Critics of President Obama’s diplomatic thaw with Cuba are questioning why a top official with the U.S. government office charged with maintaining the trade embargo and leveling sanctions against the Castro government was in Havana earlier this month meeting with regime officials.
Acting Deputy Director of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control Andrea Gacki was one of several U.S. officials in Havana for meetings that took place in mid-July, a senior administration official confirmed to the Washington Examiner. The official did not respond to follow-up questions about whom Gacki met with and what they discussed.
Since Obama announced his intention to start normalizing relations with Cuba in late 2014, dozens of U.S. officials have participated in negotiations about easing travel and other restrictions with the island nation, both in Havana and Washington.
But Gacki’s travel to Cuba this month has critics fuming because her office is charged with doling out punishment for those who violate U.S. law. Opponents of Obama’s rapprochement with the Castro regime fear she was there to help Cuba negotiate ways around U.S. sanctions.
Only Congress can lift the embargo entirely, although Obama has used his executive authority to allow greater travel from the U.S. to Cuba, and U.S. banks are negotiating with Havana to allow them to operate on the island.
Marion Smith, the executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit group founded to highlight the plight of those who have suffered under communism, said he views Gacki’s visit to Cuba as the “latest blatant attempt” to show the regime how to get around trade embargo against Cuba.
“While it’s not surprising, it’s hugely frustrating for us,” he said. “The oxygen the regime is getting in terms of access to capital is something that we’ll have to deal with from years to come,” no matter who is elected president of the United States in November.
Treasury officials have sometimes met with Iranian government officials during international conferences focused on rolling back Tehran’s nuclear program, Smith acknowledged. But he said most of those meetings occurred at international conferences where officials from both countries just happen to be in the same place at the same time, instead of a trip solely devoted to meeting with Cuban officials behind closed doors with no transparency to the American public.
“If it was a technical-sharing of information about the existing sanctions and why they remain, that would be one thing,” Smith said. “But if it’s the sort of meeting that lets Cuba know what the enforcement or non-enforcement intentions are of the Obama administration with regard to the sanctions at this particular moment, that is hugely problematic and possibly illegal.”
Smith also hinted that Treasury officials who are dedicated to enforcing sanctions instead of trying to ease them may also be upset with the top Treasury official’s recent travel to Havana.
“No career public servants are happy when they are put between U.S. law and a very political agenda,” he said.
Gacki was part of a U.S. delegation traveling to Cuba to participate in the U.S.-Cuba Regulatory Dialogue in Havana June 12-13.
The State Department only confirmed that officials from the Departments of Commerce, the Treasury and State participated, and that the purpose was to describe regulatory changes announced in mid-March “related to Cuba-related travel, commerce and financial transactions.”
“The delegations addressed ways the two nations can work together within existing U.S. laws and regulations,” the release said.
The visit comes amid reports that Cuba’s government-run bank and U.S. financial institutions are trying to find ways to allow transactions involving debit and credit cards from several U.S. banks, despite legal hurdles posed by the trade embargo.
Right now, Stonegate Bank of Florida is the only bank authorized by both the United States and Cuban governments to allow its customers to use their debit and credit cards in Cuba. The bank opened an office in Havana last year.
Shortly after the visit in mid-July, a senior State Department official told reporters that the Obama administration is “close to approaching the end of what can be done” through presidential executive authority to expand commerce and normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba.
“However, we’re constantly looking at the regulations to see where we still may make adjustments or modifications that will further … our people-to-people ties with Cuba,” he said, during a call to mark the one-year anniversary of the re-opening of embassies in both countries.
The official was responding to a question about whether to expect further easing of U.S. restrictions short of lifting the embargo between now and the end of the Obama’s time in office.Meanwhile, longtime human rights activists in Congress, including Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., argue that abuses by the Castro regime are increasing in Cuba with the renewed diplomatic ties to the United States, not improving as the Obama administration had hoped.
Meanwhile, longtime human rights activists in Congress, including Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., argue that abuses by the Castro regime are increasing in Cuba with the renewed diplomatic ties to the United States, not improving as the Obama administration had hoped.
Smith held a hearing earlier this month on the human rights situation in Cuba, where he said the “disregard for civil rights and political rights has gotten worse, not better, since the president’s much-trumpeted visit to the island six weeks ago.”
“The regime continues to jail and beat political dissidents, with even extrajudicial killings apparently sanctioned,” he said. “The Obama administration cannot allow concerns over its ‘legacy’ to muffle its voice when it should be loudly insisting that the rights of the Cuban people be respected.”
The hearing featured testimony from Sirley Avila Leon, who was a former Cuban government official before becoming a dissident who was nearly murdered in a brutal machete attack — the work, she says of Castro regime-directed “security thugs.”
Cuban officials were in Washington, D.C., this week for discussions on another topic: how to settle outstanding claims between the two nations. But the two sides made little progress other than to formalize the price tags of their claims, and agreed to continue meeting.
A senior State Department officials told reporters Friday that there’s no way to tell how the ongoing embargo would factor into Cuban claims related to economic damage it has caused because the talks are still in a preliminary phase.
U.S. nationals — including some Cuban-Americans exiled to the United States after the Castro regime came to power in the 1950s — are demanding a total of $1.9 billion, along with 6 percent interest, in claims for private property they owned on the island that the Cuban government seized. There are $2.2 billion in other outstanding U.S. court judgments against the Cuban government.
The Castro regime, meanwhile, argues that the United States owes Cuba a whopping $181 billion or more for “human damages” and $121 billion for economic damages the trade embargo has caused.
