WASHINGTON — President Obama will not send a formal delegation to Cuba to attend the funeral of the former Cuban strongman Fidel Castro, but instead will dispatch a top White House aide.
Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, will attend the funeral, as will Jeffrey DeLaurentis, the top American diplomat in Cuba, to represent the United States, said Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary.
The administration decided that the relationship between the two countries remained “quite complicated,” Mr. Earnest said. “There are many aspects of the U.S.-Cuba relationship that were characterized by a lot of conflict and turmoil, not just during the Castro regime.”
Mr. Earnest said the administration continued to have significant concerns about the Cuban government, including its poor protection of basic human rights.
“So, we believe that this was an appropriate way for the United States to show our commitment to an ongoing future-oriented relationship with the Cuban people,” Mr. Earnest said.
Although he is not a diplomat, Mr. Rhodes was the central White House interlocutor during negotiations with the Cuban government over the recent opening of relations between the two countries, and he was scheduled to be in Cuba this week for more meetings anyway, Mr. Earnest said.
The Times’s Coverage of Fidel Castro
Articles include an exclusive Times interview with the young guerrilla leader in 1957 and coverage of the revolution, the Bay of Pigs invasion and the 1962 missile crisis.
President-elect Donald J. Trump warned Monday that the push to build ties with Cuba after decades of animosity could be quickly wiped away, despite growing business and commercial ties between the countries.
“If Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the U.S. as a whole, I will terminate deal,” he said on Twitter.
Mr. Trump’s message threatened to endone of Mr. Obama’s signature foreign policy initiatives, an effort to overturn decades of enmity. Mr. Obama has relaxed restrictions on commerce, trade and financial transactions with Cuba, but he has not been able to overturn an embargo put in place by Congress.
Mr. Obama has sought to strike a difficult balance between ending the countries’ animosity and acknowledging the island government’s faults. He has seen the decades of American efforts to undermine and even overthrow Cuba’s government as being not only unsuccessful but also harmful to the United States’ image in the region.
By reducing the temperature of the language against Cuba, Mr. Obama believes that the world is more likely to focus more on Cuba’s own difficulties on economic change and human rights, Mr. Earnest said.
But Republicans were sharply critical on Saturday, the day after Mr. Castro’s death, of a White House statement that noted that it was an occasion for Americans to “extend a hand of friendship to the Cuban people” while doing little to castigate the former leader’s record of brutality.
A few hours after the White House released its statement, a statement from Mr. Trump’s transition team called Mr. Castro a “brutal dictator” who had oppressed his own people for decades and left a legacy of “firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.”
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