A man rides a tricycle with his dog running alongside him during a blackout in Havana on Monday. It was the country's third major blackout over the past four months.Ramon Espinosa/The Associated Press
Mark Entwistle is a senior fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and a former Canadian ambassador to Cuba.
Even without the kinds of military weapons currently being directed at Iran, the Trump administration has continued its attack on Cuba by effectively blockading it from critical oil supplies. This could well be the legacy of a Trump doctrine: using coercive economic instruments to slip through the formal definitions of international law.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel confirmed recently that talks between the two countries are under way. If one were to be a fly on the wall, there would be several factors to watch for that could influence outcomes.
First, the Cubans might well be confused about America’s motives and objectives. Two months ago, Donald Trump boasted that the regime would “fall pretty soon.” The subsequent oil blockade, the modern equivalent of a medieval siege, was presumably intended to bring about total surrender. But Mr. Trump and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio now refer to talks with the Cubans as being about a “deal.” This is not the same – and if regime change is not the goal, why are the Cuban people still being collectively punished?
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The Americans seemed to be looking for a Cuban Delcy Rodríguez, who is now the acting president of Venezuela and is working with Washington in the wake of Nicolás Maduro’s capture. But Cuba is not Venezuela, and there is no Cuban version of Ms. Rodríguez with whom the U.S. can “do business.” Short of costly forced regime change, the U.S. will have to deal with the Cuban state.
Mr. Trump’s prime motivation could be immigration politics – one of the few issues in U.S.-Cuba relations that can bring the two sides together over mutual interests. The President has said he wants a prosperous Cuba so that Cuban migrants in the U.S. can return; the unspoken part is that he’d like that to happen without too many deportations.
In turn, this prosperous Cuba can only be created by allowing space for the Cuban economy to grow. This will require more fundamental economic reform by the Cubans, but also the dismantling of the broader decades-old U.S. embargo, even if it happens in stages. Herein lies the inherent challenge to a meaningful “deal,” but there is no way around it. Executive orders won’t be sufficient for this historic task.
There is also the matter of the influential Cuban American leaders who back the Republicans electorally and believe that this time, the U.S. government will actually topple the regime. Would Mr. Rubio and Mr. Trump be able to get a deal done amid likely anger from that community? After all, president John F. Kennedy‘s Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961 left Cuban Americans with a sense of betrayal for a generation.
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Second, distrust runs deep on both sides. The labyrinthine U.S. embargo has become like a house of mirrors at a carnival midway: There is no long-term predictability, and it depends on interpretation and the blowing of political winds. American corporations have been hauled before American courts by Cuban Americans for doing legal and licensed business in Cuba. The Cubans declined several commercial deals with global American manufacturers during the Obama administration because they could not count on a reliable supply of post-sale parts and service – not because of the companies, but because of the U.S. regulatory environment.
Third, there is profound asymmetry in each country’s knowledge of the other. While Cuba has been studying the U.S. for decades, Washington generally hews to its own reflexive and lazy Cold War-era narrative about Cuba. They can mistakenly conflate Cubans’ real frustration about dire economic conditions and deprivations, as well as their broad demands that someone – anyone – make the economy work, as being political statements of support for Mr. Trump or the United States. Cuban governments before 1959 and during the revolutionary period indisputably failed their people in different ways, but America’s narrative about an evil Communist dictatorship masks the shifting and often contradictory realities that characterize the country.
Mr. Trump’s language itself – describing a “takeover,” “friendly” or not – projects the essentially ahistorical nature of U.S. attitudes to Cuba. With his hubris on full display, he declared on Monday that he could “take” Cuba and “do anything” he wants with it, ridiculing the basic tenet of Cuban nationalist identity that has persisted since 1868: sovereign independence for the nation.
Meanwhile, the siege of Cuba wears on, with everyday people as collateral damage. Supporters contend this will bring about an undefined new dawn for Cuba. But it’s more likely that it creates the conditions in which the seeds of the next cycle of rebellious Cuban nationalism are planted.