President Barack Obama will make a short to visit Cuba next month, according to multiple U.S. and diplomatic sources.
The White House is expected to announce the trip Thursday.
The trip comes after Obama’s administration formally reopened ties with Havana in late 2014. The Cuba Journal believes Obama may be attending a baseball game in Cuba.
The visit was first reported by ABC News.
There is much more that can be done by the United States, and by the Cuban government to advance this opening in ways that will be good for Cubans and good for the United States. That is why President Obama is traveling to Cuba,” deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said in a post on Medium. “We want to open up more opportunities for U.S. businesses and travelers to engage with Cuba, and we want the Cuban government to open up more opportunities for its people to benefit from that engagement.”
Rhodes noted the ultimate aim is to persuade Congress to lift the trade embargo — an unlikely possibility in the near term.
US President Obama’s policy of engagement with Cuba faces a major obstacle in that Congress controls much of the regulations and restrictions pertaining to Cuba. As a workaround, Obama has embarked on steady, slow drum beat of actions taken to leverage executive authority to dismantle various Congressional rules that together make up the US embargo against Cuba.
The Cuba Journal collectively refers to these actions as Cubamacare. Here are the details:
