Cuba: Obama administration loosens Cuba embargo with new measures

The Obama government is loosening the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba with a new round of regulations allowing American companies to sell to Cuba on credit and export a potentially wide range of products to the Cuban government for the initial time, officials said Tuesday.

The changes are President Barack Obama's third attempt to spur U.S.-Cuba commerce despite an embargo that still prohibits most forms of trade with the island.

U.S. travel to Cuba has exploded since Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro declared detente in 2014. But U.S. hopes of building wider trade between American businesses and Cuba's private sector have been largely frustrated by Congressional reluctance to end the embargo itself and by the island's labyrinthine restrictions on imports, exports and private business.

Obama says he hopes to visit Cuba before he leaves office but a trip would depend on the evolution being made in relations between the two nations. Tuesday's move appears designed to jumpstart commerce between the two nations and remove some of Cuba's biggest excuses for not opening its economy to trade with the U.S.

"Just as the United States is doing its part to remove impediments that have been holding Cubans back, we urge the Cuban government to make it easier for its citizens to start businesses, engage in trade, and access data online," National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said.

Part a host of other measures, the new regulations allow U.S. firms to offer Cuban buyers credit on sales of non-agricultural goods, addressing a longstanding Cuban complaint about a ban on credit.

The vast majority of Obama's new regulations have been aimed at spurring U.S. trade with Cuban entrepreneurs instead of with the national-run firms that dominate the economy. The Cuban government says that U.S. focus on private business is half responsible for the island not opening its economy in response to the U.S. loosening of the embargo.

The U.S. Commerce Department said Tuesday that it would presently allow U.S. exports to Cuban government agencies in cases where it believed the Cuban people stood to benefit. It cited agriculture, historic preservation, education, food processing and public health and infrastructure as government-controlled sectors that it would presently allow to receive goods from the U.S. on a case-by-case basis, potentially opening up a huge new field of commerce between U.S. business and the Cuban government.

"You would expect that this would open up a lot of areas where there should be enhanced trade," said James Williams, chief of the anti-embargo U.S. group Engage Cuba. He said that while Obama's initial exceptions to the embargo were criticized for not reflecting a deep considerate of Cuba, the new regulations were much additional attuned to the peculiarities of Cuba's national-controlled economy.

Cuban officials issued no immediate comment on the changes and national media made only brief mention of them in the initial hours next the U.S. announcement.

Anti-Castro figures in the U.S. have long argued against Obama's opening with Cuba, saying it empowers the national rather than the Cuban people and Tuesday's announcement gave them ammunition.

"These regulations are additional proof that the Obama Government's intent has at no time been to empower the Cuban people but rather to empower the Cuban government's monopolies and national-run enterprises," said Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American U.S. senator from Florida.

The new measures expand the different instances in which Americans can travel to Cuba without a specific permit, inclunding filming movies and television programs, conducting market research and commercial marketing and organizing professional meetings and sports events.

While the embargo prohibits pure tourism, Obama's changes have largely turned the ban into a toothless honor system requiring travelers to self-statement the purported legal reason for their travel to their airline or travel agent and again not engage in tourism on the island.

The new changes make the tourism ban even harder to enforce by expanding the number of credible reasons that an American could be in Cuba. The new measures as well contain a number of technical changes designed to allow regularly scheduled flights between the U.S. and Cuba, a potentially massive change agreed upon by the two nations late last year.

Travelers presently must go through third nations or take inconvenient and expensive charter flights. Regularly scheduled flights could bring hundreds of thousands additional American travelers to Cuba each year.