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By California Yankee Posted in 2008 | 2008 Presidential Campaign | Cuba | Immigration | Mike Huckabee — Comments (6) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Huckabee Was For Trade With Cuba Before He Was Against It.

Now that he is running for president and is no longer governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee has decided to change his mind about the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba:

As governor of Arkansas five years ago, Mike Huckabee joined a bipartisan chorus of politicians who concluded that the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba was bad for businesses. Now that he's a top-tier candidate for president, Huckabee has decided he favors the embargo -- so much so that he vowed Monday to outdo even President Bush in strangling the regime of Cuban President Fidel Castro and punishing those who do business there.

Huckabee admits his Kerry -like flip-flop on Cuba is all about political expediency:

"Rather than seeing it as some huge change, I would call it, rather, the simple reality that I'm running for president of the United States, not for reelection as governor of Arkansas," he said. "I've got to look at this as an issue that touches the whole country."

Watch the following video where he explains his change of mind on the Hannity & Colmes show.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Huckabee's 2002 letter reportedly argued that the embargo "continues to harm our own agricultural and business interests here at home and has certainly not helped the people of Cuba." Now in a successful effort to obtain an endorsement from Marco Rubio, Florida's Cuban American state House speaker, Huckabee takes the opposite view vowing to veto any effort to end the sanctions:

Huckabee pledged to adhere to provisions of a 1996 law that would permit U.S. citizens to sue in American courts for property taken from them during the 1959 Cuban revolution.

Those lawsuits could threaten European businesses with holdings on the island. Bush and President Clinton have routinely avoided conflict on the issue by suspending those provisions of the 1996 law.

"I really wasn't that aware of a lot of the issues that exist between Cuba and the United States," Huckabee said Monday, adding that his flexibility on policy should be viewed as a good thing.

How could Huckabee be unaware these issues?

Unfortunately, Huckabee's Cuban Flip-flop, has all the political expediency of Huckabee's new immigration plan, designed to counter the criticism that Huckabee has supported in-state tuition for the children of illegal immigrants.