Closer look at the man advising Trump on Cuba policy

Alexandra Glorioso | Naples (Fla.) Daily News

The words Fidel Castro have been fighting ones for Maurico Claver-Carone, the man helping President-elect Donald Trump craft policy on Cuba.

As a boy when he played high school football in Orlando, Claver-Carone wore his love for the island country with at least one black sock emblazoned with the Cuban flag. And when he wasn’t on the field, Claver-Carone was already making himself an expert on Cuban history and politics, and forming strong opinions about the Castro regime.

“If you ever mentioned Castro, he would go berserk,” said Ferlan Bailey, Claver-Carone's longtime friend who graduated with him from Bishop Moore Catholic High School in 1993. “The word 'Castro' would just set him off. He’d be like, ‘Don’t even tell me you support Castro.’ He would talk about the people who were persecuted. He knew about the economy, he knew about everything.”

Bailey said Claver-Carone would never physically fight and preferred to dominate his opponents with wit.

“I remember one time in practice, one of the guys got heated and said, ‘We can fight right now,’" Bailey said. "And Mauricio just insulted him with his intelligence.”

Now all of the knowledge and skills Claver-Carone has honed over the years as one of the country's leading pro-U.S. embargo hardliners will come to bear as he assumes one of the most consequential positions in his career. Last week, Trump appointed him to a key position on his transition team at the U.S. Treasury Department, which oversees financial sanctions enforcement with the communist island.

Claver-Carone, who had worked in Treasury in 2003 under President George W. Bush and has been a top lobbyist and advocate on Cuba, also will be handling regular rank and file work of the department. His portfolio also likely includes policy concerning sanctions on other nations, such as Iran and Venezuela.

The Miami native, raised in Spain and Orlando, obtained his masters in international law from the Georgetown University Law Center, his law degree from The Catholic University of America’s School of Law and his undergraduate degree from Rollins College.

Now back at the Treasury Department, Claver-Carone has one job that’s perfectly suited for him: undoing President Obama’s normalization efforts with Cuba — fulfilling a campaign promise made by Trump in September in Miami, the heart of the Cuban exile community.

“All the concessions that Barack Obama has granted to the Castro regime were done through executive order, which means the next president can reverse them," Trump told an enthusiastic crowd at the James L. Knight Center. "And that, I will do, unless the Castro regime meets our demands. Not my demands. Our demands.

“Those demands are religious and political freedom for the Cuban people. And the freeing of political prisoners,” Trump said.

Those words could have come directly from Claver-Carone’s Capitol Hill Cubans blog, which the 41-year-old regularly writes for as the executive director of the Cuba Democracy Advocates, a Washington, D.C., non-profit that promotes democracy and human rights in Cuba.

Claver-Carone's expertise on Cuba has brought him before Congress repeatedly for testimony on the subject, and he's become a go-to source for reporters, talk shows, and even an appearance on Comedy Central.

However, Claver-Carone has not spoken to a reporter since Trump tapped him for his transition team.

There is evidence Cuba is "going backwards," he argues, pointing to Raúl Castro’s son, Alejandro, taking part in secret negotiations between the Obama administration and Cuba regarding the easing of sanctions.

For an op-ed in Newsweek in July, he wrote that Raúl Castro has been “mislabeled a ‘reformer’” and harsh government practices have continued under his presidency.

One of the most outspoken and politically active critics of Obama’s policies toward Cuba, Claver-Carone wrote a Feb. 5 op-ed in the Huffington Post titled: “Facts Prove Obama’s Cuba Policy Counterproductive.” In it, he argued that political arrests have increased, more Cubans are leaving the island, the number of ‘self-employed’ workers have decreased, religious freedom violations have increased and Castro reneged on the release of political prisoners, among other things.

Ricardo Herrero, executive director of the anti-embargo Cuba Now group, said Claver-Carone’s point about political arrests was misguided. Herrero said the arrests are actually a sign of increased Democratic activity that occurred after Obama’s rapprochement with the communist nation.

