President Biden’s Cuba policy condemned by Miami-Dade County in commission vote

The Miami-Dade County Commission on Tuesday voted to condemn President Joe Biden’s relaxation of sanctions on Cuba, saying it sends the wrong message to a dictatorship still oppressing its citizens.

Commissioner René Garcia, a son of Cuban Americans and chairman of the county Republican Party, sponsored the resolution titled: “Resolution condemning President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s relaxation of sanctions against the Cuban communist regime.” The legislation listed a string of arguments for keeping U.S. travel and financial restrictions in place, including that sanctions rob the country’s dictatorship of financial resources.

Commissioner Rebeca Sosa, who left Cuba as a child, was a co-sponsor. “My whole family was in prison because of the communists,” Sosa said. “That’s why I co-sponsored it.”

Republicans on Tuesday temporarily held a majority of the commission votes with four of the seven Democrats on a trip to Africa this week. Despite the 6-3 vote condemning the Biden administration’s easing of Cuba economic sanctions, the resolution still could have died through a veto by the county’s Democratic mayor, Daniella Levine Cava.

She didn’t speak during the debate, and said afterwards she won’t block the legislation from taking effect after the 10-day veto window.

The three Democrats attending the meeting of the officially nonpartisan board voted against the measure: Sally Heyman, Danielle Cohen Higgins, and Eileen Higgins.

“I do worry about these items actually condemning the president by name,” said Higgins, chair of the board’s Transportation committee. “Pretty much once every month or six weeks I go to Washington [to] solicit funds from the administration.”

The commission also passed a Garcia resolution condemning the Biden administration for easing sanctions against the regime of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.

Miami-Dade has the largest Cuban-American population in the United States, and the Hispanic vote was crucial in Biden’s relatively poor showing in the county in 2020. He won it by about seven points, compared to Hillary Clinton’s 30-point win in 2016.

In recent years, Republicans didn’t block two commission denunciations of former President Donald Trump — once for his 2015 campaign comments on Mexican immigrants, and again in 2018 over his reported use of a profanity to describe Haiti. Both resolutions passed unanimously, without objection from Miami-Dade’s Republican mayor at the time, Carlos Gimenez.

Levine Cava has weighed in on national issues through her social media posts — praising Biden’s nomination of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and his State of the Union address.

She declined to comment on the Biden administration’s relaxation of some U.S. travel restrictions to Cuba, as well as limits on sending cash to the island and visas for Cuban citizens to come to the United States.

“I’m glad I don’t make foreign policy,” Levine Cava said. “I focus on local issues.”

This story was originally published June 14, 2022 at 5:20 PM.