Trump
violated Cuba embargo in 1998 business venture, report claims
Clinton
camp seizes on Newsweek report Republican nominee spent $68,000 on
investigation of business opportunities, which US law made illegal
Ben Jacobs
@Bencjacobs
Thursday 29
September 2016 20.58 BST
The Clinton campaign
on Thursday attacked Donald Trump over reports of an historic
violation of the Cuba embargo, hours after Newsweek alleged that the
Republican nominee spent at least $68,000 in the island dictatorship
in 1998, while investigating potential business opportunities.
Citing “interviews
with former Trump executives, internal company records and court
filings”, Newsweek reported that in 1998 a company controlled by
Trump “secretly conducted business in communist Cuba during Fidel
Castro’s presidency despite strict American trade bans that made
such undertakings illegal”.
The expenditure,
Newsweek said, was indirect, involving the payment of expenses
incurred on a visit by consultants from a US firm.
On Thursday, Jake
Sullivan, a senior policy adviser to the Clinton campaign, said in a
statement: “Trump’s business with Cuba appears to have broken the
law, flouted US foreign policy and is in complete contradiction to
Trump’s own repeated, public statements that he had been offered
opportunities to invest in Cuba but passed them up.
“This latest
report shows once again that Trump will always put his own business
interest ahead of the national interest – and has no trouble lying
about it.”
At the time of the
expenditure in question, the spending of any US corporate money in
Cuba was illegal without the explicit approval of the federal
government.
The Trump campaign
did not immediately issue a statement, but in a television interview
with The View, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway seemed to
acknowledge that Trump had indeed spent money in Cuba.
“It starts out
with a screaming headline, as it usually does, that he did business
in Cuba,” she said. “And it turns out that he decided not to
invest there. They paid money, as I understand, in 1998.
“I know we’re
not supposed to talk about years ago when it comes to the Clintons,
but with Trump there is no statute of limitations.”
Trump, who was due
to stage a campaign rally in Bedford, New Hampshire, on Thursday, has
taken contradictory positions on US policy towards Cuba.
In 1999, when first
exploring a presidential campaign as a third-party candidate, he took
a hard line.
In a Wall Street
Journal editorial headlined America Needs a President Like Me, he
wrote: “I would also immediately reverse the move to normalize
relations with the most abnormal political figure in our hemisphere:
Fidel Castro.
“We have pushed
him to the precipice with our embargo, helped of course by the
withdrawal of Soviet backing.
“Now comes a
movement, backed by state department bureaucrats, to rescue Mr Castro
with US dollars. The striped-pants set won’t like hearing this, but
normalization is pure lunacy.”
Moves towards
normalisation of relations were eventually announced in December
2014, by the Obama administration. Nine months later, the US embassy
in Havana was formally reopened by secretary of state John Kerry.
Barack Obama visited the country in March this year.
This week, Obama
nominated Jeffrey DeLaurentis to become the first US ambassador to
Cuba in more than half a century.
In a 2015 interview
with Jamie Weinstein of the Daily Caller, Trump said of the Obama
administration’s policy: “I think it’s fine. I think it’s
fine, but we should have made a better deal.
“The concept of
opening with Cuba – 50 years is enough – the concept of opening
with Cuba is fine. I think we should have made a stronger deal.”
In recent days, the
Republican nominee has taken a far harder line. At an event in Miami
on 16 September, he pledged: “All the concessions that Obama has
granted the Castro regime were done through executive order, which
means the next president can reverse them – and that I will do
unless the Castro regime meets our demands.
“Not my demands.
Our demands.”
Cuba policy has long
been something of a political third rail, thanks to the presence in
Florida, a key swing state, of a strong Cuban-American émigré
community. Most presidential campaigns have therefore pursued a hard
line towards the government of Fidel and Raúl Castro.
The introduction,
headline and standfirst to this piece were altered on 29 September
2016, to clarify that Newsweek rather than the Clinton campaign was
the source of a report that a company controlled by Donald Trump
broke the Cuba embargo in 1998.
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