Cuba business

For U.S. businesses and tourists, opportunities abound in Cuba

By Karen DeYoung and Carol Morello

In the wake of President Obama’s historic decision to mend diplomatic ties with Cuba, U.S. businesses and potential tourists scrambled to figure out what new opportunities will be available on the island and to position themselves at the head of the line.

The political conversation sparked by Obama’s Wednesday announcement grew in both volume and dogmatism. Some hailed the opening as the dawn of pragmatic diplomacy. Others denounced it as a presidential sellout.

In news conferences and briefings, the administration provided details of what the new policy means. Trade and tourism will expand, as soon as new regulations can be published in the Federal Register, but the half-century trade embargo will continue to limit both unless Congress decides to lift it.

Reestablishment of formal diplomatic relations, while approved by both countries, requires a formal process that will begin with the visit to Havana next month of Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson, who is heading the U.S. delegation for previously scheduled talks on migration.

Those talks, begun in 1995, take place every six months. This time, however, they will be used to start the normalization process, Jacobson said Thursday. It requires an exchange of diplomatic letters, and formal notification to the Swiss government, which has overseen U.S. affairs in Cuba for the past 53 years, that its services are no longer needed.

Then, Jacobson said, “we would change the sign” on the existing U.S. Interests Section on the Havana waterfront and open for business.

But in many ways, a new sign on the embassy and pending regulatory changes will be less a wholesale transformation in relations than they are an expansion of small measures that have been put in place gradually over the years.

The building that will become the U.S. Embassy served as the embassy for years before relations were severed, in 1961. Shuttered and abandoned, it was reopened in 1977 — with 16-year-old calendars and portraits of John F. Kennedy still on the wall — when then-President Jimmy Carter negotiated the establishment of Interest Sections with Cuba.

Since then, U.S. business in Cuba has been conducted by U.S. diplomats technically under the auspices of the Swiss Embassy, which has also overseen operations of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington. That building, on 16th Street NW, also served as Cuba’s pre-revolution embassy.

Amid the often-torturous ups and downs of estrangement, the interests sections have provided consular services, hosted meetings such as migration talks, promoted their country’s interests and provided services to their visiting citizens, and reported back to their capitals.

More than a decade ago, after years of limited telephone calls across the 90-mile Straits of Florida that often had to be booked days in advance, direct dialing was put in place. While still severely limited, Cubans can use the Internet.

The George W. Bush administration reduced trade sanctions — allowing export to Cuba of agricultural and medical goods under certain conditions — but tightened visits and remittances to the island. Obama expanded U.S. visits to Cuba and the number of American visas given to Cubans.