“Cuba is ready to fall,” U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters in early January, a day after U.S. special forces captured the Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. Three weeks later, Trump declared a national emergency to address the “unusual and extraordinary threat” that Cuba’s communist government poses to the United States, accusing Havana of a litany of “depredations,” including hosting foreign spies and terrorists. Henceforth, Trump declared, any country that supplies oil to the island may be subjected to U.S. tariffs.
Today, almost no oil reaches the island—not from Venezuela, not from Mexico, not from Algeria, Angola, Brazil, Russia, or anywhere else. American companies with special licenses can still ship diesel and other petroleum products to Cuba, and the U.S. Treasury Department will soon allow the resale of Venezuelan oil to Cuba’s small private sector, but these narrow exceptions will not meet the island’s energy needs. Without access to foreign oil, the Cuban economy is now in free fall—and Cuba’s revolutionary government risks collapse.
Even before the current crisis, the Cuban people had long suffered under a cruel dictatorship, ruinous economic policies and mismanagement, and a six-decade U.S. trade embargo. In recent years, the island has experienced gasoline and medicine shortages, routine power outages, food cost increases, and mosquito-transmitted-disease outbreaks that have overwhelmed the public health system. Now, there is no electricity, lines at gas stations stretch for hours, schools are suspending classes, and hospitals are canceling surgeries; with most garbage trucks out of service, waste is piling up on the streets.
Under these compounding pressures, Havana has little room to maneuver. Yet the chances that Trump will launch a Maduro-style military mission in Cuba remain low. After his Venezuela operation, undertaking a similar ouster would no longer have the advantage of surprise, and Cuba’s security forces are generally believed to be more loyal to their regime than Venezuela’s were to theirs.
But without oil, conditions in Cuba will only worsen. This means that Cuba’s leadership may soon be forced to accommodate Washington, bringing the revolutionary era of the last seven decades to a close. The least likely outcome of all, however, is a democratic transition. Even if Cuba’s new era looks different on paper, it will almost certainly resemble the old one in the instability and restrictions Cubans face in their daily lives.
RIPE FOR CHANGE
Ever since the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Washington has sought to undermine the one-party communist state, targeting it with economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and military actions. But these efforts largely failed. Havana’s routing of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion—in which 1,400 U.S.-backed exiles attempted to overthrow the communist regime—bolstered the Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro’s international standing as a leader against U.S. imperialism. Afterward, Cuba moved closer to the Soviet Union and benefited from extensive political and economic cooperation for the next three decades.
After the Cold War ended, U.S. policy toward Cuba began to see-saw, sometimes veering toward even more hostility and sometimes toying with engagement. President Bill Clinton signed the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, which strengthened the U.S. embargo and set stringent conditions for the lifting of sanctions. President Barack Obama, by contrast, believed that the long-standing U.S. policy of isolating Cuba had failed. He kept the trade embargo intact but restored diplomatic relations with Havana, relaxed economic sanctions, and removed Cuba’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism. When Trump first entered the White House, in 2017, he rolled back all of Obama’s normalization efforts and enacted more than 240 measures tightening sanctions against Cuba.
Despite the twists and turns in U.S. policy and changes in Cuba’s leadership, life for ordinary Cubans did not improve. In 2008, Castro formally transferred power to his brother Raúl. When Miguel Díaz-Canel became president, in 2019, he was the first such leader in 60 years who did not have the Castro surname and was the first born after the revolution. But what might have appeared to be a generational transition was in fact carefully orchestrated by the Communist Party. Díaz-Canel was a handpicked hard-liner who continues to benefit from the backing of Raúl Castro; a long-standing and powerful military-run business conglomerate still manages the country’s economy. In his debut address to the UN General Assembly, Díaz-Canel declared, “The generational change in our government should not mislead the enemies of the revolution—we represent continuity, not rupture.”
