Cuba Is Collapsing. Will Trump Invade?

23:17And we've had days, if not weeks, where you just cannot find any gas, where the power is off more than it's on. And the situation is certainly getting worse, not better. I think the psychological impact of that raid on Venezuela as well for Cubans, it showed that their soldiers were not up to the level of what the government has always told them they were, that they really couldn't contend with the U.S. and U.S. special forces, much more sophisticated weaponry and tactics. and then as well that the leadership in Venezuela, which is still, you know, a Chavista leadership, Maduro's closest allies, that they turn their back on Cuba literally overnight.

23:59And then the rest of the region, if not the rest of the world, has essentially decided to say, okay, you know, this is a government we told the Vietnamese have come here, the Russians have come here. They've suggested things the Cuban government could do, reforms they could do, business ventures they could do, and they just don't happen for whatever reason. There's an inertia here that is so strong, a bureaucracy here that is so strong, you know, one of the last communist governments in the world. And the Cuban government would say, well, we've maintained control. So that shows we've done the right things.

24:28But they're losing control at this point. And there's a deep, deep level of dissatisfaction, even among people that I know who have been supporting the government, you know, out of nationalism, out of pride for being Cuban for many, many years, they'd look and say, this government has made so many mistakes. And they essentially bet the entire country's economy on tourism. That has failed. There's no tourists to be found at this point. And then as well, they were so dependent on Venezuelan oil. They didn't diversify into solar or wind or other energy sources. And that they really thought this very improbable agreement with Venezuela was going to last forever.

25:05And then in January, with that raid in Nicolas Maduro, poof, it was gone. Weren't they also getting a lot of aid from Claudia Scheinbaum's Mexico, at least last year? Has that stopped too? They were, and it was a similar type agreement. Not as much as Venezuela. Venezuela was disrupted with some of the sanctions on them, but Claudia Scheinbaum and before her, you know, Lopez Obrador in Mexico, they are of that left wing of Latin American politics where they sort of look at Cuba as example still. It's really kind of a dying view, But Claudia Sheinbaum was sending aid. But, you know, that was such an easy one for Marco Rubio when Mexico's economy is so dependent on the U.S.

25:44And so that was really quite an easy one for someone who's been a lifelong opponent of the Cuban government, like Marco Rubio, to essentially say, you know, you keep doing this, of giving oil, which has not been very popular with the Mexican populace because it's hundreds of millions of dollars of oil per shipment. And so I think it almost gave her an out because she sent some food shipments. You know, there's there's no naval blockade off Cuba right now that prevents any oil shipments coming in. But I think a lot of governments know that they're not going to get paid for it because the Cuban government has debts around the world.

26:20But as well, it's going to invite the wrath of the Trump government, Trump administration. And they don't want to do that. So I think a lot of these governments are kind of happy to have the excuse or accepting the excuse of, you know, if we get involved in this, it's going to really infuriate the Trump administration and the consequences. But on top of that, you know, it's throwing good money after bad. We're not going to get paid. This seems to be very much a government that essentially has very few resources, is bankrupt. We are seeing the few companies who are doing business here fleeing in mass every day.

26:54I want to ask you, this is a kind of grim question, but about gradations of misery. And we're going to have to be a little clinical about this without forgetting that there are real human beings that we're talking about here who are suffering all kinds of deprivation. But there are differences between being impoverished, being hungry, being in famine conditions. Are people getting new clothes once a year or never? Can you give us a sense of – you mentioned people, children rooting in the garbage looking for something. Is that a pervasive phenomenon? Do most people get sufficient calories even if the food is unattractive?

27:30Or is there really a calorie deficiency as well as everything else? The great Cuban writer Leonardo Paduro used to say, you know, we don't get to choose what we eat, but no one goes hungry. You know, under the communist system, they sort of made the food they had available and you would eat pork until you were so bored of it or rice and beans, that kind of thing. None of that is available anymore. People might get one meal a day. You see people you haven't seen in a while and they've clearly lost weight. If you take someone out for lunch, it's a Cuban friend, they'll look at the menu and say, my goodness, every dish on the menu is worth more than I make in a month if they have a state job.

