Its correspondents in Washington, Jim Cason, and New York, David Brooks, reported that the political crisis over migration on the US-Mexico border might provoke a change in Washington’s policy on Cuba, including suspending some of the most extreme sanctions imposed by former President Donald Trump.

However, several active and retired US officials warned that the same domestic political calculus that has so far led President Biden to shy away from restoring even the modest opening pushed by then-President Barack Obama persists.

Both correspondents noted that the United States does not have a policy on Cuba, it has a policy on Florida, a congressional consultant told La Jornada, repeating what has been said by several officials who speak to the White House on the issue and what has been an open secret for decades.

But this month, centrist Democratic Congresswoman Veronica Escobar, who represents El Paso, Texas, along with several colleagues from border states, pressed the Biden administration to lift Trump’s sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela in order to address the economic pressures leading to the mass exclusion of those peoples.

In Cuba, Trump’s reversal of President Obama’s diplomatic thaw by tightening the embargo with new groundless sanctions as a sponsor of terrorism has contributed to Cuba’s economic decline, including a 10.9-percent economic contraction in 2020, the largest since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Congresswoman Escobar wrote in a letter to Biden and signed by 20 lawmakers.

We urge you to act swiftly to lift the failed and indiscriminate economic sanctions that were imposed by the previous administration, and to conduct a broader assessment of the preexisting sanctions that your administration inherited, which exacerbate the hardship of innocent civilians.

In the face of this crisis, the blockade is once again on debate in Washington. Former White House official Ben Rhodes, who helped develop Obama’s diplomatic opening with Cuba in 2015, commented in an interview with MSNBC last week that “our own policies are contributing to this.”

We could have an honest conversation here that the embargo we have on the island, and the sanctions we have against Cuba and Venezuela, are contributing significantly to the humanitarian crisis that is driving people to the US border, he noted.

But it is not only those on the border who are arguing for change. The coalition of farmers, business people, clergy people and academics that promoted and supported Obama’s opening to Cuba still exists and is still partially active.

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