When I covered Cuba as a correspondent in the 1990s, I experienced the deepest of mixed feelings. It struck me as wrong that the island nation was still being subjected to numerous hardships by a vengeful United States that used any number of means to weaken and isolate it.
At the same time, it was clear that Cuba’s government, led by the aging revolutionary Fidel Castro, had itself found countless ways to make life needlessly difficult for its citizens. As one of the last places on Earth that still clung to a version of Soviet-era communism, the Cuban state would only tolerate the most limited experiments with private enterprise, while running state-owned stores where coveted imported goods could only be purchased with dollars exchanged at a usurious official rate. This had the effect of mostly limiting access to essentials to politically connected people, leaving the broader population’s needs unmet.
When I covered Cuba as a correspondent in the 1990s, I experienced the deepest of mixed feelings. It struck me as wrong that the island nation was still being subjected to numerous hardships by a vengeful United States that used any number of means to weaken and isolate it.
At the same time, it was clear that Cuba’s government, led by the aging revolutionary Fidel Castro, had itself found countless ways to make life needlessly difficult for its citizens. As one of the last places on Earth that still clung to a version of Soviet-era communism, the Cuban state would only tolerate the most limited experiments with private enterprise, while running state-owned stores where coveted imported goods could only be purchased with dollars exchanged at a usurious official rate. This had the effect of mostly limiting access to essentials to politically connected people, leaving the broader population’s needs unmet.
This was the era of the equally timid introduction of the internet in Cuba. The government ran (and still does) a monopoly on service provision and charged through the nose for online access. Through rigidities like these, a state that ceaselessly proclaimed its dedication to the masses became one that routinely served its elite first.
I felt deep sympathy for the Cuban people back then, because so much of this seemed so unnecessary. That included Washington’s long-standing embargo on the country, which not only outlawed trade with the island but prevented it from harvesting money from the hordes of U.S. tourists who would have eagerly visited a beautiful and richly endowed Caribbean country situated only 90 miles off the Florida coast had they not been barred from doing so.
But at the same time, the Cuban government’s response, in both its policy and rhetoric, stuck in my craw. Its one-size-fits-all self-justification and rationale for forever putting off meaningful change was what it insisted on calling el bloqueo, the U.S. “blockade” of the island. Wrongheaded in its own persistence though it was, outside of the Cuban missile crisis, the United States had never really imposed a physical blockade on Cuba. This fiction allowed Havana to obscure the fact that other post-Soviet Marxist states (think almost all of Eastern Europe and Vietnam, which retained its old political system) found ways to restructure their economies and deliver much greater prosperity to their people.
In noting this history, I do not wish to minimize Cuba’s geopolitical handicap. Washington welcomed all of those other countries into the international economy, including Vietnam, which had finally defeated the United States after a long and costly war in which 58,000 American soldiers died. Cuba was a unique target of the United States’ ire.
Today, nonetheless, we are seeing the ways in which Cubans are being made to pay dearly for their government’s failure to push its economic model’s evolution much harder back in an era when the opportunity was at hand. Most egregiously, this includes the period of detente and cautious rapprochement with Washington during the Obama administration, when the U.S. president went so far as to visit Havana.
What is happening between the two countries today amounts to a true blockade. It seemingly came out of nowhere earlier this year, not provoked by any Cuban threat. In a fit of self-empowered unilateralism, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has taken the almost unprecedented measure of blocking all oil shipments to a country with which it is not at war. When I search for rationales, the best I can come up with is that Trump grew intoxicated with Washington’s awesome military and economic power after imposing trade sanctions on an enormous range of countries early in his second term—and especially after the U.S. strikes last June against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and the extraordinary abduction in January of Venezuela’s president (and Cuban ally), Nicolás Maduro.
One additional motivation seems to me to go beyond the mere fact of having a seemingly convenient target for a rampaging superpower. That likely rationale is a domestic political one. By finally destroying the remnants of the Castro system, the Trump administration would be catering to an important constituency in Florida composed of large numbers of Cuban exiles and their descendants. Most famous among them, of course, is Trump’s secretary of state and national security advisor, Marco Rubio.
More active U.S. moves against Cuba, such as military action, seem to have been stalled or postponed by Washington’s present stalemate in the U.S.- and Israeli-initiated war against Iran. Make no mistake, though. The cutoff of oil to a relatively poor nation that is almost entirely dependent on fuel imports is an unusually cruel measure, one that may be enough, over time—unlike the present U.S. naval blockade of Iran—to bring down the Cuban government, albeit in messy and unpredictable ways.
Just like with Iran, the Trump government seems to have fairly little idea of how to manage such a change to the Caribbean status quo. One readily imagines huge numbers of Cubans fleeing misery and turmoil in their homeland by crossing the narrow strait that separates them from the U.S. mainland. In the mid-1990s, 35,000 Cubans came to the United States in a chaotic crisis of boat people risking their lives aboard flimsy rafts. One difference between now and then is the virulent anti-immigrant stance staked out by Trump.
One also readily imagines prolonged strife in Cuba itself. This would involve much more than the instability that routinely follows abrupt regime changes. That is because Cuba’s large exile population in nearby Florida introduces a uniquely powerful factor of potential instability. In their rosy optimism, many of these exiles, including many entrepreneurs and wealthy people, imagine themselves as decisive factors in the island’s future renaissance. The reality is likely to be far more complicated—not least because so many of them, including the most powerful officials now shaping Cuba’s fate, have never set foot on the island.
Rubio’s parents came to the United States before the Castro revolution; he has never visited the island he now holds such power over, aside from Guantanamo Bay. Relatedly, many Cuban exiles sustain naive views of the country’s pre-revolutionary past, imagining it as a paradise or wonderland, where freedom reigned, especially the freedom to get rich. In fact, Cuba then was a caste-riven society, where some indeed did get rich, often by manipulating the rules of a highly corrupt society to their advantage. Most Cubans, meanwhile, remained mired in misery, with few public services and very limited prospects. What is more, all of this had a strong racial overlay, with Black and brown Cubans almost entirely confined to the margins.
These were important contributing reasons for the success of Castro’s 1950s revolution in the first place. And those in exile today who sustain sugarplum notions about the past, or about their own ability to lift Cuba into a prosperous future by dint of their own wealth or initiative, are rarely interested in examining these realities carefully or thinking concretely about how to manage inequality.
If and when the Cuban government falls, one should be wary of the fable that the Trump administration will almost certainly spin. Rubio and other officials will wax lengthily about how the Castro system’s demise is proof of the dead end of socialism and of the superiority of the U.S. way.
But even if Castro’s successors played their weak hand badly, this was never a true test of systems. The United States has consistently worked to make Cuba’s economic life difficult, never wanting it to have even a passing shot at success. It didn’t fully blockade the island, as Cuban officials long insisted—not with naval means, anyway. It didn’t have to. Washington moved much more quietly, blocking Cuba’s access to the international banking system, for example, and making it difficult for it to do business with other nations.
But now the cruel hour is upon us, and with it, the misery, turbulence, and uncharted reckoning it is sure to bring.
