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More U.S. travelers may soon start flocking to Cuba, but don’t expect oil executives to follow them. Cuba is believed to hold sizable oil and gas resources off its northwest coast, in the eastern Gulf of Mexico — raising speculation that the Communist nation could become an attractive target for energy companies if Wednesday’s diplomatic thaw eventually leads to the end of the five-decade-old U.S. trade embargo. But exploration by Brazilian, Malaysian and Spanish companies in the past few years has failed to produce any gushers — and the current worldwide glut of cheap oil is not going to encourage...

WASHINGTON — Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said Thursday that starting to trade with Cuba "is probably a good idea" and that the lengthy economic embargo against the communist island "just hasn't worked." Paul became the first potential Republican presidential candidate to offer some support for President Barack Obama's decision to try to normalize U.S. relations with Cuba. The president's surprise announcement on Wednesday was slammed by several potential GOP candidates, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who said it amounted to appeasing the Castro regime. Paul said in a radio interview with Tom Roten of...

Rand Paul Breaks With Rubio and Bush Over Cuba Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is the latest potential presidential candidate to weigh in on policy changes to Cuba and the libertarian leaning Republican's position splits from other Republicans who are also considering a presidential run. Paul told Tom Roten of News Talk 800 in West Virginia that the 50-year embargo "just hasn't worked" and normalizing relations with the island nation is "probably a good idea." "If the goal is regime change, it sure doesn't seem to be working and probably it punishes the people more than the regime because the regime...

Fresh off his 2012 re-election victory, President Barack Obama summoned senior advisers to a series of meetings, asking them to “think big” about a second-term agenda, including the possibilities of new starts with long-standing U.S. foes such as Iran and Cuba. Two years later, after painstaking secret diplomacy on separate but surprisingly similar tracks, efforts with Tehran and Havana are in full swing. The nuclear negotiations with Iran continue and are far from a guaranteed success. But Wednesday’s announcement that the U.S. and Cuba will normalize relations after more than 50 years of hostility suggests one of the last chapters...

Diplomacy: As the Castros rejoice at President Obama's move to normalize ties, extend trade credits, take their country off the terror list and free its deadly spies, the queasy question remains: What did the U.S. get in return? The question is being asked by the more serious leaders in Washington. Marco Rubio for one. "(Obama's) foreign policy is, at a minimum, naive and perhaps truly counterproductive to the future of democracy in the region," said the Florida senator in the wake of the giveaway. "Barack Obama is the worst negotiator that we've had as president since at least Jimmy Carter,...

The New Year worry for a watching world is if Obama can open up channels for drastic policy changes in Cuba without the knowledge of the American population and Congress, when will he do the same for Iran? Just as Fidel Castro became Cuba’s dictator when he and his guerrillas triumphantly entered Havana on January 7, 1959, President Barack Obama became America’s dictator on Dec. 17, 2014. Swaggering into Havana dressed in army fatigues with his signature cigar, Castro claimed the island as his own. Like a thief making off with a nation in the middle of the night, Obama...

Sen. Rand Paul broke with the field of Republicans considering a 2016 presidential run on Thursday, calling President Barack Obama's decision to normalize relations with Cuba a "good idea" since the American embargo against Cuba "just hasn't worked." Paul, a likely presidential candidate, made the remarks in an interview with News Talk 800 WVHU's Tom Roten, just a day after his potential competitors for the Republican nomination -- former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. Ted Cruz -- slammed the decision to normalize relations as a dangerous move. Rubio and Cruz are sons of Cuban immigrants. Paul...

Bloomberg article, link only. Link

President Barack Obama displayed "political courage" when he changed over 50 years of U.S. policy by announcing a renewal of diplomatic relations with Cuba, former President Jimmy Carter told MSNBC's "Morning Joe." Critics of Obama's announcement have said the move only served the Cuban government, but Carter said there was "no doubt" that the "beneficiaries of this primarily will be the Cuban people." "I'm very proud and grateful that President Obama has shown such good wisdom, and, also, I'd say, political courage in taking this long overdue step," Carter said Thursday.

Countries determined by the Secretary of State to have repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism are designated pursuant to three laws: section 6(j) of the Export Administration Act, section 40 of the Arms Export Control Act, and section 620A of the Foreign Assistance Act. Taken together, the four main categories of sanctions resulting from designation under these authorities include restrictions on U.S. foreign assistance; a ban on defense exports and sales; certain controls over exports of dual use items; and miscellaneous financial and other restrictions. Designation under the above-referenced authorities also implicates other sanctions laws that penalize persons...

