Cuba

Maryland Representative Chris Van Hollen returned from Cuba with Alan Gross and a new US strategy of engagement with Cuba:

For over 50 years, US officials have tried to bring about positive change and reform in Cuba by attempting to isolate the island nation. It is clear that policy has been a miserable failure. Over the last five decades, the Castro brothers have outlasted over eight American presidents and very little has changed. The oft-cited definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

The governments of US and Cuba are paving the way for a massive overhaul in their political policies.

For more than five decades, US has kept an economic embargo on Cuba, but all of this is now changing under the Obama administration. Today President Obama begins a broad range of diplomatic and regulatory measures that are considered the most sweeping change in U.S. policy toward Cuba since the 1961 embargo was imposed.

Today marks the 52nd anniversary of the US embargo on Cuba. This communist island nation is the only one-party state in the western hemisphere.

The embargo, known among Cubans as "El Bloqueo" or "The Blockade," consists of economic sanctions against Cuba and restrictions on Cuban travel and commerce for all people and companies under US jurisdiction.

President Obama has appointed a Washington lawyer with increasingly responsible government experience to be the State Department’s new special envoy for closing Guantanamo Bay Naval Base Prison in Cuba.

Mr. Cliff Sloan has litigated cases at all levels of federal and state courts, including six U.S. Supreme Court arguments, numerous arguments in the U.S. Courts of Appeals, and matters in trial and district courts across the country.