President Joe Biden<\/a> took office in January 2021 with hopes high in Cuba for a reversal of a harsh Trump-era approach, but Cuba\u2019s crackdown on protests during the summer of that year prompted the administration to keep pressure on Havana.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe new measures would exclude Cuban officials, military officers and other government \u201cinsiders,\u201d with the aim of minimizing resources available from the benefits to the Cuban government, the officials said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Republican U.S. Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, a Cuban American lawmaker from South Florida, quickly criticized the Democratic administration\u2019s announcement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Biden Admin is now giving the \u2018Cuban private sector\u2019 access to the U.S. financial system,\u201d she said in a post on X. \u201cThis would make a mockery of American law, considering no progress has been made toward freedom on the Island and repression has intensified.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cuba has long blamed the embargo \u2014 a tangled web of U.S. laws and regulations that complicates financial transactions by the Cuban government \u2014 for decades of economic crisis that have left it with little choice recently but to open its economy to small private business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Such businesses \u2014 for decades taboo in Communist-run Cuba \u2014 are now booming on the island.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
New Cuban laws put in place in 2021 have seen the establishment of upwards of 11,000 small businesses as of May, the government has said, ranging from corner grocers to plumbing, transportation and construction businesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those businesses employ upwards of 15% of Cuban workers and accounted for around 14% of gross domestic product, according to economy ministry statistics from late 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The regulations announced on Tuesday also authorize U.S. banks to once again process so-called \u201cU-Turn\u201d fund transfers, allowing them to move money for Cuban nationals \u2014 including payments and remittances \u2014 so long as senders and recipients are not subject to U.S. law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Such measures are a step in the right direction, said John Kavulich, president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, but he noted a \u201cglaring omission\u201d in the policy: Cuban businesses are still handicapped by a requirement that they use banks in third countries to move their money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAs long as financing, investment, and payments need to be routed through third countries, the Biden-Harris Administration will be constraining precisely the activity it professes to support,\u201d Kavulich said in an email.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was no sign that Tuesday\u2019s announcement could foreshadow a more significant easing of U.S. sanctions and other restrictions on Cuba, beyond the modest steps that Biden has already taken since he became president.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some analysts have attributed Biden\u2019s cautious handling of Cuba issues to his concern that a softened approach to Havana could hurt him politically among strongly anti-communist Cuban American voters in Florida, a key swing state that he lost to Trump in the 2020 election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The U.S. officials declined to say whether the administration was conducting a formal review of Cuba\u2019s continuing presence on the State Department\u2019s list of state sponsors of terrorism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nbcnews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON \u2014 The U.S. Treasury Department on Tuesday announced regulatory changes to allow more American financial support for Cuba\u2019s nascent private sector and bolster access to U.S. internet-based services, limited but timely measures that officials said would help give the island\u2019s budding small businesses a leg up. The United States said it would permit small […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":27791,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1155],"tags":[2278,28699,28700,28701,5721],"class_list":["post-27790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-cuba","tag-internet-services","tag-private-sector","tag-regulatory-changes","tag-u-s-treasury"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27790"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27792,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27790\/revisions\/27792"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/27791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}