President Joe Biden's administration has taken some steps toward his campaign pledge to re-engage with Cuba, but he hasn't gone as far as he promised.

During the 2020 campaign, Biden said he would restore former President Barack Obama's policies that granted Americans unrestricted rights to visit family and send money to Cuba. Former President Donald Trump reversed that policy and made it harder for Americans to visit the island and tightened financial and banking restrictions against the communist regime led by Cuba President Miguel Diaz-Canel.

Some, but not all, of those changes remain as Biden enters the halfway point of his term.

"It is a partial and cautious re-engagement spurred mainly by the migration crisis in Cuba and at the U.S. border," said Ted Henken, associate professor in the sociology and anthropology department at Baruch College in New York.

Agents at the southwest U.S. border encountered Cubans nearly 30,000 times in October, surpassed only by Mexicans. The New York Times reported the current wave is larger than the 1980 Mariel boatlift and the 1994 Cuban rafter crisis combined.

In November, U.S. and Cuban officials met to discuss immigration issues under the U.S.-Cuba Migration Accords, a set of agreements from 1994 designed to discourage illegal immigration, provide protections for refugees and expand opportunities for legal immigration. After the meetings, Cuba's Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío said Cuba would resume receiving Cuban nationals deemed inadmissible into the United States.

The Biden administration has taken other steps that some experts see as re-engagement, but barriers remain.

A spokesperson for the National Security Council provided PolitiFact with a list of actions on Cuba:

• Travel: Authorized U.S. airlines to serve Cuban airports beyond Havana and reinstated educational or professional purposes as acceptable reasons for travel.

• Family reunification: Resumed the Cuban Family Reunification Parole Program, which allows certain eligible U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents to apply for parole for their family members in Cuba. In early 2023, the U.S. will increase consular services and visa processing.

• Remittances: Simplified regulations and eliminated the cap on family remittances. The Treasury Department clarified that funds for authorized remittances to Cuba may be transmitted through digital technology and credit/debit cards.

• Hurricane Ian relief: Announced $2 million for emergency relief for those in need in Cuba.

"The consular services, travel, and remittances policy opening is significant as it will ease up some of the economic pressure driving emigration," Henken said. "However, they are mostly aimed at the Cuban people and require limited cooperation from or engagement with the Cuban government."

Although Biden reinstated the "people to people" license category for group trips, he has not removed the Trump ban on the use of any Cuban hotel, which are government-owned, Henken said. That means the license effectively restricts groups to small numbers capable of staying in private bed and breakfasts.

Biden's refusal to reinstate the "people to people" license for individual travel also limits the number of U.S. tourists.

In a similar vein, although Biden lifted restrictions on remittance amounts, he has yet to rescind Trump's order to shut down Western Union and other smaller wire-transfer services to Cuba because they process money through a state financial entity, Henken said.

​​American University government professor William LeoGrande said that the Biden administration has taken "positive steps, but they fall far short of Obama's policy."

Obama removed Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, which Trump restored and Biden has not changed.

"Overall, the tone in bilateral relations remains tense and negative, (with) no real dialogue on progress toward normalization of relations," said Richard E. Feinberg, professor of international political economy at University of California, San Diego.

Sebastian Arcos, associate director at the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University, said the Biden administration's steps could be considered re-engagement compared with the Trump policy of disengagement and sanctions. 

Experts told us in 2021 that Democrats' hopes of winning some congressional races in Florida — where the Cuban American vote is strong — made it tricky for Biden to engage with Cuba. But in November's midterm elections, Republicans dominated in Florida with double-digit victories by Gov. Ron DeSantis and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, who were both incumbents.

That outcome may free the Biden administration to do more.

"There is a silver lining to this dark electoral cloud for Democrats: A deep-red Florida gives them the freedom to reconstruct their Cuba policy based on U.S. foreign-policy interests rather than prognostications about Cuban American voters in Miami-Dade," LeoGrande wrote in Foreign Policy. "But the habit of letting domestic politics drive Cuba policy will be hard to break. It has shaped how Democrats approach the issue for 40 years — ever since the 1980s, when Cuban Americans became a significant voting bloc."

Biden has taken some steps toward re-engagement with Cuba, but not at the same level as Obama. For now, we rate this promise In the Works. 

Staff writer Maria Ramirez Uribe contributed to this article.

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