Trump’s Plans for Regime Change in Cuba Face a Nigh-Insurmountable Hurdle

After beginning the war, but before his conduct of it turned it into an embarrassment, President Trump said: “On the way back” from Iran “we will be taking over” Cuba “almost immediately.” Now, humiliated and bewildered, he hungers for a success before this autumn’s elections.Cuba’s 67-year-old regime has survived 13 American presidencies. Yet a bumptious 14th has big plans. Loosely speaking.Communist Cuba, a threadbare museum of Marxism, has always attracted tyranny tourists, leftist pilgrims eager to experience, briefly, applied socialism. The only good its evil ever produced is Armando Valladares’s magnificent 1986 memoir, “Against All Hope,” chronicling 22 years as a political prisoner. Beatings were never perfunctory, always ferocious and imaginatively cruel. He was fed watery soup laced with glass, or dead rats, or half the length of a cow’s intestine, rectum included, filled with waste.Other than those pilgrims, no one believes the Havana regime has a shred of legitimacy. What should be done?For decades, Communist Cuba, a mendicant nation prickly about its revolutionary dignity, depended on subsidies from the Soviet Union, then on bartered oil from Venezuela. Now it experiences electricity blackouts sometimes lasting 22 hours a day. Some airlines have stopped serving Havana because fuel is scarce for return trips. Tourism has evaporated. The Economist says “harvests are virtually non-existent.” The Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady reports that “output from once-vibrant export industries like sugar, tobacco, coffee and fruit can’t even supply the domestic market.”Like North Korea, another family business, Cuba’s regime, in which Fidel Castro’s brother, Raúl Castro, 95, still matters, has one priority: survival. It understands the threat posed by permitting any freedom in tyranny’s fissures. Hence its fear of free enterprise, socialism’s solvent.Raúl Castro (with whom President Obama posed for photos during his “engagement” with Cuba) cannot be an interlocutor, given the proper U.S. indictment of him for murder. In 1996, he ordered Cuban military jets to shoot down two American civilian aircraft over international waters. They were helping escapees from the prison island.Mr. Trump’s base includes Cuban Americans, a large majority of whom, according to a Miami Herald poll, favor military intervention and oppose any economic engagement that preserves the regime. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, an adult in Mr. Trump’s Cabinet, says Cuba’s economic trajectory “will not change as long as the people who are in charge of it now remain in power.” Gaesa, an army-run conglomerate, controls 70 percent of the economy.Cuba’s economy shrank 11 percent between 2019 and 2024, and more than 1 million people, about 10 percent of the population, fled the country between 2022 and 2023. The Trump administration insists that prostrate Cuba threatens American “national security.” Cuba’s army has about one-fifth of its former 200,000 soldiers; its tiny air force is ramshackle. Cuba reportedly has more than 300 drones, but what use are they? And surely there is sufficient U.S. leverage to pressure Havana into ending Russia’s and China’s use of the island for listening to American military communications. Is there, however, an American obligation toward this unfortunate neighbor?The villain (until he softened his cold utilitarianism) of Charles Dickens’s “Hard Times,” Thomas Gradgrind, probably believed that “the Good Samaritan was a Bad Economist.” Meaning: Charity skews incentives for self-reliance, etc. Some ethicists, however, wonder whether a Good Samaritan nation with the power to do good has an obligation to do it.All agree, however, that there is no obligation to do what cannot be done. And what can be done for a nation that by now is all regime and no meaningful citizenry?In March, a mob sacked a Communist Party headquarters in central Cuba. This spark of insurrection was aberrant and fleeting. Totalitarianism always has one foundational objective, which it has achieved in Cuba. The population is a dust of wary individuals, easily blown about. Their capacity for collaboration — for politics — has atrophied. A smooth democratic transition is a chimera.In January, Mr. Trump said, “Cuba is ready to fall.” Into what? Has Trump thought through his vow to “take care” of Cuba with a “friendly takeover” during “a little brief stopover”?Before he skittered away from demanding Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” he jovially said of Cuba: An American aircraft carrier will “stop about 100 yards offshore, and they’ll say ‘Thank you very much. We give up.’”Such a cutup. Our Metternich from Midtown Manhattan is not intimidated by the aphorism that if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.The Washington Post

Trump’s Plans for Regime Change in Cuba Face a Nigh-Insurmountable Hurdle

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