Federal prosecutors in Miami were prepared to indict Raul Castro as the head of a major cocaine smuggling conspiracy in 1993, but the Clinton Administration Justice Department overruled them, current and former Justice Department officials tell ABC News. The officials say Castro, as Cuban Defense Minister, permitted Colombian drug lords to pay for the use of Cuban waters and airstrips as staging grounds for smuggling runs into the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s. in Washington,” said a former Justice Department official with direct knowledge of the case. “There were numerous national security and intelligence issues that would...

From today's White House briefing... CNN's JIM ACOSTA: You're not ruling it out? EARNEST: I guess the point is that the president has had the leaders of both Burma and China to the United States and for that reason I wouldn't rule out a visit from President Castro.

MIAMI — They were known as the Cuban Five, members of a spy ring that descended on South Florida in the 1990s and infiltrated exile groups and military installations. They, along with other members of the ring, tried to make themselves indispensable to the exile groups whose secrets they stole. One of the operatives worked at the Naval Air Station in Key West, while another worked undercover in Tampa. “They were very good,” said Ramón Saúl Sánchez, the founder of the Movimiento Democracia, one of the exile organizations that was infiltrated. “When you trust somebody who you honestly believe is...

The ruble weakened against the dollar and euro on Thursday with traders saying President Vladimir Putin had so far offered no concrete measures to pull Russia out of a crisis at his end-of-year news conference. At 0954 GMT (04:54 a.m. EST), the ruble was around 3 percent weaker against the dollar at 62.04 RUBUTSTN=MCX after opening more than 1 percent higher. The rouble was also around 2 percent weaker versus the euro at 76.50 EURRUBTN=MCX on the Moscow Exchange.

Some Republican and Democratic leaders, along with many of my colleagues in conservative talk radio were quick to criticize President Obama’s move on Wednesday to restore diplomatic ties with Havana; they claimed it rewarded dictatorship and damaged America’s global posture and bargaining position. Missing in much of the national conversation is how this White House maneuver checks Russia’s growing influence in Cuba, where Moscow, in Cold War fashion, has been flexing its military and economic muscles just 90 miles from the US coast in an overt challenge to our national security. A clear-minded analysis of Obama's move may impart future...

So who benefits the most from this new ‘relationship’ between the United States and Cuba? Aficionados’ will soon be able to smoke fine Cuban cigars without having to smuggle them into the U.S., but beyond that what exactly has the U.S. gained by Barack Obama’s diplomatic overture towards the brutal communist dictatorship in Havana? The Caribbean island has been locked in the 1950’s for decades as the rest of the world moved into the twenty-first century. But while trapped in the past Cuba has certainly been involved over the years in current events, and usually not in a particularly positive...

The historic plan announced by President Obama on Wednesday to normalize relations with Cuba was met with heavy bipartisan resistance on Capitol Hill, raising questions of whether Congress will even consider easing a more than 50-year trade embargo against the communist state -- let alone end it. Obama said the United States will cease what he called an “outdated approach” with Cuba, and take steps to normalize diplomatic relations -- including opening an embassy in Havana -- after American Alan Gross was released from the country following five years in prison as part of an agreement that also included the...

On the rare occasion I find myself in agreement with President Obama, I get nervous. It just feels like a setup. Like someone's going to pull the rug out from under me at any moment. But right now, I have to admit, I was very pleased to hear the news that the U.S. and Cuba are moving to normalize relations.

A long time ago, on an island not too far away, a pair of brothers was ejected from a good Jesuit school. The one was reportedly a better student, the other less impressive, but together, they preferred other things – politics, rabble-rousing, war. When the brothers grew up, they fell in with a bad crowd – the worst of crowds, in fact. Far across the oceans, Chinese communists were consolidating their power, Soviet communists were drawing an iron curtain down the center of Europe, Korean communists were settling in for the long haul in Pyongyang, Vietnamese communists were revolting against...

The Vatican played a significant role in healing relations between arch foes Cuba and the United States, officials said Wednesday. Pope Francis was personally involved in secret negotiations between the longtime enemies, sources said Wednesday, as the historic announcement was made in Washington D.C. The pontiff sent private letters to President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro over the summer, urging them to turn their swords into ploughshares. The Pope expressed "warm congratulations for the historic decision" to resume relations, the Vatican said in a statement Wednesday. The Vatican and an undisclosed Canadian location served as top-secret areas for negotiations...