Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Friday called for the U.S. Congress to end the U.S. economic embargo in Cuba and said she would make it easier for Americans to travel to the Communist-led island if she were president. Clinton made the Friday speech from Florida global University, where Sen. Marco Rubio and former Gov. Jeb Bush. Just like Clinton’s support for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, her position on Cuba is in line with the majority of Latinos – a key voting bloc in several 2016 swing states.
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Clinton dismissed her opponent “outdated Cold-War lens”, stressing that the 50-plus year embargo had not worked.
Despite Florida’s changing demographics and the Cuban-American diaspora’s softened view of the embargo, Republican presidential contenders remain stiffly opposed to lifting it – and they’re earning some supporters for it.
Most of the country – 73 percent – agree with Cuban millennials, according to a Pew poll.
Clinton reminded her audience that she had called to end the embargo as her term as secretary of state wrapped up because she “became convinced” that encouraging ties between Cubans and Americans would promote economic and political change on the island.
“We will not tolerate attacks on United States citizens”, Bill Clinton said at the time, “and we will stand with those both inside and outside Cuba who are working for a peaceful transition to freedom and democracy”.
In a pre-rebuttal to Clinton’s speech, Bush criticized her for promoting “a false narrative” that the embargo is a relic of the Cold War rather than a necessary tactic to encourage the Cuban government to abide by democratic values.
She framed their stance on the embargo as part of broader foreign affairs errors.
Bush, who earlier shared a stage with Clinton at a National Urban League conference in nearby Fort Lauderdale, embraced their disagreement, saying it was “insulting to many residents of Miami for Hillary Clinton to come here to endorse a retreat in the struggle for democracy in Cuba”.
“Today I am calling on Speaker Boehner and Senator McConnell to step up and answer the pleas of the Cuban people”, Clinton plans to say.
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U.S.-born Cuban-Americans, Amandi said, are consistently more supportive of normalized relations than their Cuban-born parents and also are less likely to consider themselves one-issue voters.
