Cuban President Ra ú l Castro and President Barack Obama meet at the Summit of the Americas in Panama City, Panama, April 11, 2015. | AP Photo Obama riles GOP with Cuba trip The president plans to meet with Raul Castro during his trip next month, a move the GOP field is calling ‘appalling.’

President Barack Obama will visit Cuba next month, a historic trip that will fulfill a personal desire and could help Obama solidify the renewed ties with the island nation ahead of a potential GOP successor.

During the trip, which will take place on March 21 and 22, Obama will meet with Cuban President Raul Castro, as well as Cuban entrepreneurs and members of civil society, the White House said in a statement, part of a media blitz rolled out on Thursday.


“Next month, I'll travel to Cuba to advance our progress and efforts that can improve the lives of the Cuban people,” Obama said on Twitter, adding that he is not turning a blind eye to human rights concerns. “We still have differences with the Cuban government that I will raise directly. America will always stand for human rights around the world.”

But the trip will hardly be a victory lap, say both supporters and opponents of Obama’s Cuba policy. So far, loosened restrictions appear to be helping bring more visitors and cash to Cuba, with few benefits to U.S. businesses and at best halting improvement on the human rights front. Without entrenched interests backing up the new policy, there’s not much to stop a Republican successor from rolling it back.

“We want to make this policy change irreversible,” White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters Thursday. The goal, he continued, is to make the new links between the Cuban and American people — and businesses — “gain such momentum that there’s an inevitability to the opening that’s taking place and the increase in engagement that’s happening in our countries.”

They’re not there yet, experts say.

“If there is not a meaningful and operational U.S. business presence in Cuba by the date he leaves office, then a future president will have little impediment towards making changes,” said John Kavulich at the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council. Otherwise, he added, a new president “will say, looking at the relationship, it all seems about Cuba making more money and giving us less of it.”

Obama’s trip could go a long way in helping improve the quality of life for the Cuban people, who still do not have full freedom of speech and assembly under Castro, Rhodes wrote on Medium Thursday.

“We want to open up more opportunities for U.S. businesses and travelers to engage with Cuba, and we want the Cuban government to open up more opportunities for its people to benefit from that engagement,” Rhodes said. “Even as we pursue normalization, we’ve made clear that we will continue to have serious differences with the Cuban government — particularly on human rights.”

Rhodes also urged Congress to lift the decades-long economic embargo, arguing that such a move would improve Cubans’ well-being and human rights.

But with fierce Republican resistance, there is a slim chance of that happening.

And GOP presidential contenders were quick to condemn Obama’s decision to travel to Cuba — the first U.S. president to do so since Calvin Coolidge.

“Appalling for @POTUS to legitimize the Castro regime with a visit before freedom for Cuban people,” Jeb Bush wrote on Twitter Thursday morning.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, called on Obama to change his plans in a letter on Thursday. “Rather than achieving several long-standing U.S. goals and national security interests, you have methodically squandered this opportunity, legitimizing the Castro regime and enriching it in the process,” Rubio wrote. “A presidential visit to Cuba absent of any concessions from its government is a dangerous idea, and I urge you to reconsider.”

Ted Cruz, whose father was a Cuban immigrant, said the trip was “always his plan” and reflects a broader pattern on Obama’s foreign policy. “He has alienated and abandoned our friends and allies,” Cruz told radio host Mike Gallagher on Thursday. “You know, one of the first things he did when he became president was send the bust of Winston Churchill back to the United Kingdom. That was shameful.”

Ben Carson granted that “the president has a right to go any place he wants to go,” speaking to reporters in Orangeburg, S.C. “It would’ve been much smarter to wait until they had a change in leadership,” Carson added, “which has to be coming pretty soon since Raul Castro is 83, 84 years old. At that point, you have a lot of leverage.”

With Republican congressional leaders resisting a formal lifting of the embargo and pledging to block an ambassador to Cuba, the next president would have wide latitude to again cut off the island nation, giving Obama less than a year to try to build lasting ties.

For now, looser restrictions under Obama have the potential to bring jetloads more tourism dollars to Cuba. The administration has already broadened the scope of legal travel with plans to restore commercial flights to the once-estranged Communist country, to as many as 110 a day.

But other than airline companies, it’s not clear that U.S. companies have seen much benefit since the White House announced in late 2014 that it would seek to normalize relations with Cuba. While, U.S. companies have received approval to export more than $7 billion worth of goods and services to Cuba over the past two years, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker said Wednesday that it's unclear how many of those sales will be made because of the slow and uncertain pace of reform in Cuba. In some sectors, things have gotten worse: food and agriculture exports to Cuba dropped significantly last year compared to 2014.

Supporters said Obama’s trip could be a great marketing move, for both democracy and U.S. economic interests.

“For Cubans accustomed to watching their government sputter down the last mile of socialism in a '57 Chevy, imagine what they'll think when they see Air Force One,” said Sen. Jeff Flake, the rare Republican backer of restoring relations with the island nation. “Just think of the progress that can come from one day allowing all freedom-loving Americans to travel to Cuba."

But the optics for high-profile visits to Cuba haven’t always worked out so well. Last month, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler traveled to Havana to discuss expanding Internet access with Cuban officials. The Cuban government followed up by announcing some new home broadband pilot projects — provided by the Chinese company Huawei.

“Companies are interested” expanding across the Gulf of Mexico, Kavulich said. “But they also see that Cuba has thus far been using U.S. companies’ interest toward Cuba as bait to get better deals from other countries.”

The Obama administration said earlier this month that Coolidge, who traveled to Cuba in 1928, was the last and only sitting U.S. president to ever visit that island nation. However, Harry Truman visited the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in 1948, and, after his time in office, former President Jimmy Carter visited the country in 2002.

Obama voiced his intention to visit Cuba in December, though he said the conditions needed to be right given the country's history of human rights abuses. The U.S. has since reopened its embassy in Havana and removed Cuba from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism last year.

“If I go on a visit, then part of the deal is that I get to talk to everybody,” Obama told Yahoo! News at the time. “I’ve made very clear in my conversations directly with President [Raul] Castro that we would continue to reach out to those who want to broaden the scope for, you know, free expression inside of Cuba.”

The White House wouldn’t say, however, which dissidents Obama will meet with, and it’s unclear how provocative Obama will choose to be as he asserts American values of free expression.

He might opt out of doing an interview with the U.S.-funded Radio Marti, a Reagan-era news and entertainment network that broadcasts pro-democracy news and entertainment into Cuba that’s reviled by the government, and instead talk to a more youthful, new-media voice like the dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez.

Those considerations, Kavulich said, “will be challenging and will be the subject of much debate within the National Security Council and the State Department.”

Obama also plans to travel to Argentina during the trip, and will meet with new Argentine President Mauricio Macri. The White House noted that it has been nearly 20 years since the last bilaterally focused visit by a U.S. president to Argentina.

Doug Palmer and Ali Breland contributed.