CUBA/ECONOMY/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/VENEZUELA: “The battle for Cuba’s economic future is being waged on its beaches. And at its all-inclusive resorts, dive sites and cobblestoned colonial plazas. As most of Cuba’s economy stagnates or declines, the country has launched a full-scale effort to turn virtually the only bright spot — tourism — into an engine that can drag the rest of the communist island through its worst economic crisis in two decades. In government meetings and propaganda, it has now set a goal of drawing 5 million tourists in 2019 — perhaps the modern-day equivalent of its Soviet-era dependence on the annual sugar-harvest production…Across the Florida Straits, the Trump administration is intently focused on scaling back tourism to the island as part of a campaign to smother the Cuban economy and force its government to sever ties with President Nicolás Maduro’s government in Venezuela. Trump recently activated a section of the 1996 U.S. law known as Helms-Burton, allowing lawsuits against foreign companies doing business on properties confiscated after the island’s socialist revolution.”
–Andrea Rodriguez, “Cuba still welcoming tourists despite Trump restrictions,” USA Today, May 17, 2019 3:49 pm