President Donald Trump announced on Friday the reversal of several key parts of Barack Obama's normalization of relations with Cuba, which started in December 2014.
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Trump's hardline on US relations with Cuba could create a blind spot in a major drug-trafficking corridor
After Obama's opening to Cuba, security cooperation increased. But those joint efforts have been frozen under Trump — perhaps permanently.
President Donald Trump speaks about Cuban dissident Cary Roque at his announcement of his Cuba policy at the Manuel Artime Theater in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood, Florida, June 16, 2017.
Before an enthusiastic anti-Castro crowd in Miami, Trump signed a directive that restricted Americans' ability to travel to the island, prohibited financial dealings with the Cuban military, and laid out several stipulations on which future US-Cuban negotiations would be based.
One of the four goals of Trump's police change is to "Further the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and those of the Cuban people," according to a fact sheet distributed by the White House.
"[Russia] has already started trying to make up the gap in petroleum imports to Cuba that have fallen off dramatically with the chaos in Venezuela," retired Army Brig. Gen. David L. McGinnis, a member of the Consensus for American Security at the American Security Project, said on an Atlantic Council conference call this week.
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Russia has also recently forgiven billions in Cuban government debt and won a bid to build a railroad on the island.
"They're in a market for products from both Russia and China, and both of those countries have the resources to provide the loans to allow them to purchase their weapons and equipment," McGinnis said.
These are not new concerns.
In 2010, nine retired generals wrote to then-House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Howard Berman to say that Cuba did not pose a threat to the US and to call for the travel ban to be lifted.
For its part, Havana has not fully embraced Russia (or China, which is Cuba's largest trading partner and the largest holder of its foreign debt).
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According to McGinnis, that is likely because of the Cuban government "wanting to have a balanced foreign policy to the best extent they can, hoping that we will step forward and do the right thing."
This isn't a return to the Cold War, but the Cuban mood may quickly change if avenues for engagement with the US appear to be closed.
"If we would step back, that would kind of take the hope away from the Cuban government that there was going to be rapprochement," the retired general said, "and obviously they would be forced toward the two eager adversaries of the United States in our own backyard."
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