Rep. Reid Ribble, R-Wisc., listens to Roberta Jacobson, assistant secretary of the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Relations of the State Department as she answers a question about the new US-Cuba policy. (Daniel Hersh/MNS)
WASHINGTON – Republican congressmen grilled Obama administration officials on President Barack Obama’s decision to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba, criticizing the secrecy of the negotiations and the abruptness of the policy shift.
Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., Obama’s Dec. 17 policy shift left many members of Congress in the dark.
Obama ordered that full diplomatic relations be restored with Cuba and that an embassy be established in Havana, ending a more than 50-year break in talks between the two countries. The announcement followed 18 months of secret talks that ended with a phone call between Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro.
“The administration’s growing track record of secret negotiations, whether in Iran or the release of the ‘Taliban Five,’ is increasingly troublesome,” Royce said in his opening remark.
Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., said that he was shocked at the change and might have been less opposed if he had known the reasoning behind it. Others simply did not like being left in the dark.
But Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., said after a half-century chill, a new policy was needed.
Cuban citizens did not ask for a dictatorship, and the Obama administration decided the United States should not punish them by continuing to isolate Cuba, Roberta Jacobson, assistant secretary of state for the bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, told the committee.
Jacobson said the isolationist policy had “become such an irritant in our work with other Latin American countries” that it was impeding the ability to work effectively with them.
A day after the Senate Foreign Relations Committee heard from Cuban activists, the officials from the State, Treasury and Commerce departments defended the policy shift.
“The whole point of this new policy is not that we are telescoping to the Cuban government that they don’t need to change or that we expect them to change right away,” Jacobson said. “Certainly we want those practices to change. We simply are not naïve enough to think that they will change.”
She said Cubans are starting to separate their own economic future from that of their government, but they do not always have the means to do so. Those are the people, she said, that the U.S. wants to help with its new Cuban policy.
