Deal or ordeal: Trump’s bad options in Cuba

0:03Sarah Birke:The Economist.

0:09Sarah Birke:Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

0:18Sarah Birke:Today on the show, meeting the contenders in Colombia's highly polarized election and our World Cup team profiles continue with Mexico.

0:33Sarah Birke:First up, though.

0:42Sarah Birke:If you supported or voted for Donald Trump because of his promise not to get America involved in new foreign entanglements, boy are you disappointed. In January, American Special Forces snatched President Nicolás Maduro from his hideout in Venezuela. That brought Cuba's biggest oil supplier under American control. Mr. Trump thought that would, at last, bring Cuba to heel.

1:16Sarah Birke:Months later, the only thing that's changed is the increased misery for everyday Cubans. No capitulation of the regime, no popular uprising, no deal to end that misery. So now come the threats of military action. On Tuesday, Cuba's foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez Parilla did not hold back at the UN's Security Council. He said America's actions amounted to war crimes. He said military aggression would result in a bloodbath. He said that at a moment that we hope will never happen, the people of Cuba will fight to the last consequence. But things simply cannot continue as they are now. Donald Trump is right to want to change Cuba.

2:00Sarah Birke:Sarah Burke is our bureau chief for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. The communist rulers of the island are really vile. They have impoverished their people and locked up anyone who disagrees with them. But so far, Trump's methods for inducing change have achieved very limited success.

2:20Sarah Birke:And by way of recap, we've certainly talked a lot on the show about how miserable the conditions in Cuba have become over the years. Is it much the same as when last we spoke? Every time I've gone to Cuba, it just gets worse. This is a country that for 67 years has suffered from imprisonment of any political opponents, squashing of free speech, and just a total degradation of the economy that has immiserated the people. Ordinary Cubans who work and have what should be decent jobs as teachers or government workers really can't even afford basic food, eggs, beans, rice. They have no electricity.

2:55It's getting hotter and hotter. So in that sense, Jason, since I was last there earlier this year, it has got worse. And the elites, meanwhile, are pretty insulated from this. They drive around in their nice cars and go to nice restaurants. And so the inequality is also growing.

3:09Sarah Birke:And you said Mr. Trump's methods for trying to change any, all of this, have not worked so far. What's been on the menu up until now? The menu has mainly been sticks rather than carrots. So from January, he choked off Cuba's oil supply, starting with cutting off Venezuela's once he'd done away with Nicolás Maduro, and then also forcing other countries to stop sending oil as well. And that's mainly the stick they've used, as well as more recently threatening some form of military action. The Cubans are negotiating and talking to the Americans. And we have seen a few political prisoners released and some offerings in terms of economic opening and reforms, such as letting Cubans abroad invest.

3:48But these are pretty small gains and definitely far less than Trump and his Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is Cuban-American himself, want to see. And indeed, less than most Cubans would want to see. There's no sign really yet that there's going to be any wholesale change of the type that would satisfy people or indeed any change of the regime itself.

4:10Sarah Birke:So do you think the spirit of what's happened so far is an attempt to foment popular protest? Definitely at the start, it seemed to be that. It seemed to be, look, let's make the situation source of unbearable, which many Cubans say is just wholly cruel. They're the ones suffering from the oil embargo far, far more than the ruling class. And the idea was that maybe they would come out to the streets and they would overthrow the regime, a bit like Donald Trump called for to happen in Iran as well. Now, obviously, that hasn't happened. And there are good reasons why it hasn't happened. The Cuban regime cracks down very hard on people who come out to the streets or show dissent.

4:44And the other thing is most young people who are more prone to come out and protest have left the island. And so what you're seeing now is a look at different military options instead.

4:54Sarah Birke:What do those look like? So none of them are simple. When I've talked to people, there are three broad options. You could do a wholesale invasion, which they're not going to do, I don't think. You could do limited strikes on key targets, which might scare the regime into concessions, at least that's the way the thinking goes, or provoke some split in the ruling class. You could easily imagine strikes on certain airfields, on docks. The Americans, there is no doubt, could do this. Cuba's army is very degraded at this point. But no one thinks that is necessarily going to change anything either. The Cubans tend to dig their heels in when it comes to being under threat.

5:32And they've also been preparing for years and years and years and years for some form of American invasion. This is a rallying cry for them.