28:06And so, you know, if it were not for Cuban family members abroad sending back food, sending back money however they can, this island would have already collapsed. One of the great ironies of what's taken place here is that the people who fled, that Fidel Castro cursed as they left, called them worms. they're the ones who are supporting not only their family members but through the money they spend here the government and it's the Cuban excels that want to have change and so you've seen you've seen a kind of a campaign in Miami and other places of you know stop sending your relatives food and money because it'll be better to have this collapse in the short term well of course if it's your mother your grandmother or your kids you're supporting you know people are going to continue to send whatever aid they can.

28:49But when I first started coming here 30 years ago, people were poor, but they were not miserable. Now you see misery and you see increased poverty and you see people that don't have power, that don't have water. All the basic services that government should provide are no longer provided here. There used to be a very strong ration book system where they gave you tons of sugar, tons of cooking oil, rice and beans, cigarettes sometimes. but things you could trade here. And now people don't get anything through the ration book hardly. This is a government that has collapsed in all but name. They would take issue with that.

29:27They would say, we're still in charge here. But the basic things that a government needs to provide, like picking up trash, they don't do anymore. There's trash all throughout the city, which used to be Paris of the Caribbean. It's just drowning in trash, which of course creates flies and mosquitoes and other things. But every day I see people rooting through the trash, something you would never see before. Regular people looking for something to eat. You see women holding children in the street, knocking on your window. And that's something the government wouldn't have allowed before. Now they really don't have a choice.

30:01So we have not seen kind of these massive breakdowns in times past where people take to the sea in the wraps because they have nothing left to lose and things have gotten that bad. But we have seen people go out at night and protest with pots and pans, something the government doesn't allow here, but at this point haven't cracked down on. You know, you hear about towns outside of Havana that might go two or three days without any power. And particularly in the summer months now, as we're getting into the hotter, hotter months, it's just misery. And people go out and sleep outside and they get eaten by mosquitoes.

30:33And this is a very educated population, a very proud population. And And everyone will tell you this is kind of the worst period they can ever remember experiencing in their lives. Let me ask you a bookended pair of questions about the relationship between the government and the people. So on the one hand, the world now offers many examples, not many, but examples of communist regimes, China, Vietnam, that have opened their economy and generated prosperity without sharing political power with the population, that they've discovered all the apparatus of repression can be retained even as you make the economy work better.

31:06Why did Cuba not succeed in that direction? And then the second bookend is as the people are immiserated, do these protests, are there, is there any sign that they are converting into an actual political movement, a demand for real change or overthrow of the government or radical change in the government and the bringing in of a new kind of political system? So the first question, which is something the Vietnamese and the Chinese have come and apparently been their toughest critics, you know, we know everything you're doing is not going to work because we did it. And this is what you need to do.

31:37And you have a short window to do this. I always think about Raul Castro sort of trying to bring in Cuba for a landing. And he clearly wasn't able to. But he, Raul Castro would bring up all these examples of Vietnam, how Cuba sent their experts after the war with the US to teach them how to grow coffee. And now Cuba is importing coffee from Vietnam. It doesn't make sense. They brought Vietnamese experts to teach Cubans how to grow rice, something Cubans are more than capable of if they had a government that was able to open up their agricultural sector and allow people to import a tractor, which they can't do, or import seed, which they cannot do.

32:10They have to do all that through the government. The government doesn't have any money, and you know the end result. So there's a lot of frustration here among supporters of the government. Look what China's done. Look what Vietnam has done. And the government officials that I talk to say, well, you know, they didn't have their largest enemy right off their coasts. There's a lot more they could have done here. And just because of inertia, bureaucracy, they didn't do. But I also think it's a matter of control. In Vietnam and China, they made a conscious decision. Some people, and we'll make it that they're loyal people, but they're going to get rich.

