Clinton to call for lifting embargo with Cuba

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton asked Friday in Miami that the U.S. Congress definitively end the embargo on Cuba.

In her remarks, Clinton said her campaign is about bringing prosperity to the U.S., but also to the citizens of Cuba, and “for the young entrepreneur in Little Havana, who dreams of expanding to old Havana”.

The former secretary of state became the first major presidential candidate to come to the heart of America’s Cuban exile community to make her case that Congress should lift the Cuban embargo.

Hillary Clinton visited the home turf of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio on Friday and came out swinging at both Republican presidential hopefuls.

Normalizing relations with Cuba is part of a broader foreign policy vision that Clinton spelled out near the end of her speech. Clinton’s call for lifting the embargo would have sounded radical a decade ago; by Friday, it was rapidly approaching conventional wisdom.

Regarding her new anti-embargo stance, Clinton said “I did not come to this position lightly; I well remember what happened to previous attempts at engagement in the 1990s”.

“The Castros were able to blame all of the island’s woes on the U.S. embargo… and delaying their day of reckeoning with the Cuban people”, she added. Generations of Cuban-Americans have been born in Cuba and fled shortly after the Castro-led revolution in the late 1950s generally supported a hard line, including an embargo that prevented American businesses from trading with Cuba and blocked Americans from traveling in the country and spending money there as tourists.

Daniela Ferrera, a 17-year-old Miami resident, protested outside Clinton’s event, saying she’ll support Rubio because he “actually believes in freedom for the Cuban people”.

For decades, south Florida politicians and presidential candidates vying for the state’s crucial electoral votes reflected those views, regardless of party.

Republicans were quick to attack Clinton’s position as further enabling the Castro regime – even before the speech began.

Now, says Florida pollster Fernand Amandi, an expert on Cuban-American public opinion, that once solid voting bloc is “a community in transition”, giving Clinton an opening. “The younger generations are more like any other immigrants – they care about pocketbook issues, jobs, their kids’ educations”, he said. ‘So think after 55 years of failure, it’s time for something else.’. Fifty-nine percent of Republicans surveyed by Pew Research Center earlier this month said they wanted to see the embargo come to an end, and 72 percent of all Americans said the same. “President Obama and Secretary Clinton must learn that appeasement only emboldens dictators and repressive governments and weakens America’s global standing in the 21st century”, he said.

Pew found the same trends even among Republicans, with 56 percent of GOP voters backing a diplomatic bond and 59 percent supporting an economic relationship.