Over the last six years, his administration has passed some economic reforms, such as the legalization of small and medium-sized private enterprises, but it has steered clear of any meaningful political opening. Yet the domestic circumstances Díaz-Canel faces have steadily become more complex; inflation has risen, blackouts have become even more common, and shortages of basic goods have intensified. In the summer of 2021, thousands of Cubans took to the streets in dozens of cities across the country, calling for liberty. Díaz-Canel responded to Cuba’s multiple, concurrent crises by denying systemic failures, reaffirming traditional ideological positions, and resorting to repression.
POINT OF NO RETURN?
Trump’s reelection introduced a wildcard—and meant that the Cuban elite’s traditional methods of retaining power might no longer work. Trump has advertised his belief in using military force against dictators. And he has suggested that Washington has a direct wish to influence Cuba as part of an effort to establish hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. The rapidly escalating conflict in Iran could delay Trump’s decision on Cuba, though not necessarily. Trump is difficult to read and notoriously unpredictable; he may well see the prospect of a rapid dismantling of the Cuban dictatorship as a much-needed foreign-policy win.
In either case, Trump is unlikely to turn first to military intervention; he would instead attempt to secure political change in Cuba through negotiation and diplomatic pressure. (Last week, he floated the idea of conducting a “friendly takeover” of the island.) According to reporting in Axios, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has already been talking with Raúl’s grandson, the 41-year-old Raúl Guillermo Rodriguez Castro. But after nearly seven decades of communist rule, there is no Cuban leader capable of bringing substantive change to the country. Too many inside government are loyal to the regime, and the opposition is divided and lacks a plan.
One potential outcome relies on Cuban leaders accepting Trump’s demand that they make some form of “deal.” In January, Díaz-Canel seemed to suggest that the Cuban military was prepared to fight: “The best way to avoid aggression is for imperialism to have to calculate what the price of attacking our country would be.” But amid the second Trump administration’s crippling blockade of the island, he has begun signaling—albeit obliquely—that he recognizes that he must take a different approach. “We are making every effort so that the country can once again have fuel,” he said last month. “We have to do very hard, very creative, and very intelligent work to overcome all these obstacles.”
If the current Cuban leadership is open to reform, the Trump administration may be amenable to working with them to settle on terms agreeable to both parties. Or Washington could push for more substantial changes, including deeper economic liberalization and a reorientation away from China and Russia. Under these conditions, the country would likely remain under single-party rule, but there would be a shakeup at the top. Díaz-Canel would step down as president, yielding power to someone who has Raúl Castro’s backing but is also acceptable to Trump.
To be sure, many Cubans would likely perceive their government’s acquiescence to U.S. demands as an erosion of Cuban sovereignty, even a reversion to the island’s pre-revolutionary status as a U.S. client state. A rebellion by the military and parts of society cannot be ruled out.
THE WORST IS YET TO COME
What is most unlikely, however, is any real democratic transition in Cuba. Although economic liberalization could generate growth and reduce poverty, it would also privilege stability over political pluralism. For the foreseeable future, whoever is in power in Havana will have to accommodate large segments of the old party-state bureaucracy and the armed forces, whose cooperation will be essential for short-term stability and governability.
Even if broad segments of Cuban society demand a decisive break with socialism, the dominant bureaucratic, academic, military, and media elites would seek to preserve their influence. And with most of the regime’s political opponents abroad or in jail, there is now no obvious leader for Cubans to rally around.
However the showdown unfolds, Cuba’s traditional revolutionary model is not likely to endure. The regime’s revolutionary character is unsustainable. U.S. pressure will lead to Cuba’s transformation. But any hope the Trump administration might have that such a transformation will be pain free is misplaced. Cuba will transition from a revolutionary state to a postrevolutionary one that lacks a clear new identity.
In the weeks ahead, the only thing Cubans can be sure of is their country’s deterioration: longer blackouts, more protests, more arrests, accelerating emigration. Cuba is feeling pressure from both outside and within. The revolution seems close to its final chapter, yet the manner of its demise—and what will follow—is still unknown.
Loading…
Source link
