Could presidential politics screw up America’s engagement with Cuba?

Could presidential politics screw up America's engagement with Cuba?
Tim Fernholz
July 31, 2015

Hillary Clinton went to Florida today and blasted her Republican
opponents in the US presidential race for their support of an embargo
and travel ban on Cuba—a move that might complicate efforts to end the
island nation's American ostracization.
"The Cuban people have waited long enough for progress to come," she
said in a speech to college students in Miami. "Even many Republicans on
Capitol Hill are starting to recognize the urgency of moving forward.
It's time for their leaders to either get on board or get out of the
way. The Cuba embargo needs to go, once and for all."
Indeed, support for ending the five decade embargo on Cuba is broad in
the US, including 47% of Republican voters. Many interest groups that
often line up with Republican politicians—including the business
community and farmers—support lifting the embargo as well. Amendments to
temporarily lift the embargo handily passed the Republican-dominated
Senate appropriations committee this week.
That kind of comity hasn't always been the case. As Republican contender
Jeb Bush's campaign immediately pointed out, Clinton supported the
embargo in the past. But the change in public opinion on the issue gives
Clinton—and other politicians—space to reconsider their views of a US
policy that has yet to change Cuba's repressive political regime. Many
Republican leaders in Congress haven't veered from their position,
however; nor have their presidential candidates, besides the libertarian
outlier Rand Paul.
"The Obama-Clinton policy is rooted in a false narrative that paints the
embargo as a relic of the Cold War," Bush, the former Florida
governor—who has received millions in campaign funds from pro-embargo
donors—said in a statement. "They claim to want to free Cuba from the
past, but they misunderstand the present. The Cuban people are not
imprisoned by the past, they are imprisoned by the Castro regime."
The danger for Democrats is that if Cuban relations get caught between
the two parties during a presidential race, Republicans who are
sympathetic to lifting the embargo may have a change of heart—just as
conservative policy ideas became anathema to the GOP after they were
endorsed by US president Barack Obama. In other words, if Clinton is for
it, the GOP base might turn against it.
Engage Cuba, a bipartisan group of political operatives lobbying for
normalization of US relations with Cuba on behalf of US business, is
ground-zero for this kind of conflict. One of its founders is Luis
Miranda, a Democratic operative who helped roll out Obama's policy as a
White House spokesperson; another senior adviser is Stephen Law,
formerly the top staff to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. Law
runs a "Super PAC" that will spend millions in support of Republican
candidates this year.
"We obviously can't control what campaigns do on this issue, but at
Engage Cuba we believe a positive, bipartisan approach has the best
potential to neutralize opposition and move the normalization process
forward," Law tells Quartz.
The fear? That a negative, partisan approach could lead to gridlock, or,
worse, roll back this historic opening entirely.

Source: Could presidential politics screw up America's engagement with
Cuba? - Quartz -
http://qz.com/469292/could-presidential-politics-screw-up-americas-engagement-with-cuba/