32:42And they will have thousands of employees. They will have a power center. And every now and then we'll have to arrest somebody for being too overtly corrupt. But, you know, we're going to allow people to get right here. The government here is not cross that rubric on of allowing people to be successful. To this day now, if you're Cuban and you want to own a hotel, you can't do it in your own country. I know Cubans who do it outside of Cuba. You can have a limit of only like 200 employees. I had a great quote from someone recently where they said, you know, if Steve Jobs had been born in Cuba, he would still be working in his garage.

33:14And it's true. You know, if you have these limitations on how big you can grow and no contract you sign with the government can be enforced. And at any point, the government could come in to say, oh, you've gotten too big. It happens all the time. And that's not what we envisioned. You're too successful. It's more of a danger in this country for a business person to be too successful than to be unsuccessful. People are worried if their business gets too big here because they could get shut down or someone from the government says, oh, I'm going to take that over. And then they run it in the ground is what is what inevitably happens.

33:48So there has to be this decision change in mentality at the top here where they look and say people are in private business. We're not the enemy. They're actually helping us. And there's still a lot of suspicion because the people at the top here, you know, they were prepared for a world where the Soviet Union was going to win the Cold War. You know, that's what they grew up thinking was going to happen. And so they still haven't assimilated the lessons of Vietnam and China that you can open up, but you have to give up some control of your economy. They say to this day, private businesses, private enterprises are going to be complementary to the Cuban economy.

34:24The heart of the Cuban economy will still be the state run enterprises, all of which are incredibly inefficient, don't work, provide terrible service. And so you wonder how that could lead to a prosperous economy. It can't. On the protests, you know, the government has been very effective here in making sure anybody who could possibly be an opposition leader is either tossed in jail or more often than not encouraged to leave the country or forced to leave the country. And so that is what happened. You don't really have a leadership here. I think as well, a lot of the people who are opposition figures, they look more to Miami rather than their own internal population, because that's where the money might come from.

35:06It's striking that you have people going out and protesting, but they don't really have a leadership. And what they're doing right now is they're just trying to get the lights turned on in their neighborhood, water perhaps delivered to their neighborhood. People are exhausted here. They're living day to day. No one's really thinking down the road, the future. And they also know that if they start calling for political changes, that's going to probably lead to exile or jail cell. But within the political system, there's absolutely no room that I can see, at least, for dissent, for advocating for change.

35:37Things seem very much frozen politically. You know, if you've risen your whole life to have a job here where the power is not cut in your house, where you have food in your fridge, why would you want to change anything? You don't want to change things. You're the 1%. Why do the police and the security services obey if they're not being paid or not being paid in any way that allows them to buy anything? Before they would have advantages. They would get a box of chicken, usually because it comes from the U.S. They might get a little gasoline now. But all those little sort of side things they got that made them better off than their neighbors are rapidly vanishing.

36:13And so I think maybe there's some loyalty. Maybe there's fear that if I'm the first to speak out, what will happen to me? But, you know, I think, you know, the day we see sort of a police officer take off his uniform, throw it down in anger, then then that's it for them. You know, they still have a very effective apparatus. It goes from on high in terms of making sure the military is loyal to that. The cop on the street corner is loyal. But what we're seeing on the neighborhood level, because I live in a neighborhood with Cuban neighbors, is there's more and more crime taking place. And the police aren't doing anything about that.

36:50They're only really reacting when there's protests in something that will get the government's attention. It's almost like the government has sort of given up on crime. And thankfully, guns aren't widespread here. There isn't at this point a widespread drug problem or organized crime. But what you just have is kind of a relentless petty crime. And people have learned, one, they have the desperation that drives them to do it. But also they've learned that there are no consequences. So that is one of the things that absolutely concerns me. As someone who has gas in my tank or money in my pocket, am I going to be a target?

