The U.S. and Cuba Have Both Abandoned Their Principles

America’s rivalry with Cuba was once a bitter battle of ideas. When a 20-something Fidel Castro electrified his supporters with visions of a bright socialist future, he wasn’t bluffing. When John F. Kennedy said that the Cuban revolution was “incompatible with the principles and objectives of the Inter-American system,” he meant it. People on both sides defended these ideas around the world. Cuba supported uprisings in Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, the Congo, and elsewhere. It sent thousands of soldiers to fight a revolutionary war in Angola and thousands more to defend a Marxist government in Ethiopia. Wherever the Cubans went, they were countered by Americans—more square, but often just as idealistic—determined to hold the line for democracy and human rights.

That was a long time ago.

Today Washington and Havana are still antagonists, but the ideologies on each side have faded over the years. Cuba’s socialist utopianism wore away gradually. The American government’s commitment to democracy eroded much more quickly, just in the past few years. Both governments still mouth the old slogans, by rote. As they negotiate over Cuba’s future—with the threat of U.S. military intervention hanging over their talks—a new dynamic has emerged: The two sides appear to be haggling not over ideas but over which side can extract the most financial gain from Cuba. The new reality is tawdry, but it might put a resolution within reach. Officials who operate like mob bosses don’t need to agree on transcendent values to make a bargain.

Cuba’s ideological hollowing is decades old. When the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991, Cuba lost its patron and 35 percent of its GDP. Eastern European Communist Parties were dissolving, and their countries were holding democratic elections. At first, Castro took the opposite path, declaring, “We are not only fighting for ourselves. We are not only fighting for our ideals.” But with the country’s economy in free fall, his government had little choice but to back away from its Marxist orthodoxies. Castro quietly accepted small-scale private enterprise, along with widespread sexual tourism. Regime insiders grasped that they could leverage their power into money. Slowly, Castro’s cronies built a kleptocracy that proved ruinous to the Cuban people, but hugely profitable to them.

Under Raúl Castro—Fidel’s brother and successor, who, at 94, remains the chief authority in Havana—the entity that actually runs Cuba is not the Communist Party, but GAESA, the Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. GAESA is a military conglomerate that controls 40 to 70 percent of the Cuban economy; it dominates the hospitality sector, gasoline retailing, supermarkets, currency exchanges, and money transfers, and runs the island’s main port. Government documents leaked to the Miami Herald last year suggested that GAESA held as much as $18 billion in assets. The group’s tourism subsidiary earned a 42 percent profit margin in the first quarter of 2024. GAESA pays no taxes, transfers no dividends to the state budget, and is legally exempt from audits. It is a ruthlessly extractive state monopoly, run by generals and Castro-family members and hangers-on, and no longer even pretends to act in the public interest.

[Vivian Salama and Sarah Fitzpatrick: Trump’s eye is already on Cuba]

While GAESA’s leaders profit, 89 percent of Cubans live in extreme poverty. Doctors say that more patients are dying as the health system crumbles. More than 1 million people—a tenth of the population—have fled since the coronavirus pandemic. The situation has become so dire that seven out of 10 Cubans report skipping meals, and one in five intends to emigrate. Many of those who stay behind are older and poorer. But it’s the constant blackouts that bother people the most: Even before the United States imposed an oil blockade earlier this year, 72 percent of Cubans named power outages as their main concern. Since the blockade, virtually everyone on the island has lost power in blackouts that, at one point, lasted 20 hours; three grids have broken down in four months; hospitals have been unable to function. Water pumps have stopped, and garbage trucks, too. The United Nations warns of collapse.

Miguel Díaz-Canel, the puppet president Raúl Castro appointed, has been left to manage the contradictions. He recently invited the Cuban exiles his predecessors called gusanos—“worms”—to invest in island businesses for the first time in 70 years, a move that would once have been considered an unimaginable act of ideological heresy. In Cuba today, Marxist bromides serve as nothing more than rhetorical cover for corruption. Cuba watchers have had decades to get used to this charade.

