Homeland Security Today Dayton, Ohio 11 August 2016
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U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, Inc. New York, New York Telephone (917) 453-6726 • E-mail: [email protected] Internet: http://www.cubatrade.org • Twitter: @CubaCouncil Facebook: www.facebook.com/uscubatradeandeconomiccouncil LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/u-s--cuba-trade-and-economic-council-inc- Homeland Security Today Dayton, Ohio 11 August 2016 US to Deploy Federal Air Marshals on Cuba Flights By: Amanda Vicinanzo, Online Managing Editor The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) announced this week that the United States and Cuba have reached an agreement which will allow federal air marshals on board certain flights to and from Cuba. TSA released a statement on the decision at the request of the US-Cuba Trade and Economic Council. TSA explained that In-Flight Security Officers (IFSOs), also known as federal air marshals, play a crucial role in aviation security. The agency plans to continue to work with Cuba to expand the presence of IFSOs on flights to and from Cuba. “This agreement will strengthen both parties' aviation security efforts by furnishing a security presence on board certain passenger flights between the United States and The Republic of Cuba,” TSA said in the statement, adding, “IFSOs serve as an active last line of defense against terrorism and air piracy, and are an important part of a multi- layer strategy adopted by the US to thwart terrorism in the civil aviation sector.” Commenting on the announcement, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, warned that despite the presence of federal air marshals on flights between the two countries, Americans traveling to Cuba remain at risk. “While the agreement to allow federal air marshals on-board flights between the United States and Cuba is a positive step, the American people should have grave concerns about the level of security currently in place at any foreign airport where the host government refused to allow Congress to visit,” McCaul said. President Obama’s plan to open regularly scheduled commercial air service to Cuba has been met with significant reservations. As Homeland Security Today previously reported, lawmakers have expressed concerns that terrorists could use Cuba as a gateway to the United States. “The Administration is telling us that we should entrust the safety and security of American citizens to the Cuban government,” Rep. John Katko (R-NY), who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee’s Transportation Security subcommittee, said in a May 2016 statement. “A country that was just removed from the state sponsors of terrorism list one year ago on May 29. A country whose leaders have repeatedly derided the values and principles for which our great nation stands.” In July, Katko introduced legislation to prohibit all scheduled commercial air travel between the United States and Cuba until TSA certifies that Cuban airports have the appropriate security measures in place to keep Americans safe. Just weeks beforehand, Katko and other members of the House Homeland Security Committee were blocked by the Cuban government from entering the country to assess security risks associated with resuming air travel between the United States and Cuba. The first of the more than 100 daily roundtrip flights between the two countries is slated to begin at the end of this month. Politico Washington, DC 11 August 2016 AIR MARSHALS NOT ENOUGH FOR CUBA FLIGHTS? House Homeland Security Chairman Mike McCaul says the TSA’s move this week to put air marshals on flights to and from Cuba is a “positive step.” But he contends that the added security doesn’t change the fact that the Cuban government won’t let U.S. lawmakers visit to size up the country’s airport procedures. “The American people should have grave concerns about the level of security currently in place at any foreign airport where the host government refused to allow Congress to visit,” the chairman said in a written statement this week. A long story: TSA sent a statement to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council on Tuesday saying that the agency struck an agreement with Cuba that “sets forth the legal framework” for putting air marshals on flights between the two countries. That announcement came after McCaul and several other lawmakers were unable to travel to the island nation in June because the Cuban government did not approve their visas for the trip to assess aviation security. The Miami Herald Miami, Florida 11 August 2016 How a GOP hardliner on Cuba changed sides and what it cost him Former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez gives a speech during the opening session of the first China Conference of Quality at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China on Sept. 15, 2014. Feng Li AP By James Rosen WASHINGTON On a steamy summer day one year ago, standing on a dusty Havana back-road, Carlos Gutierrez was somehow able to find the childhood home he’d last seen more than a half century earlier, before he and his family fled Fidel Castro’s communist revolution. It’s a blood bank now, but he walked down the street, rounded a curve and recognized it right away: No. 26, a simple one-story house. More remarkable still was Gutierrez’s presence there at all, helping to lead a high-level American delegation to mark the reopening of the U.S. Embassy in Havana. For Gutierrez, the most fascinating journey of all has been an internal one, an intellectual and emotional excursion that has carried him from his role as an anti-Castro hardliner in Republican George W. Bush’s Cabinet to his new role as a champion of American business investment in his homeland. Gutierrez gives numerous reasons for his policy shift, ranging from having left Miami as a child to his family’s time in Mexico and his later work in China. By themselves, none of those things had been enough to change his mind. But they culminated in a long talk with President Barack Obama that he found persuasive. Obama’s talk was like the last drop in a chemistry experiment that makes a liquid solution turn solid in an instant: Each drop that came before it contributed to the change, but only the last one made it happen. “That sort of opened the door,” Gutierrez told McClatchy . “It forced me to think even more realistically.” Some one-time friends of the former commerce secretary don’t buy his evolutionary depiction of the shift. They see a financial motive tied to his position as co-director of the Albright Stonebridge Group, a high- powered Washington consulting firm that helps open doors for American companies seeking to do business abroad. “When it’s an outright case of just literally doing it for the money on an issue that he was a big believer in, I’m sorry – I have zero respect for that,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a Cuban-American Republican from Miami, told McClatchy. Gutierrez, 62, rejects that kind of judgment. “I don’t need the money, but I do want to help the country of my birth,” he told McClatchy. Only three of his nine trips to Cuba in the past year, Gutierrez said, have been for Albright Stonebridge clients. Four have been unpaid excursions as head of the U.S.-Cuba Business Council, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce affiliate that he’s headed without compensation since February 2015. His initial journey in August last year was as part of the official U.S. delegation for the embassy opening in Havana, while his other trip came at the invitation of the Meridian International Center, a Washington- based nonprofit that asked him to join a cultural exchange. That first morning back in Cuba, filled with wonder, Gutierrez had pulled open the curtain in his room at the Hotel Nacional and looked out at the once-grand Spanish Colonial shops of Old Havana. “I felt joy,” Gutierrez recalled in an interview at Albright Stonebridge, which he heads along with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. His office is just a few blocks north of the U.S Commerce Department, the mammoth federal agency he led less than a decade ago. “I felt just happy to be in the place that I was born – the place I’d thought so much about and read so much about. It was just a very special feeling. And, then, the people are great.” As happy as it made him, the homecoming came at a steep personal price. Gutierrez, a handsome man with a gray mustache on a trim face, had been a hero to Cubans in South Florida and beyond – only the second Cuban-American member of a White House Cabinet. The first, Mel Martinez, served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Bush before Gutierrez joined his Cabinet. Martinez later represented Florida in the U.S. Senate. Gutierrez’s embrace of the Castro regime made him an overnight pariah among his own. “They see it as betrayal,” Gutierrez said. Friends stopped talking to him, and not just Diaz-Balart. Miami Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo, whose election campaign Gutierrez supported in 2014, said he felt blindsided. “I consider his change of position drastic, and it was unexpected,” Curbelo said. Some of Gutierrez’s friends felt ambushed. “It was sad to hear,” Orlando Gutierrez Boronat, head of the Cuban American Directorate in Miami, told McClatchy. “I regret that he’s taken that position.” Asked whether he and Carlos Gutierrez remain close, Boronat responded, “We were friends. It’s been a while since I’ve spoken with him.” Doubts about his true motivations anger the normally unflappable Gutierrez.