HAVANA -- The Obama administration is loosening the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba with a new round of regulations that allows American companies to sell to Cuba on credit and export a limited number of products to the Cuban government, officials said Tuesday.
RELATED ARTICLE
http://www.arkansas…">Airline expects Cuba flights by midyear
The changes are President Barack Obama's third attempt to invigorate U.S.-Cuba commerce despite an embargo that still prohibits most forms of trade with the island.
U.S. travel to Cuba has grown 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 said he hopes to visit Cuba before he leaves office, but a trip would depend on the progress being made in relations between the two countries.
"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 information online," National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said.
Among a host of other measures, the new regulations allow U.S. firms to offer Cuban buyers credit on sales of nonagricultural 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 state-run firms that dominate the economy. The Cuban government said that U.S. focus on private business is partly responsible for Cuba's not opening its economy in response to the U.S. loosening of the embargo.
The U.S. Commerce Department said Tuesday that it would now allow U.S. exports to Cuban government agencies in cases in which it believes the Cuban people stand to benefit. It cited agriculture, historic preservation, education, food processing and public health and infrastructure as government-controlled sectors that it would now allow to receive goods from the U.S. on a case-by-case basis.
"These regulations are more proof that the Obama administration's intent has never been to empower the Cuban people but rather to empower the Cuban government's monopolies and state-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, including filming movies and television programs, conducting market research and commercial marketing, and organizing professional meetings and sports events.
The embargo prohibits pure tourism. Obama's changes have established a system in which travelers must self-report the purported legal reason for their travel to their airline or travel agent and then not engage in tourism on the island.
Tuesday's changes make the tourism ban harder to enforce by expanding the number of credible reasons that an American could be in Cuba. The new measures also contain some technical changes designed to allow regularly scheduled flights between the U.S. and Cuba.
Travelers now must go through third countries or take expensive charter flights. The regularly scheduled flights, some analysts have said, may bring hundreds of thousands more American travelers to Cuba every year.
Business on 01/27/2016