In America, and not only in the Cuban-exile community, politicians from both parties have made the ideological case against Cuban communism for decades. Back in 2021, then-Senator Marco Rubio railed against the Cuban regime in the language of high moral purpose that conservatives had always adopted, saying, “We condemn this communist, this Marxist, this socialist tyranny. Call it for what it is.” As recently as July 2024, Rubio joined Rick Scott and Ted Cruz in introducing a Senate resolution honoring the anniversary of Cuba’s 2021 protests and condemning the regime for the “brutal oppression, persecution and torture” of citizens demanding freedom; Rubio called the protests “a testament to the Cuban people’s tenacity and their unwavering desire for freedom from tyranny.” Then-Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat, spoke in the same register, calling for solidarity with Cubans “risking it all to liberate themselves from the iron hand of dictatorship.”

Cuban propaganda long dismissed this kind of talk as ideological window dressing for America’s imperialist designs on the island. For decades, that was mostly a lie meant to drain the American opposition of its moral force. What’s startling is how quickly yesterday’s propaganda has morphed into a neutral statement on American policy.

When Donald Trump returned to power last year, the U.S. began dismantling institutions created to defend democracy abroad. It closed USAID; gutted the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor; withheld funding for the National Endowment for Democracy; and effectively shut down Voice of America (a judge recently ordered the organization to resume operations). Members of an administration demanding that Cuba democratize have welcomed Vladimir Putin onto American soil and lavished praise on Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

And now, thanks to reporting from The Atlantic’s Vivian Salama and Sarah Fitzpatrick, we know that Trump’s ambitions in Cuba aren’t primarily ideological. They’re mercenary.

Four sources told Salama and Fitzpatrick that the U.S. attorney’s office in South Florida is preparing indictments against the political and military leadership in Havana—including some members of the Castro family—on potential charges related to drug trafficking, espionage, and violent crime. A similar legal strategy preceded the U.S. capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in January. The possible indictments and the fuel blockade might signal that the administration wants to impose regime change and usher in democracy in Cuba. But people familiar with Trump’s thinking told Salama and Fitzpatrick that the president is most interested in “securing broad U.S. latitude to invest in, develop, and ultimately capitalize on Cuba’s underdeveloped cities and beaches,” they write.

[Vivian Salama: All eyes on Cuba]

“There’s billions of dollars to be made there,” an administration official told them. Trump’s interest apparently dates back to his days in real estate. “He’s interested in Cuba as a market for him, and completely agnostic about the politics,” one person who spoke with Trump about Cuba during his first administration said to Salama and Fitzpatrick. “He didn’t care.” They report that the administration is considering Cuban American GOP donors for potential leadership roles in Havana.

The point of dropping bombs in Cuba, then, wouldn’t be to subdue the Cuban armed forces so much as to produce a visible, unmistakable rupture—a before and after that Trump can point to. In Caracas, the U.S. operation to seize Maduro lasted hours. It left the old regime mostly in place, and simply changed the optics: A dictator had been removed, and Trump could claim the win.

An earlier vintage of American leader might have argued that even if economic opening was his No. 1 concern, ushering in freedom and democracy would be the best way of achieving that. And some of Trump’s advisers and backers may well believe that. But the Trump administration has given little indication that it wants to turn Cuba into a genuinely open economy. Open economies are competitive, and the last thing that a kleptocrat wants is a competitor. What Trump seems to object to in Cuba’s economic system isn’t how corrupt and extractive it is; it’s that he’s not getting a share of the take.

As the fight between Washington and Havana narrows to a dispute over who takes home the guaranteed profits in such a system, the outlines of a potential deal come into focus: The generals keep their cut. The Republican donors get their roles, splitting their loot with the more pliable components of the Castro clique. The president gets his deal, and maybe a hotel. And the Cubans who believed the slogans—from either side—get nothing. The political scientist María de los Ángeles Torres has warned that a deal focused on economic opening alone would “crush the aspirations of Cubans both on the island and in exile who have fought to establish democratic rights in their homeland.”

She’s right, of course, but that hardly registers these days. For nearly seven decades, Americans who worked to contain Cuban influence genuinely believed in the cause that they were fighting for, even when the methods they used in the fight betrayed their ideals. The Cuban regime spent decades warning about an imperialist American enemy that didn’t quite exist. Now that enemy is at the doors, and the revolution has nothing left.