(CN) — Broadly supported by most U.S. and Cuban citizens, former President Barack Obama’s historic normalization of relations between the two nations received a setback Friday as his successor unveiled new restrictions on business and travel.
“Effective immediately,” President Donald Trump said, “I am canceling the prior administration’s completely one-sided deal with Cuba.”
For the venue of this afternoon’s address — the Manuel Artime theater in Miami, Florida’s Little Havana — Trump could hardly have chosen a more foreboding symbol of a disastrous foreign-policy maneuver.
The Artime theater is named after the Cuban exile who led the Bay of Pigs invasion, a covert CIA plot to overthrow Fidel Castro two years after the 1959 end of the revolution.
It was a spectacular failure, with more than 100 members of the U.S.-trained Brigade 2506 killed, more than 1,000 captured, and Castro scoring a decisive military victory that strengthened his then-nascent rule.
But the brigade’s veterans, exiles living in Miami, remain a potent political force whose endorsement helped nudge Trump a little more than a percentage point to victory in the swing state of Florida.
Trump acknowledged the boost, in characteristically grandiose terms, in his speech Friday.
“Florida as a whole, and this community supported us by tremendous margins,” he told a crowd of hundreds. “We really appreciated it.”
Ripping up Obama’s cautious olive branch toward the Cuban government, the president offered unrestrained antagonism.
“Many of you witnessed terrible crimes in service of a depraved ideology,” he said.
Entering the stage to the tune of “Hail to the Chief,” Trump’s roughly 45-minute address amounted to a CliffsNotes version of a U.S. hardliner's complaints against Cuba — namely its economic system, human-rights record and historical grievances.
In a Cold War rewind, Trump invoked the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which he said almost brought “enemy nuclear weapons 90 miles from our shore.”
Trump also slammed Cuba’s granting of asylum to Assata Shakur, a Black Panther whom he referred to by her married name, JoAnne Chesimard, and called a “cop killer.”
“The harboring of criminals and fugitives will end,” Trump said. “You have no choice. It will end.”
Human Rights Watch urged Trump not to exacerbate U.S.-Cuban relations, saying that the half-century old embargo has caused only suffering.
“The previous administration was right to reject a policy that hurt ordinary Cubans and did nothing to advance human rights,” Human Rights Watch managing director Daniel Wilkinson said in a statement.
To William LeoGrande, dean of American University’s School of Public Affairs, the site of Trump’s speech shows the president playing to a crowd who did him a favor.