Trump’s other “Repeal and Replace” problem
On Wednesday (Dec. 7), countless words were spoken in Washington, but these seven cut through the din: “Please don’t turn your back on us.” Speaking to journalists and Members of Congress in the U.S. Capitol, four Cuban women who run small businesses on the island urged President-elect Trump to maintain the reforms in U.S. policy that have helped make their businesses grow.
Yamina Vicente, an event planner and interior decorator; Marta Elisa Deus Rodríguez, who runs an accounting business; Julia de la Rosa, who runs a bed-and-breakfast; and Marla Recio Carbajal stood together. They represented over 100 Cuban private business owners on the island who signed this letter. It connects the improved climate for doing business in Cuba to the increases in travel to the island, improved access to the Internet, direct calling, and easier financial transactions brought about by a more open U.S. policy toward Cuba.
As Reuters reported, the letter was organized by Cuba Educational Travel, a U.S. company that arranges trips to the island, and coordinated with Engage Cuba. It was signed by Cuban entrepreneurs who operate family-owned restaurants, car services, hair salons, startup companies and other small-scale businesses.
Marla, who received her undergraduate degree in economics at the University of Havana, returned to Cuba after earning a graduate degree at the University of California, San Diego, to start a business that helps U.S. visitors plan events on their trips to Cuba. She credits President Raúl Castro’s opening Cuba’s private sector and the sharp increase in U.S. visitors for creating this opportunity.
On Wednesday, Marla told a crowd of U.S. legislators and journalists, “I want to be in Havana and I look forward to a future that is better for the American and the Cuban people” – so long as President Trump doesn’t turn his back on her, her fellow entrepreneurs, and the mass of Cubans who want the policy of closer U.S.-Cuba ties to stick.
There is a fear of being forsaken expressed by many Cubans as they eye the incoming Trump administration and its threat to undo President Obama’s opening to Cuba.
Earlier this week, Tim Padgett wrote in the Miami Herald of his encounter with Caridad Limonta, who served as one of the first female vice-ministers of small industry in Cuba. She left government to start what has become a successful clothing business. She can’t understand why Mr. Trump would reverse U.S. policy to normalize relations. “Why would he want to asphyxiate Cubans like me?” Limonta asks.
The economist Ricardo Torres, writing in Progreso Weekly, is as worried by the potential fallout that the unraveling of U.S. travel and trade would have inside Cuba’s governing counsels as he is by the damage that “could be felt in sectors such as tourism or remittances.”
He writes, “It would also confirm the warnings of groups [resistant] to U.S.-Cuba rapprochement in the sense that the U.S. is not a trustworthy partner. Washington would again turn its back on Cuba, precisely when the island needs more integration and relations with the world, so as to lay down the foundation for the new Cuban model.”
In U.S. politics, there is a fierce debate over how the President-elect can keep his campaign promise to repeal and replace “Obamacare,” when there is no workable alternative to forcing 20 million Americans to relinquish their health insurance and fall through the cracks.
On his first day in office, it won’t be hard for President Trump to pull the regulatory rugs out from under businesses like Airbnb, Sprint, Verizon, Marriott, Western Union, United Airlines, and the Carnival Cruise lines – the ones that helped Marla, Marta, Julia, and Yamina ramp up their small businesses. He can terminate their deals with a swipe of his pen in as much time as he takes to type out a tweet, and turn his back on them on all.
Repealing is, in fact, dead easy. Replacing? Not so much. The alternative to the new policy is the old policy – that Cold War okie-doke of broken diplomatic relations and squeezing the Cuban economy to force its people to lead harsher lives.
Backsliding like this, as Rep. Tom Emmer (MN-6th) said Wednesday, standing beside the entrepreneurs from Cuba, would fit the definition of insanity: “doing something over and over again and expecting a different result.”
For the President to turn his back on Marla, her brother and sister small business owners, and on the hopes that the vast numbers of Cubans who work in the service of their government share with them; it would be more than insane. It would be indecent.
This was the right time for Marla to raise her voice. And the right moment to do it.
(From Cuba Central)
[Photo at top of Yamina Vicente, a Cuban event planner and interior decorator, and one of many new entrepreneurs on the island who visited Washington, D.C. this week.]
