The US regrets Cuba’s increasingly “more repressive” attitude, but does not desist in its rapprochement

The United States administration regretted on Wednesday that the Cuban government has increased its policy of repressing the discordant voices of the Cuban people while Washington maintains its policy of rapprochement.

“It is true that the policy of this administration is not identical to the policy of the Obama-Biden administration. [2012-2016]but it is also true that five, six years have passed since 2017 in which the Cuban regime, in a certain way, has become even more repressive,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said in an exchange with reporters.

The comments arose after statements by Bed Rhodes, who served as National Security Advisor to the government of Barack Obama, and was in charge of coordinating the negotiations with the then ruler Raúl Castro, who assured in a recent interview that the word “disappointed” barely “begins to describe” how he feels about the Biden Administration’s policy toward Cuba.

Price listed some of the steps that the government of Democrat Joe Biden has taken in its interest to enable a rapprochement with Cuba and cited the recent reset of the Family Reunification program and the increase in diplomatic personnel for consular affairs at the embassy in Havana.

On the contrary, he offered a sample of the opposite path that the government of President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez has followed by recalling “when peaceful protests, which expressed aspirations for a better future, were met with repression, arrests and imprisonment throughout the island.” , alluding to the massive demonstrations of the July 11, 2021 in more than 60 towns and cities throughout the island.

“That is just one example of the repression that we have continued to see by the Cuban regime,” he explained.

Havana, meanwhile, has accused the White House of provoking the discomfort of the Cuban people and argues that popular discontent is based on the impact of the trade embargo imposed by Washington, which dates back to 1962.

both governments resumed last April in the US capital the migratory dialogues, interrupted in 2018 under the administration of Republican Donald Trump.

The meeting occurred when the US is receiving numbers of Cuban immigrants in an irregular situation through the southern border that have outnumbered the Mariel exoduses in 1980 and the so-called Balseros Crisis in 1994, according to data of the Border Patrol.

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