Rebuilding our relationship with Cuba would be a win for American business and a win for the Cuban people.
We need to ensure that our foreign policy towards Cuba incentivizes and makes it easier for there to be a democratic transition. That is how I would examine our foreign policy towards Cuba.
For more than fifty years, our policy towards Cuba was not making life better for Cubans. In many ways, it was making it worse.
There are countries that send us garbage. There are countries that send us their outdated technology as their cooperation. With Fidel [Castro] it is totally different. Fidel is the first and the best one to stand for peace in the world denouncing the interventionist policies of the U.S.
You probably heard about the big prisoner swap with Cuba. A man who has been incarcerated in Havana for five years is back home in the United States. And we sent them some prisoners. The deal still has to be approved by President Obama and Bud Selig.
John Kerry's record on Cuba is pretty bad.
We've been trying to open the gates of communication between Havana and Miami through art, which is apolitical most of the time: It doesn't have anything to do with politics and is only an exchange of ideas.
[Barack Obama] is aware of the criticism back home [from Cuba] that this embargo still exists.
Fifty years of isolating Cuba had failed to promote democracy, setting us back in Latin America. That's why we restored diplomatic relations, opened the door to travel and commerce, and positioned ourselves to improve the lives of the Cuban people.
We should sell them to our worst enemies, the Russians and the Cubans.
The truth is that the driver in policy is not the relationship between the United States and Cuba, but the relationship between Cubans, and that is far stronger than 50 years of intragovernment hostility.
