MIAMI—Cuban-American lawmakers from Florida helped shape U.S. relations with the island for years until they found themselves on the outside during a historic thaw in relations.
But they could be getting the upper hand on Cuba policy again under President Donald Trump with a possible return to an earlier, more hard-line U.S. stance toward relations with Cuba’s government.
“We have had more conversations with high-level Trump officials than we had in eight years of the Obama administration,” said Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, one of a handful of Republican members of Congress from Florida who long had an outsized role on U.S. foreign policy related to Cuba.
What Diaz-Balart and other Cuban-American lawmakers hope is that their renewed access to the U.S. government under Trump’s leadership will help them reverse the steps taken by former President Barack Obama and President Raul Castro to “normalize” relations between the two countries.
