Castro or Castro? Family Members Volley With Trump Team for Best Deal on Cuba

The lights went out across the entire island on March 16. Cuba’s national grid, starved of Venezuelan oil since America’s January’s detention of dictator Nicolás Maduro, suffered a complete collapse. Triggered by a boiler leak at the Antonio Guiteras thermoelectric plant in Matanzas, the failure caused a cascading disconnection that left roughly 10 million people in darkness. Many still are, as officials supply only a few hours of power per day on a rolling basis.The darkness came on the same day that President Trump, in the Oval Office, offered a characteristically unambiguous assessment of where things stand in Washington’s pressure campaign to degrade a government already barely holding together.“I do believe I’ll be having the honor of taking Cuba. That’s a big honor. Taking Cuba in some form,” Trump told reporters. “Whether I free it, take it, I think I can do anything I want with it. They’re a very weakened nation right now.”With Venezuelan oil no longer flowing following the pre-dawn raid that delivered Mr. Maduro to New York to face drug trafficking and weapons charges, and Mexico bowing to U.S. tariff threats, Cuba is running on fumes in the most literal sense. The island is receiving scant humanitarian aid, including fuel, from abroad. America has allowed the sale of fuel to Cuba’s private sector since February, though only about 30,000 barrels have arrived to the nation that previously survived on 100,000 barrels per day. The question hanging over the Caribbean is whether Mr. Trump’s conquering language is a prelude to an intervention or leverage in a negotiation already quietly underway.Who is talking to whomWith Cuba having lived with power failures for decades, the current outage is familiar to many. What comes next, however, negotiated by an American administration not hung up on tradition nor treaty, could be the game changer. “Only a complete regime change in Cuba will satisfy the double goal of guaranteeing the national security of the United States and the welfare of the Cuban people,” the interim director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University, Sebastian Arcos, told The New York Sun.President Miguel Díaz-Canel says Cuba’s 94-year-old former president, Raúl Castro, is involved in talks between Havana and Washington, the first time Havana has acknowledged the communist revolutionary’s direct role in negotiations. Speaking to a leftist former Spanish politician, Pablo Iglesias, Mr. Díaz-Canel described conversations as in the early stages but said Mr. Castro’s role underscores the gravitas of the discussions.Secretary of State Marco Rubio is also said to be negotiating with the grandson of Raúl Castro, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, nicknamed “El Cangrejo,” the Crab. The younger Mr. Castro, who heads Raúl Castro’s personal security detail, is seen inside the administration as representing younger, business-minded Cubans for whom revolutionary communism has failed. Cuba has already agreed to release 51 prisoners, a gesture most recently brokered through the Vatican. Such moves have historically accompanied diplomatic openings between Havana and Washington.On Friday, Mr. Rubio dispelled reports that the Trump administration is seeking to push Mr. Díaz-Canel from power while leaving untouched the families of Raúl Castro and his deceased brother, Fidel, calling reporters who say as much “liars.” “This is not about the Castro family. This is about a system of government that doesn’t work,” he told reporters. “Cuba’s economy needs to change and their economy can’t change unless their system of government changes. It’s that simple.” Nonetheless, a professor of Latin American politics and U.S. foreign policy at American University, William LeoGrande, said resolution in Cuba is most assuredly reliant on the Castro clan. “Because the Cuban regime is a highly institutionalized communist system, removing the president would change almost nothing,” Mr. LeoGrande told the Sun. “Díaz-Canel does not have sole decision-making authority; he shares it with a collective leadership and with Raúl Castro, still influential even in retirement.Mr. Arcos draws a sharper conclusion. “The ‘official’ government of Díaz-Canel is nothing more than a facade of civilian power for what really is a military regime. Raúl Castro has turned the armed forces into the real power — they have the guns and the bank accounts,” he said. The senior director of government relations at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Connor Pfeiffer, framed it in structural terms.