37:28And I certainly now, when you go out at night and the power could be off in all of Havana, it gives you pause about kind of where you go and what you do. and you certainly take much more care now. It's always been one of the safest cities in Latin America and you can feel that changing on a day-to-day basis. All right, let's shift now to the U.S.-Cuba relationship. A tense relationship, a lot of accusations back and forth. Do you feel that some kind of direct U.S. intervention is imminent? Is the United States looking for a slow squeeze under Trump and Secretary of State Rubio? Or are they imagining some kind of Venezuelan solution where they do a deal with some elements of the regime to bring the – without changing the nature of the regime to bring it more into an American orbit?

38:15This is the question that I spend all my day thinking about that everyone I get together with, from a meal or drink or cigar or whatever, talks about. It's the one conversation everyone is having on Cuba at all different levels of society. certainly the Trump administration has threatened to do what you said, the military solution. And it's hard to see how that just would lead to an outright collapse of the government, if not society here. Even if they just started striking military bases, military targets, there are not many at this point. But it would be incredibly disrupting. And I don't think you can discount anything at this point.

38:52Donald Trump has said, well, what if I just put an aircraft carrier off the coast? And everyone saw this aircraft carrier, what would the reaction be? The Cuban government is certainly planning for this. Ever since the Biggs invasion, they've spent decades telling people an invasion is coming. People stopped believing in it until now. They're taking preparations. They called the war of the entire populace, sort of a Vietnam style resistance where they arm everybody and they're putting people through military training. Every week they release videos of kind of the latest provincial action. You look at some of the weapons they're using, they are older than either of us.

39:33They are, you know, early, early days of the Cuban Revolution, weapons that came from the Soviet Union. There was one video where they're pulling an anti-aircraft weapon with oxen. So, you know, it is not a pretty picture when you match the military might of the United States up against what remains of the Cuban military, which used to be one of the strongest in the region, but has fallen on hard times like anything else here. And I think there's just a general apathy. Whereas before, you know, Fidel Castro was this young leader who was so inspirational. There's no figure like that today. More and more you hear people say, let's just get it over with.

40:11If we're going to happen, let it happen tomorrow so the suffering can end and we can begin to rebuild this country and Cuban exiles could come back and reinvest and people would see some change and last in their lifetimes. I think what's more More likely is the slow squeeze, which you mentioned. Just wait for them to completely run out of power, cause mass protests to take place if that's still possible. Because, of course, you know, as long as the military and the police are loyal to the government, protests really don't seem to have a chance here. But I think if you got to a point where the power is off and just stayed off and we're getting very close to that point, the power is off most of the time now.

40:51So if you got to a point where these aging Soviet era power plants just died or had no fuel to power them anymore, then that could be the moment where the Trump administration, you know, obviously trying to please the Cuban-American vote that has been so supportive of Donald Trump and helped Marco Rubio become the first Cuban-American secretary of state. Someone who, you know, this is his issue his entire life. He's been one of the fiercest opponents to the communist government here. And so you talk to people in Miami and whether they're right or wrong, they think this is the moment. This is as close as they've ever come to to bringing down the government.

41:35and they would not be satisfied with a Venezuela-type solution that leaves somebody in power who's a former regime official or would sort of keep a similar type government in power here. They want Eastern Europe full collapse. I think everyone could end up getting disappointed here because how do you do that without putting troops on the ground? I think it would be very, very difficult. At the end of the day, the power structure that's here, it's the only people, They're the only people that still know how to run this country, make things work. They can restore order if they need to. So I think that would be the sanest way out of what otherwise could be the collapse of a country is finding somebody in the government, like Delcio Rodriguez, is more willing to make deals.