5:39Sarah Birke:What about the kind of operation that the Trump administration carried out in Venezuela, a decapitation strike, if you like? So that's doubtless very tempting for the Trump administration insofar as they see Venezuela as a huge success for them. But Cuba is not Venezuela and everyone would do well to remember that. Raul Castro, who is presumably the person they would take out, he's the person they just indicted on May the 20th, has no formal position of power. And so if you take him out, assuming you could, and he's probably in hiding, it doesn't actually affect the power structure. Not to say he doesn't have power, he has veto power over everything that happens in the island.

6:16But either way, in theory, everything still would continue and it's unlikely that this would cause much to change. He's also 94 years old. In fact, he'll be 95 on June the 3rd. And it doesn't look as good. And many Cubans are indeed, I wouldn't say fond of him, but they wouldn't react very well to him being taken off in handcuffs Maduro style in the way that Venezuelans reacted to that happening to their leader. It's not an obvious exit route either or success route for the Trump administration.

6:45Sarah Birke:It's also a very different country that the Trump administration would be dealing with, right, in that Venezuela, broadly, a far richer one. Yeah, I mean, I should have mentioned too that there is no equivalent of Delcy Rodriguez, who took power after Maduro was taken out. But yeah, it's a very different country. Oil is a big difference. Venezuela has oil, has resources. It had a way of reconstructing the economy. Cuba doesn't really have resources in that way. So there's not necessarily clear how you could rebuild this complete economic devastation. And on top of that, Cubans don't have a political position in the way that's organised like Venezuela does.

7:20Not to say there are good local leaders or one couldn't be gathered together, but it's not as obvious or clean cut as in Venezuela. So you'd need an awful lot of private investment. And there Cuba does have a plus point. There are lots and lots of extremely well-off Cuban-Americans in the United States who could and would be willing to invest. But you're talking about a recovery that needs to be much more profound and would take much longer and a political transition that would be much harder than in Venezuela.

7:49Sarah Birke:I guess one question is how much Cubans on the street support American interventions of any of the kinds you've described. I think that's changed over time, Jason. Cubans are very nationalistic and obviously don't like the idea of America coming and invading or occupying or doing anything in their country. But it's got to the point that people are so desperate that you hear all the time from Cubans, let's just get it over and done with. We don't care how. Things can't get worse. And so I think we've really got to the point where the suffering is so big that people want change anyway. And if that means the Americans, and for many people they think that's the only option that now really is on the table for them, then great, let that be the option.

8:29Sarah Birke:And so do you think a military option is a good option for the Trump administration, for Cuba, for Cubans? For all the reasons we've just laid out, Jason, it doesn't seem like it's one that is going to work. And it seems, one, that the risks are very high. when I've been doing calls with people over the last few weeks and months and we try and game this out and you go down one route and you come to a dead end and you go down another and you come to a dead end and you go down to another and you come to the dead end. This is not an easy problem. This is a regime that has been in power for 67 years and does not want to let go of power.

9:01And the idea that you can beat it with a stick or you can offer it such an incentive, these rational economic ways of thinking about things don't necessarily fly. The best possible outcome would be a negotiated deal that leads to a huge economic opening and a gradual political transition. You would have to leave the regime in place, but you would have to do some of the things that have been made public. Oil would come in and the Cubans have to really open up the economy. They have to release political prisoners. They have to not crack down on people. The army's corrupt business empire needs to back away from some of its control.

9:37You could see that working. but whether it's a realistic option or it's going to happen is another question.

9:44Sarah Birke:Sarah, thanks very much for joining us. Thanks, Jason.

10:04I've met all three leading and starkly different presidential candidates for the elections coming up this Sunday in Colombia.

10:20One of them, Abelado de la Espriella, is a hard right figure he dubs himself El Tigre. I went along to a rally of his on a recent trip and his supporters run around in tiger costumes. It's got the feeling of a spectacle, there's pumping music, there's sparks flying on stage.

10:40Sarah Birke:Ivan Cepeda, the hard-left candidate, his rallies have a very different feel. His standard propers instead the pages of his speech, which he keeps his glasses on and reads from very carefully to not miss a word.

11:03And then it's Paloma Valencia. She's really the establishment sort of centre-right candidate. She is more centrist, but she's still pretty tough on security. She says she's going to get Colombians their security back.

