Trump’s push to make Cuba ‘surrender’ will fail: Negotiator

Bloomberg

The Cuban negotiator who normalised relations with the US during the Obama administration said President Donald Trump’s push to dismantle the deal won’t dislodge the communist regime in Havana.
Cuba endured almost 60 years of US aggression and can survive another bout of antagonism from Washington, Josefina Vidal, now Cuba’s ambassador to Canada, said in an interview. The latest White House measures to squeeze the Caribbean nation include curbs on travel, a cap on remittances and allowing lawsuits over confiscated property, a step that’s prompted criticism by US allies.
Vidal questioned the integrity of Trump’s aides, including National Security Adviser John Bolton, and argued the renewed pressure on Cuba is a simple play for Republican votes in Florida. “This is a policy which is condemned to be defeated again,” Vidal said at the Cuban Embassy in Ottawa.
“They want Cuba to surrender. They want Cuba to abandon what Cuba is, to abandon its principles, and to submit Cuba again to the desires of the US But that won’t happen.”
Bolton delivered the Trump administration’s latest salvo a day earlier on the 58th anniversary of the start of the failed US-backed invasion of Cuba, addressing Bay of Pigs veterans in Miami. Allies in Canada and Europe protested the decision to allow US lawsuits against foreign companies doing business on the island.
Even so, Cuba is starting to feel the pinch as Trump rolls back Vidal’s work with the previous administration, which culminated in the restoration of full diplomatic relations and Barack Obama’s historic 2016 visit to Havana and meeting with then-President Raul Castro.
With the political and economic crisis in Venezuela choking off Cuba’s oil supply, shortages of food and medicine have already hit the island. Trump’s bid to curb tourism will add to the crunch by taking more hard currency out of the economy.
The US says Cuba is keeping Nicolas Maduro in power in Caracas, despite international efforts to depose him. “If you could wave a magic wand and take the Cubans out of Venezuela, Maduro would fall almost simultaneously,” Bolton said before his speech in Miami.
“This is slander. This is a lie. Bolton is a liar,” Vidal shot back, citing the veteran American foreign-policy hawk’s 2002 allegation — questioned by US intelligence agencies — that Havana was developing biological weapons. She also questioned the truthfulness of Trump’s Venezuela envoy Elliott Abrams, calling him a criminal. Abrams pleaded guilty to lying to Congress in 1991 about the Iran-Contra scandal.
Cuba says all of the almost 20,000 Cubans in Venezuela are doctors, nurses, teachers or other community-service providers. That portrayal has been challenged by former Venezuelan military officers who say Cubans were present during their torture and interrogation by Maduro’s forces.
US-Cuban contacts established under Obama, such as working groups on immigration and drug trafficking, have ceased, Vidal said. She suggested that Trump had been persuaded by Senator Marco Rubio that Cuban-American Republican voters in Florida are critical to his 2020 re-election bid.