Sen. Marco Rubio plans some State of the Union pushback to protest President Obama’s executive action aimed at normalizing relations with Cuba.
Rubio, a Florida Republican and a vocal opponent of Obama’s unilateral effort to re-establish business and diplomatic ties with Cuba, has invited Rosa Maria Paya Acevedo as his personal guest to Obama’s annual speech to Congress on Tuesday, his office confirmed Monday.
Paya Acevedo is a Cuban Christian Liberation Movement activist whose father, Oswaldo Paya, one of Cuba’s best-known dissidents, was killed in 2012 in a car crash under suspicious circumstances.
The Paya family argues that the Castro brothers orchestrated the crash and that it had been driven off the road, while the Cuban government asserts that the driver lost control of the vehicle and hit a tree. The Cuban government has refused to allow an investigation and has withheld a copy of the autopsy report from the family.
In addition, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., a former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is bringing a representative of the family members whose relatives were killed by Castro regime in 1996.
In February of that year, members of the anti-Castro group Brothers to the Rescue were in a pair of Cessnas flying over international waters near the island. The Cuban Air Force shot the planes out of the sky, killing three American pilots.
Ros-Lehtinen has invited Marlene Alejandre Triana, the daughter of Armando Alejandre, a decorated Vietnam veteran and one of the pilots who died in the 1996 shoot-down.
Earlier Monday, the White House announced that Alan Gross, a subcontractor recently freed by the Cuban government after five years of imprisonment, will be one of first lady Michelle Obama’s guests at the State of the Union address, along with Gross’s wife Judy.
Gross’s release came the same day Obama announced his unilateral action to re-establish diplomatic ties to the one-party Communist island nation, which is viewed by those supporting the new relationship with Cuba as a positive outgrowth of loosening restrictions on the island nation.
Late last week, the Obama administration released new regulations lifting several travel, trade and business sanctions between the U.S. and Cuba.
Opponents of the move cautioned that Obama was acted too precipitously and not pushing for concrete actions benefitting the Cuban people, such as free-elections and other human rights concessions, before easing the sanctions on the Cuban government.
Rubio, and Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., sent Treasury Secretary Jack Lew a letter Wednesday demanding more details about how the administration plans to implement its new Cuba policy.