Herrero views Claver-Carone’s appointment as a mistake.

“Appointing him is a significant step backwards. We’re talking about a career lobbyist who has spent the last 13 years of his life trying to torpedo any effort in the federal government of trying to open up to Cuba. That includes restrictions on family travel,” said Herrero. “Now, we’re going to have this person in Treasury trying to torpedo licenses.”

Claver-Carone’s appointment touches upon a tension within the Cuban-American community and in the USA regarding the best way to deal with the Castro regime. For an island with a relatively small gross domestic product, Cuba’s appeal to America’s interest in lifting sanctions transcends business. It speaks to the Obama administration policy that is based on engaging hostile nations such as Iran.

“You know what? It’s horrible. The human rights are horrible” in Cuba, said Joe Arriola, a former Miami city manager who was one of the many Cuban-Americans to visit the island during Obama’s historic diplomatic visit in March.

Arriola added: “We have seen it. Isolation doesn’t work. You cannot isolate a country. The thing is, you talk and communicate, and create changes from within.”

Claver-Carone began publishing the Capitol Hill Cuban’s blog in May of 2008, before Obama became president. The blog focuses on Cuba but extends to other countries like Iran and Venezuela.

Four years before the blog and after he left Bush's Treasury Department, Claver-Carone was hired by two Miami-based Cuban Americans, Remedios Diaz-Oliver and Gus Machado, to lead their US-Cuba Democracy PAC. Claver-Carone is also the executive director of the Cuba Democracy Advocates private foundation, started in 2001, which pays him more than $100,000 a year to promote human rights and Democracy in Cuba, according to its annual tax filings.

Pedro Pequeño, a former professor of anthropology at Rollins and mentor to Claver-Carone, said they often discussed how naïve people are regarding Fidel Castro and that Claver-Carone intensely admired his great uncle, Dr. Francisco Carone Dede. Pequeño described Dede as one of the most influential Cuban philosophers, as well as Fidel Castro’s former professor.

A 2011 USA Today profile on Dede in 2011 detailed how Castro put him under house arrest after Dede denounced the regime.

“Mauricio, since very young, was an avid student of his great-uncle’s history,” Mayda Carone, his mother, said in an interview. “It’s what inspired him to become a lawyer and believe so stridently in freedom.”

Those who are familiar with Claver-Carone’s reputation and Trump’s thinking said the president-elect clearly intends to roll back Obama’s directive.

“I think it indicates correctly that the president-elect is taking a harder line on communism and the oppression of the Cuban people,” said Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to Trump.

Stone said he hoped Claver-Carone would be given a permanent appointment in the Trump administration to help pressure Cuba into undoing Fidel Castro’s legacy.

“Let’s not lose sight of the fact that Fidel Castro was a mass murderer, that he was a thug, that he oppressed women, gays and Christians,” Stone said. “I think a lot of liberal Americans unfortunately have this romantic notion that Castro is dashing."

Susie Wiles, Trump’s former Florida campaign strategist, said she became aware of Claver-Carone’s work through “policy channels” and met him through a mutual friend in late August or early September. Wiles said he was an immediately “willing and able surrogate” for the Trump campaign.

Claver-Carone also acted as an apologist for Trump in September when Newsweek reported that Trump’s company violated the embargo when it conducted business in Cuba in 1998. In addition, Bloomberg reported in July that Trump organization officials visited the island in 2012 and 2013 to explore golf-course developments.

Claver-Carone told reporters that Trump should have been credited for ultimately deciding not to do business with the regime and to promise to reinstate the full U.S. embargo.

On Nov. 9, Claver-Carone posted an op-ed on his blog called Obama’s Cuba Policy Lost Florida for Hillary.

Though others dispute his conclusion, Claver-Carone had much to celebrate: Every pro-embargo hardliner won in Florida. Claver-Carone said there were lessons to be learned.

“First, candidates should stop taking advice from a handful of greedy businessmen who are clueless as regards to the real pulse of the Cuban-American community,” Claver-Carone wrote. “Second, issue polls are meaningless.”