42:23At this point, the negotiations have not gone anywhere. The government has been very resistant to the idea of you don't get to tell us who leads our country, what our internal policies are going to be. They think they can outweigh and outlast the Trump administration. And they've done it up until now with every other administration that's come before them. So they think we'll arm our people, we'll get ready for an invasion, and we'll call Trump's bluff. But they may be making a historic error here. um cuba has historically used emigration to the united states both as a safety valve for the regime and also as a kind of weapon like in the mariel boat lift of 1980 where the united states wanted a few thousand people released and the cubans allowed hundreds of thousands of people to come overwhelming the city of miami um is the trump administration has closed that safety valve and in fact sent people back what have been the implications for cuban society and for florida of the end of that emigration pathway.

43:17And I've covered some of those deportation flights, which despite the tensions are still taking place. Of course, there's many more Cubans that could be deported than the government here is willing to accept. But you do speak to people. And sometimes there are people who had families in the U.S. or married to U.S. citizens. And then like so many other cases we've heard in other countries, they get picked up and days later, they're back here in a country they hadn't been to in years. and really the lowest economic point in anyone's memory. So that's very disrupting. Cubans, of course, in South Florida got used to this idea that we're not migrants, we're refugees, we're exiles, and we have this special status.

44:00You know, this could come back to hurt Trump in Florida because it's been shocking for Cubans, both here and there, to see deportations, to see the end of these policies that allowed them to come, basically anyone who wanted to come to the U.S. from Cuba could. And that's no longer the case. But what you've heard Cuban-American leadership tell their constituents is this is an administration, the Trump administration, that is going to go farther, has already gone farther. I mean, they've indicted Raul Castro than any other administration in the past has. And our ultimate goal has to be the complete upheaval of communism taking back our country.

44:38And so it's worth it. And it's worth it for us. You know, if this is part of the strategy, then it's worth it. And I think as well, people were seeing a different class of Cuban come in recent years, and they would get residency in the US and immediately come back here and send more money here, come here on vacations. They were not the traditional exiles and said, I'll never return until the Calaisers are gone. And so I think that generational shift really struck the hard-aligned people in a way that they said, these are not really our allies. They have a different view of the government. They can't imagine a Cuba without the government.

45:20And so people would leave and then they would immediately come back and sort of set up businesses here, invest in the island, which is, of course, they would say is the rightest Cubans. But But the hard line elements in Miami, which is at the end of the day where the political power is, where the money is, they are looking at this and saying we are as close as we ever have been. And the economic opportunities in a free Cuba would be tremendous in terms of tourism, in terms of infrastructure. But to get that, it can't be kind of this half step towards economic freedom. We need a full economic opening.

45:57And, of course, it's been such a mixed message from Washington. But the one consistent thing you've heard from Trump is, you know, the economy has to open. Cuban Exiles need to be able to come back and invest freely and not have this kind of treatment the Cuban government gives any foreign investor, but particularly Cuban American investors, which is you have to partner with us. It's kind of a 50-50 proposition. We can take it away from you whenever we want. We can change the rules on you in the middle of the game. At any point, we can take back the property because you don't really own it. There needs to be full property ownership is what the Trump administration says.

46:35They need to open up the economy, particularly to Cuban-Americans coming back. They need to have some sort of special status. And the government's stranglehold in the economy here needs to end. And that's something the government so far has really resisted. And the counterproposals have fallen far short of what the Trump administration, in particular Marco Rubio, who knows the system here inside and out, are demanding. And so that's where negotiations really have not been successful, because the Trump administration is basically negotiating with a gun to their head here. And the government here is saying, you know, you can pull the trigger, but we're not going to blink.

47:11were, you know, the thing they yell after every speech here is, patria muerte, fatherland or death. And a lot of people still claim to mean that, that they're willing to die for their government. You know, hopefully it won't come to that, but you wonder if it does, you know, like in Venezuela, do people have a change of opinion once the bombs start falling? I don't know. You know, they've had a long, long time here. People are very indoctrinated, but they also love their country and they don't want to go back to sort of being a plaything of the U.S. you know all the suffering and sacrifice has had to be for something and and just a kowtow and bow to the u.s uh would kind of be an ignominious end to the revolution um that uh is still you know raul castor is 95 but he still seems to be the one who's making uh calling the shots here as the ultimate authority and and for someone like him at the end of his life to betray his brother's revolution and political movement it doesn't seem to be in the cards the reporting in the United States about Cuba, or the commentary, often suggests that there is tremendous resentment in Cuba of the exiles and an unwillingness to see them return and reinvest and maybe try to reclaim things that used to belong to them.

