WASHINGTON: Senior advisers to President-elect Donald Trump promised on Sunday that he would strike a "better deal" with Cuba after Fidel Castro's death, without saying how this might affect the historic rapprochement under President Barack Obama.
While prominent Republicans have blasted Castro as a murderous tyrant since his death Friday, no one close to Trump has directly threatened to end the political opening announced in 2014 by Obama and his Cuban counterpart Raul Castro.
But Trump's advisers made clear Sunday that the outgoing Democratic administration had, in their eyes, made too many concessions to Havana -- notably by easing the US economic embargo of 1962 -- without receiving enough in return in areas like human rights, democracy and a free-market economy.
"We've got to have a better deal," Trump's chief of staff, Reince Priebus, said on Fox News Sunday.
"Repression, open markets, freedom of religion, political prisoners. These things need to change in order to have open and free relationships, and that's what President-elect Trump believes," he added.
Priebus said Trump would ensure that "there isn't going to be a one-way relationship from the United States to Cuba without some action from the Castro administration."
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