Trump’s Cuba Policy Is a Humanitarian Disaster
Trump’s Cuba Policy Is a Humanitarian Disaster
Sanctions and embargoes have immiserated Cubans without bringing regime change.
On January 25, 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed a U.S. naval “quarantine” of Cuba. “If they are hungry,” the president fumed, “they will throw Castro out.” His ambassador to Cuba, Philip W. Bonsal, chided him with a moral reminder: “We should not punish the whole Cuban people for the acts of one abnormal man.”
If it was hard for the U.S. to hear that restraint then, it has become deaf to it now. For over 65 years, U.S. policy has been to employ an embargo to pressure Cuba until the regime collapses. By 2018, that embargo had cost Cuba $130 billion, according to the UN. According to Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, the “act of economic warfare” had caused more than $4.8 billion in losses to Cuba between March of 2022 and February pf 2023. “If we calculate the damage caused by the blockade in these 60 years, based on the value of gold,” he added, “it amounts to $1.337 trillion.”
It may be impossible to know how many Cubans have died as a consequence of the embargo, but a landmark study by Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón, and Mark Weisbrot that was recently published in The Lancet Global Health found that unilateral U.S. sanctions caused death tolls similar to armed conflict. The unilateral sanctions on Cuba may be the longest and deepest of U.S. sanctions.
Despite the decades of economic and personal suffering, the policy has failed. The embargo has brought Cuba misery but not regime change. And yet, in the absence of a more promising plan, the Trump administration seems intent on simply intensifying the current plan. The result will not be regime change but more suffering.
The Trump administration has set an end-of-year deadline for regime change in Cuba, the Wall Street Journal reported last month. But, according to the Journal, the White House lacks “a concrete plan” to achieve that goal. Bloated on Venezuelan success, they are considering using that operation as a “blueprint.”
But Cuba is not Venezuela. The Journal reports that the Trump administration is “searching for Cuban government insiders who can help cut a deal to push out the Communist regime.” But, unlike in Venezuela, there is no such person. In a recent webinar hosted by the Quincy Institute, the retired U.S. diplomat Vicki Huddleston said that there is “probably no one in the Cuban government the U.S. knows of who could be an insider.” William LeoGrande, Professor of Government at American University and a specialist in U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America, added that the U.S. knows of no person inside Cuba “who could command the loyalty of the party, the military, and the people.”
There will also be no bottom-up regime change in Cuba, because there is no large, strong, organized opposition. The Cuban opposition is in Miami. “There is,” LeoGrande says, “no chance of a popular uprising.” If Venezuela cannot be a blueprint for Cuba, neither can Iran with its mass protests.
President Donald Trump has recently suggested, without details, that the U.S. is “starting to talk to Cuba.” But talk about what? What does the U.S. want Cuba to do in exchange for ending the embargo? If it is regime change, the regime is not going to agree to that. “There is no chance for a deal with the current government,” Huddleston says, “if the U.S. goal is regime change.”
That seems to leave only an intelligence or military operation to take out President Miguel Díaz-Canel. But such an operation would bear no fruit. A decapitation operation likely would have one of two results: Either a replacement figure unchosen by the U.S. would step in, or the military would fill the power vacuum. The former may be a smoother transition for Cuba than the chaos the latter could bring, but neither brings about the result the U.S. desires.
That leaves only a military operation. But that would require occupying Cuba and lots of boots on the ground, something that, presumably, neither Trump nor his base desires. As LeoGrande says, bombing Cuba would not achieve America’s goals. It would lead only to a succession of leaders or a costly invasion and prolonged occupation.
With all other options retired, the U.S. is, so far, repeating the same failed strategy. Trump has reinvested in the embargo: “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”
Venezuela provided 34 percent of Cuba’s oil in the last year. Cuba has been cut off from that lifeline. Mexico provided Cuba with 44 percent of its oil last year. Washington is pressuring Mexico to complete the strangulation of Cuba by cutting off its oil too. Mexico has already cancelled one shipment of oil, though Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum later said that Mexico will continue sending oil to Cuba as humanitarian aid and that Mexico will send other humanitarian aid, including food. Mexico recently confirmed that it had sent 814 tons of food and hygiene products.
Some in the Trump administration are pushing for “a total blockade on oil imports” to Cuba to collapse the economy and push out the government. On January 29, Trump signed an executive order imposing tariffs on any country that sends oil to Cuba. The U.S. charge d’affaires in Havana told his staff the same day that “now there is going to be a real blockade. Nothing is getting in. No more oil is coming.”
Trump has justified the reinforced embargo and the cutting off of Cuba from the oil that keeps the lights on and the country running by declaring a “national emergency” over the “unusual and extraordinary threat” caused by “the policies, practices, and actions of the Government of Cuba,” including harming and threatening the United States by hosting Russians who spy on the United States, building intelligence and defense cooperation with China, welcoming Hezbollah and Hamas, and supporting terrorism.
The Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded by asserting that Cuba “rejects the characterization that it is a threat to the security of the United States.” It stated that “Cuba does not host foreign military or intelligence bases” and that it “does not harbor, support, finance, or permit terrorist or extremist organizations.”
The intensified embargo on Cuba, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said, could cause “a large-scale humanitarian crisis.” In the absence of any other “concrete plan,” that seems to be the U.S. strategy. Over half a century of hoping an embargo will trigger regime change has been a failure. Tightening it will only lead to starvation and a humanitarian crisis for the Cuban people.
This is not a foreign policy with conscience, and it is not a foreign policy that will help the Cuban people, as Trump has claimed is the goal.
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