11:21And these three represent really just radically different visions for the future of Colombia. And right now, it's still possible that any of the three could yet be the next president.

11:30Sarah Birke:And before we talk about the three, tell me about Colombian voters, what they're thinking about what Colombia is like now. What's on the docket? Well, it's a bit of a split picture. I mean, security is bad and voters are worried about it. Last year, a presidential candidate was assassinated. Cocaine production, this is a country that produces two-thirds of the world's cocaine. That production's at record highs. More civilians have been caught up in the violence than at any point in the last decade. So that's all pretty grim. And that's partly because the government's been pursuing something called total peace, an attempt to negotiate with all these rebel groups who are really just drug traffickers at this stage, at the same time.

12:07And that's basically failed. But the flip side is that voters are feeling quite a bit better about the economy. consumptions. Ah, Petro, the current left-wing president, has hiked the minimum wage by 17%. That's a big feel-good for a lot of people. I mean, the government is overspending, trying to kind of pump up the economy. It's a bit artificial, if you like. They're bullying the central bank to lower rates. But of course, jam today is popular, and that certainly helps the left and their candidates superior.

12:33Sarah Birke:So tell me about him. Well, he's in a good position, arguably a favorite or close to it, partly because of this pumping of the economy by the current government. But he's a very different figure to Gustavo Petro. Petro is a sort of impetuous character. So Petro is severe, austere, serious. He likes Nero collar shirts and cardigans. I met him last year in his pretty unflashy apartment in Bogotá, and he kind of almost academic or certainly carefully explained his very left-wing views, and in particular his unflagging belief in this approach of total peace. Entonces, para resolver el asunto, la política de paz total que ha planteado el gobierno,

13:15He promises to carry on with that despite its failings. And economically, he wants a left-wing slate. He wants land distribution. He wants much greater welfare spending. He even wants state procurement to favor small players like community kitchens. And of course, some of this alarms business and markets. But he tries quite hard and quite clearly to assuage fears and the claims of right-wingers that he would somehow turn Colombia into Venezuela, which next door, of course, collapsed into a sort of socialist dictatorship.

13:51The right, of course, does not believe him when he says that, or at least much of it doesn't.

13:56Sarah Birke:Well, tell me about then El Tigre, the candidate from the farthest right. Well, he's really surging in the polls right now. And you can see why to some extent he attended his rallies and he's just a hyperactive performer. He was dressed in a bulletproof vest, dancing around behind bulletproof glass, but in a kind of excited way, pumping up the crowd.

14:20I met him in person as well. He was more soft-spoken, but he never misses a chance to flash a pearly grin with his spectacularly perfect teeth. He says to me, I'm not a populist, I'm popular. It's different.

14:36But many do compare him, and his own beard resembles the populist president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele. Just like Bukele, De Les Puella promises to build 10 privately run mega prisons in the jungle. He told me that mass trials of gang members are a possibility. He said to me, right now, Colombia doesn't have prisons, it has crime universities.

15:04But his past has been criticized. I asked him about, for example, the fact he represented as legal counsel Alex Saab. Alex Saab was a close ally of Nicolás Maduro that recently ousted president of Venezuela. And Saab has been extradited to the USA on charges of money laundering. Well, Espriera says, this was just a product of my work as a defense lawyer. He says, I did absolutely nothing wrong. and he offers up a slightly gratuitous, a bit sexual analogy to ram home the point. He points out my wedding ring and says, do I love my wife? He's inquired about my marital fidelity and then followed up by saying, but when I was single, did I used to date a lot of women?

15:49Apparently, this is all in service of explaining there's a difference between the role of a defense lawyer and the role of a president, just like there's a difference between the role of a single man and the role of a married one. So at the very least, he's quite a character.

16:01Sarah Birke:And lastly, tell me about Paloma Valencia, the establishment candidate. Well, that's right. In some ways, she is a total insider. She's the granddaughter of a former Colombian president. She's the political protege of Álvaro Ribe, a very influential, more recent former president. And she's got a team of experienced politicians around. She is, frankly, in many ways, more sensible than the other two candidates. She's tough on security, but she cares about the informal economy. She wants education to be a priority. And she'd be the first female president for Colombia. But she didn't seem that optimistic when I met her.