It could have been a celebration of one of President Barack Obama's most significant foreign-policy legacies. Instead, Thursday, two years after Obama overturned U.S. policy toward Cuba, the White House assembled Cuban Americans, Cuban government officials and business partners in Washington to offer the best reassurances they could come up with that their efforts had not been in vain.
Obama has spoken to President-elect Donald Trump about the importance of holding the course on Cuba. And once out of office, Obama intends to remain involved in Cuba matters as a private citizen, several meeting attendees said.
"He absolutely will," said Ric Herrero, one of more than 20 Cuban Americans who met with Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes.
Obama did not attend the private meetings, held across the street from the White House at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, though he sent each attendee a letter encouraging them "to carry forward the work of strengthening our partnership in the years ahead."
The White House did not specifically respond to a request for comment on the president's Cuba plans or conversation with Trump. It's unclear when the two men discussed Cuba, though they recently spoke by phone the day after Cuba announced Fidel Castro's death.
In an MSNBC interview Thursday, Rhodes said Cuba has been "one of the subjects of discussion" between Obama and Trump. "President Obama made clear there are real opportunities for American business down there," he said.
While Obama's backers gathered in Washington, Miami's hard-line Cuban-American members of Congress said Obama's Cuba policy has been "disastrous."
"The United States has received no benefit from these concessions, nor have the Cuban people, because the Castro regime has given up nothing _ nada," said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla. "Hopefully with President-elect Trump and a new administration, we may be in a position to reverse some of the damage inflicted on the cause of freedom and democracy in Cuba."
A crucial difference is over how much support to give Cuban dissidents. Ros-Lehtinen and her colleagues consider them the only legitimate political opposition; the people who met at the White House argue that small-business owners known as cuentapropistas pose a bigger, more powerful threat to the Cuban regime.
The White House has pushed for U.S. companies to complete agreements with the Cuban government before Trump's Jan. 20 inauguration, hoping that having contracts in place will make Obama's policy more difficult to undo. Cuba recently signed deals with cruise operators and Google, though the U.S. is pressuring Cuba to do more.
A chief concern at the meetings Thursday was that Trump's "volatile" personality could ignite a war of words with the Cubans, who have so far kept silent about the president-elect's Cuba statements. On the other hand, attendees said, Trump doesn't have a clear political ideology and could be more interested in showing up Obama on Cuba by negotiating more concessions.
"It was partly a celebration of what has been achieved, and a mourning" for the intense political fight that awaits, said one of the participants, Ted Henken, a Baruch College sociology professor and Cuba expert who attended the event.
"We would like nothing more than the new administration to succeed beyond what we did," Rhodes said earlier in the week.
Trump took the first step toward setting his own foreign policy by selecting Rex Tillerson, chairman and chief executive of Exxon Mobil, as his secretary of state. Unlike Trump's other choices, Tillerson's Cuba position remains unknown. Exxon's Cuban assets, worth tens of millions of dollars, were seized after Castro's revolution.
Hardliners appreciate that Tillerson refused to join the Russian-owned Rosneft in drilling for Cuban oil. "The current sanctioned law of (the) United States will not allow us to participate in any activity in Cuba," he said at Exxon Mobil's 2014 annual shareholders meeting.
The other side, however, points to something else Tillerson said in the same meeting _ that his company usually opposes sanctions. "We do not support sanctions, generally, because we don't find them to be effective unless they are very well implemented comprehensively, and that's a very hard thing to do."
Both sides agree that the biggest indication of what direction Trump will take lies in the people Tillerson appoints to run day-to-day Cuba operations at the State Department. The same goes for two other key departments dealing with Cuba, treasury and commerce, and for the National Security Council.