48:23And underneath this, and this point is sometimes hinted at, sometimes made more specifically, Cuba was for a long time a slave society. It was a slave society for a generation longer even than the United States remained a slave society. And while the The Cuban revolutionary elite is very European in origin. Just look at the Castro brothers. That one way to describe what happened in Cuba was the people who got out and came to Florida and did well tended to be either descendants of the slave owners or in some ways working for the slave system. And the people who got trapped behind and who are now the impoverished mass of the remaining Cuban population are the descendants of the slave population or those who intermarried with the slave population.

49:03and there's this racial angle that creates enormous resentment, fear, tension, anger, hate between the descendants of the exiles and the descendants of those who remain behind. What do you think of that line of commentary? How much truth is it? Or are people so desperate now that they would welcome anything that came back and offered them a way to a better life? I think people are more desperate than they've ever been in their lives. And I always say that The smartest thing any invading army could do here would be to distribute food and not drop bombs because that is something the government is unable to do.

49:39But backing up, you're absolutely right. The people who left in the first years of the revolution were lighter skinned. They came to the U.S. and did very, very well in a way migrants usually don't do. But these were very educated people. They were doctors. They were people who owned banks in Cuba. Some of them left with resources. Other people left with clothes on the backs, like my mother-in-law is Cuban. They left with what they had in their suitcases, but they did very well because their father was an architect and was able to teach in the U.S. But that was one of the selling points that Fidel Castro had is, you know, for the poor people, for the people who were descendants of slaves, you know, you had nothing.

50:21Many times you lived in rural communities that didn't have electricity. And, you know, we've educated you. We give you electricity. We've given you social mobility. But that's a distant memory at this point, I think, for most people. And, yes, you do talk to people in their sort of 70s and 80s and they have some memory. But certainly, you know, you watch any old movie with a Cuban and they're just shocked by how better things looked then. how there was no trash in the streets, how the streets weren't broken, how buildings weren't collapsing, how this was one of the richest societies in Latin America.

50:56And yes, you had a huge disparity in income. But now, you know, you have a 1 % here that are in the government or connected to the government, and you have a 99 % here approaching levels of poverty that are just as bad, perhaps, as we saw before the revolution. And so I think right now, if you're hungry, and you have no power in your house, and perhaps you have no water in your house, which is a very big problem here, you're not blaming on the U.S. because these are issues that have been such a long time coming. And the Cuban government does blame everything on the embargo. And they certainly have a case that a lot of the problems here are a result of that, but not all of the problems.

51:39And I think one of their errors has always been to blame everything on the embargo. and I think people have kind of gotten fed up with that excuse and you can't constantly point to what life was, how terrible life was like before the revolution because even the leadership or even supporters of the revolution are old enough to remember it. They know that there were things here that were better than. But I think what the biggest thing has been is you have so many people that have left in recent years. Some people say 20 % of the population and they are connected, of course, to the internet. And more importantly, people are connected here to the internet in a way they haven't been.

52:15And they're shocked when Cubans leave and they go to Mexico, which is a country they've always been told is a poor country. And they see how much better things are there. Or they go to Brazil, or they go to Spain. Of course, so many people here have Spanish descendants because Spain was the economic basket case and people are coming here because it was a richer country up until the revolution. And so they go to these countries and they can show their relatives here what life was like in these countries where they've only ever heard bad things about these countries and they see that's not the case.

