UPDATE: Bloomberg’s Josh Rogin is reporting that Hillary Clinton “secretly pushed” to open up Cuba just as Obama proposed yesterday:
Nevertheless, throughout 2011, Clinton and her team continued to press the White House to take further steps on Cuba. In early 2011, frustrated by what she saw as resistance from the Obama political advisers as well as the NSC staff, Clinton met personally with the president and nudged him to keep going.
…
After returning to Washington, Clinton directed her head of policy planning, Jake Sullivan, to work up several options to lay out a policy approach and present it to the president. The result was, in essence, what Obama announced Wednesday, a source close to the process said.
Once again, Hillary Clinton is in lock step with Barack Obama, this time on normalizing relations with Cuba.
In her book Hard Choices, Clinton explained how she advocated Obama drop the U.S. embargo on Cuba entirely, and normalize relations with the Castro regime:
Near the end of my tenure I recommended to President Obama that he take another look at our embargo. It wasn’t achieving its goals and it was holding back our broader agenda across Latin America. After twenty years of observing and dealing with the U.S.-Cuba relationship, I thought we should shift the onus onto the Castros to explain why they remained undemocratic and abusive.