The U.S. today lifted restrictions on family travel and financial transfers to the island, opened telecommunications and satellite links and eased licensing requirements governing agricultural and medical sales. But Cuba’s communist authorities dismissed the move as a “cosmetic” gesture that does little to ease the U.S. economic embargo.
The Obama administration has been trying to engage the regime in Havana, hoping that easing restrictions on travel, remittances and trade would prompt reciprocal concessions, not least on improving Cuba’s dire human rights record.
But the communist authorities’ response to a recent academic exchange initiative suggests that the engagement may prove less than constructive. Havana has denied exit permits to some 30 Cuban students offered U.S. government-funded scholarships to study in the U.S., according to a report in The Miami Herald.
The students were also accused of ideological transgression and were expelled from their colleges in Cuba. An internal document of the Ministry of Higher Education dismissed the initiative as an effort to “ideologically permeate” Cuban students by offering scholarships.
“We are involved in a new process of control and ideological purges that resembles the worst moments and stages of the past,” said a University of Havana professor who spoke with the Herald on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
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