González, Biden’s senior adviser for Latin American affairs, said this Tuesday at a forum in Miami, neither did the heavy hand applied by Donald Trump during his Presidency return freedom to countries like Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
In an apparent effort of damage control, the president of the Florida Democratic Party, Manny Díaz, emphasized that the measures are “encouraging” for ordinary Cubans and “especially for the thousands of families that continue to be separated by the political draconian of the past administration”.
The Republican National Committee, through its spokeswoman Julie Friedland, stressed: “Florida Democrats have 99 problems and Joe Biden’s relief of communist dictatorships is definitely one of them.”
“Florida Democrats have 99 problems and Joe Biden’s easing of communist dictatorships is definitely one of them”
According to experts consulted by EFE, the review of the policy towards Cuba, which has lasted more than a year, includes two main factors. The first is the growing arrival of undocumented Cuban migrants, a crisis that analyst William LeoGrande compares to the 1980 Mariel exodus and the 1994 rafters.
“The second is the damage that the hardline policy towards Cuba was doing to the US relationship with the rest of Latin America, as the potential for a disastrous collapse of the Summit (of the Americas) has shown,” adds this expert. in Cuba at the American University.
None of the experts consulted believes that the United States is willing to back down on its plan to exclude the three countries it considers undemocratic from the summit, something that would greatly irritate a key Biden ally, Democratic Senator Bob Menéndez.
“But perhaps taking these constructive steps (towards Cuba) could appease some of the region’s leaders who are threatening not to attend,” considers the head of Cuba at the independent Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), Mariakarla Nodarse Venancio.
Venancio described that announcement as a “modest but positive” step to undo some of the toughest policies, but stressed that “it is not a return” to the thaw that Obama promoted.
According to LeoGrande, the policy that Biden has outlined is more similar to the one that Obama maintained before December 2014. “These are all unilateral measures by the United States and do not represent a rapprochement towards Cuba at the diplomatic level, beyond the recent talks on migration LeoGrande opined.
“Obama was prepared to go further than Biden. Obama, for example, talked about (that Congress should) lift the embargo (on Cuba), something that Biden has never supported”
Biden’s main adviser for Latin America, Juan González, stressed this Tuesday during a conference in Miami that the announcement is addressed to the Cuban people and not to the Government of Cuba, which he said must assume its “responsibility for human rights violations.” .
Mark Feierstein, who was Obama’s adviser on Latin American issues and also worked for a few months in the current US administration, reminded Efe that Biden “has a different idea” of how Cuba policy should be compared to his Democratic predecessor.
“Obama was prepared to go further than Biden. Obama, for example, talked about (that Congress should) lift the embargo (on Cuba), something that Biden has never supported (since he came to power),” Feierstein explained, who now works at the Albright Stonebridge organization.
The former adviser believes that Biden’s tougher stance comes from the president himself and not from any of his advisers, but he does not rule out that the president could further soften the policy towards the island in the future, especially if Cuba undertakes more “economic and political reforms.” “.
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