“The decision to engage in talks with family members of Raúl Castro reflects the administration’s recognition that the Castro family and the military, not the formal communist party apparatus, are in control of the regime,” Mr. Pfeiffer told the Sun. “That’s the only way to have a chance at political change and not just reach an economic agreement that the regime fails to uphold, as happened after the Obama-Castro thaw.”Havana’s answer: Talk, stall, surviveHavana has made its negotiating position plain. “The political system of Cuba is not up for negotiation, and of course, neither the president nor the position of any official in Cuba is subject to negotiation with the United States,” Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío told reporters.Cuba, he said, is willing to discuss trade compensation and the 5,913 outstanding American property claims from nationalizations after 1959. What it will not discuss is who leads it.Mr. Díaz-Canel claims that the two countries are still far from any formal agreement, describing negotiations as “long processes” requiring “willingness and channels for dialogue, and all of that takes time.” The Cuban strategy appears to be to keep talking to buy time, perhaps until the U.S. midterm elections in November. At the same time, Mr. LeoGrande is skeptical that military pressure will offer a clean solution.“Since the 1990s, Cuba’s military doctrine has been ‘the War of the Whole People,’ which involves the armed forces waging a protracted asymmetrical guerrilla war against an occupier, as in Iraq,” he said.Mr. Arcos takes a bleaker view.“This regime is both obstinate and obdurate, and I fear it will negotiate for time but will not willingly capitulate,” he said. “They will hold until they are forced out.”Lights out: the human costBehind the geopolitical chess match, the consequences on the ground are severe and worsening. Blackouts of up to 20 hours at Havana and longer in the provinces have become commonplace, producing food shortages, water scarcity, a near-collapse of public transportation, and major sanitation failures. Cuba has now experienced three total nationwide grid collapses in March alone.“The humanitarian situation in Cuba was already extremely fragile, but the electricity crisis is pushing many essential services to the limit,” Americas director at Human Rights Watch, Juanita Goebertus, said in a statement. “People don’t have reliable access to drinking water, hospitals can’t operate safely, basic goods are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain, and garbage is piling up in the streets.”The hospital crisis is particularly acute, jeopardizing more than 32,000 pregnant women and cutting off an estimated 96,000 people from surgeries they need, around 11,000 of them children, according to Cuban health officials and the United Nations. Ambulances struggle to find fuel. At Havana’s Institute of Hematology and Immunology, nurses reported losing power two or three times a day, with outages lasting long enough to compromise refrigerated medications. Garbage has not been regularly collected, raising the prospect of dengue and cholera outbreaks when the rainy season begins in May.“If the current situation continues and the country’s fuel reserves are depleted, we do fear an accelerated deterioration with the possible loss of lives,” warned the United Nations’ resident coordinator in Cuba, Francisco Pichón.The escalation optionsWashington, for its part, is not yet out of pressure tools. Mr. Pfeiffer outlined several still available to Washington short of military action.“One option is imposing secondary sanctions on foreign entities that do business with entities on the Cuba Restricted List,” he said. “This would hit the tourism sector by subjecting Canadian and European companies to the threat of United States sanctions, depriving regime elites of the foreign cash they use to stay in power.”Indictments of key regime officials are also under active consideration at the Department of Justice, he added.The White House has yet to address one more legal dimension. More than a dozen American presidents have honored the pledge not to invade Cuba, a commitment made as part of the 1962 agreement that resolved the Cuban Missile Crisis. Mr. Arcos argues that the pledge has essentially expired.“The Kennedy-Khrushchev agreement became moot once the Soviet Union disappeared,” he said. “Unlike all other presidents since 1991, Mr. Trump simply walked out of the traditional assumption that the United States must wait for the regime to collapse on its own.”Whether Mr. Trump presses the advantage militarily, accepts a face-saving political transition, or watches Havana run out the clock to the midterms is the central question of the coming weeks. For now, as Mr. Díaz-Canel acknowledged in his latest address, the stakes for ordinary Cubans could not be more immediate. “The impact is tremendous,” he said in his latest address. “It is most brutally manifested in these energy issues. This causes anguish among the population.”

Castro or Castro? Family Members Volley With Trump Team for Best Deal on Cuba

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