52:43And I think people here kind of feel like they've been lied to by the government for so long. They don't believe anything anymore. That's a problem when you lose credibility. You don't believe anything that you're told anymore, whether it's true or not. And people are online. I know people are supporters of the government. And the first thing they do is read Excel websites every day about Cuba because they don't feel the government tells them the truth about anything anymore. And so So all media on this island is state-run media. The message is the same across. There's no real debate. There's no real coming out and saying anything different than what the government tells them to do.

53:21And people joke about all the things to do with the newspaper here other than read it, whether it's toilet paper or ratfish in it. I just had one of my kids' birthdays, and we made a paper mache pinata out of a lot of my old copies of grandma that we keep at the office. but no one really reads it anymore. And so they're getting their information from outside of Cuba, which tends to focus on how mismanaged the government is, how completely sort of frozen in time they are. But I think the main thing is people see a relative who, like them, was struggling and they really leave. And Cubans are very creative, hardworking people, and they do very well outside of Cuba.

54:02And so then the question is, well, why can't they have that same success inside of Cuba. And I think the answer again and again, you know, is to blame the government for the severe, severe restrictions they've put on their own people that for whatever reason, they, you know, only are now beginning to talk about lifting. But this is something they could have done a long time ago that would have really helped lift so many people out of poverty. And they've just been so reluctant to do. Last question, or it's a double-barreled one. How long do you intend to spend in Cuba yourself? How much more of your career do you intend to devote to the island?

54:37And do you imagine that when that time comes, that the regime will still be there or that Cuba will be something different? I would like to see a change here because, you know, during the Obama years where the U.S. opened up, Cuba didn't open up as much, but at least it took away the excuse of the embargo is to blame for everything. And you saw a very short lived Cuban spring where businesses were open up. People were particularly artists doing politically charged things that the government didn't know how to react to. You had Cubans moving back here with some of the know how they picked up from living abroad.

55:12and really changing things in a way that people have never seen here in their lifetimes. And you just breathe an air that you don't anymore. And so I would like to get back to that however we can. And certainly I would not like to see my country, the U.S., attack the country that I've chosen to live in most of my life. I don't know. It doesn't make sense to be here anymore on a rational level. And yet, you know, ration is left. I love this country. I want to see it have a better future. Hopefully that will come sooner rather than later, one that doesn't involve violence, preferably, you know, if the government could open up.

55:51And certainly you would like to see a place where people can pick their leadership, know what their leadership stands for, have elections with more than one candidate. I think we can all agree, you know, no democracy is perfect, but that is a better way to pick to pick your leaders, have a sense of what they're for, have real political debates. And so this is really the most interesting moment, the hardest moment, but the most interesting moment that I can ever remember living in Cuba, having spent so much of my life and now most of my career here. So I want to see what happens next. I have friends here the same way their families have left.

56:28They're having a very difficult time. They could leave and they say, I want to see what happens next. I know from people who've left that then write me every day, what's going on, what's happening, and they want to know. I also know that there could come a point here where it just doesn't make sense, or I can't do my job here. And at that point, I don't think I'd be doing anyone any favors by being here. But as you mentioned, CNN has had remarkable luck and fortitude by lasting out the correspondents before me as well, who spent difficult years here as well. And so I'm sort of carrying the torch for that.

57:02And Ted Turner was the one who opened up our our bureau here. And so I would like to see it through. And we have that luxury and that privilege of telling people what's happening in Cuba as best as we can. And so I would like to continue doing so for as long as I can. Patrick Ottman, thank you so much for being the world's eyes and ears into Cuba. Such a difficult place to work. Your work is so important. And we're all so grateful for it. Thank you for joining me today on The David Fromm Show. Well, thank you. Appreciate the onwards.

57:40A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer Charlie Worzel onto the David Frum show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think, and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time.

58:17It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.

58:28Logging off. Rebuilding our attention spans. Trading in smartphones for dumb phones. Why are people trying to get off their screens? And what are they really after? I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. And I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're exploring the often fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology. And examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much to Patrick Oppmann for joining me today on The David Fromm Show.

59:03As mentioned at the top of the show, my literary discussion this week will be the play Othello by William Shakespeare. The play came to mind because I happened to see a very powerful and emotional performance of the play this past weekend at Washington, D.C.'s Shakespeare Theatre Company. If you have a chance to go, I strongly recommend it. The title role is played by Wendell Pierce. Othello is a play that drives home a message that I often think about when engaging with ancient literature, which is that by engaging with plays written before our time, we can emancipate ourselves, forcibly emancipate ourselves, from some of the trammels of living in our time and escape some of the habits of mind that make us very conventional in our thinking and open the way to broader thoughts.

59:47Now, I assume everybody knows the plot of Othello. The great general, He's a moor from the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. He has found himself in Venice after many harrowing adventures, including a spell and servitude. He is accepted by the Venetians. They make him commander of their armies, and they welcome him into the homes of powerful people. But they don't quite want him marrying their daughters. Nevertheless, Othello and the daughter of an important senator fall in love, Othello and Desdemona. They get married, and the play commences just after their marriage as Othello succumbs to pangs of jealousy, fanned by his aide Iago, who motivated for reasons that are actually kind of obscure, motivated by reasons that are kind of obscure, is determined to destroy Othello and Desdemona alike.

1:00:33He succeeds in igniting Othello's jealousy to the point where Othello murders Desdemona. And indeed, by the end of the play, about four people are dead on stage, someone else is dying offstage, and there are a couple of wounded men bleeding. It is quite a pileup of carnage at the end of the act. Now, one of the problems with the production of Othello, if you're a director or an actor who has to work with it, is that the material with which Iago has to work to get Othello to the point of murderous jealousy is pretty flimsy. The plot turns on the mystery of a handkerchief that Othello gives to Desdemona.

1:01:05Desdemona loses it, or it's stolen from her. Iago then plants the handkerchief in the lodging of another man, and with that, he convinces Othello that his wife has been massively and serially unfaithful to him to the point of murder. It's not a very good plot contrivance. It's so notoriously bad that one 17th century critic of the play said the moral of the play was, ladies, look to your linen. If you lose an handkerchief, you could be dead. So if you're a director or actor working your way through this problem, you've got, it seemed to me, on my way home, three solutions, three exits to the problem of the flimsiness of the plot leading to these calamitous consequences.

1:01:44One is to emphasize Iago, the guileful, insinuating convincingness of this malicious supervillain who works on Othello to the point where any reasonable man would be deceived and fooled and worked into a rage that can lead to such a catastrophe. So exit one, emphasize Iago the supervillain. Exit two is to de-emphasize the heroism of Othello and to say, you know what, maybe Iago wasn't a supervillain. maybe Othello was primed and ready to be worked into a murderous rage. There was something wrong with him, a crack on the inside that just the first encounter with outward pressure could snap and destroy.

1:02:24And the third exit from the plot is to work a little bit of tension with the written lies in the play and to make Desdemona a more seductive and tempting character than maybe Shakespeare wrote her to be. To play her in ways that give Othello some reason to inspire his jealousy and thus to set the plot in motion. So Iago the supervillain working on Othello, Othello the flawed hero easily worked upon, or Desdemona the flirtatious woman about whom a man could have such suspicions. But the problem with all of these exits is they touch powerful pain points in our modern outlook and habit of mind. If you make Iago the supervillain, you sort of make Othello the more rather dim and gullible.

1:03:08And that's kind of working on some stereotypes that are uncomfortable. If you make Othello a flawed hero who is easily manipulated, well, that suggests that he's kind of emotional and irrational and excitable. And that plays on some stereotypes. And of course, if you make Desdemona flirty and seductive, then you're suggesting what? She deserved it. She was asking for it. She brought it upon herself. That is also uncomfortable. These discomforts are so intense that one of the great actors who's played the part of Othello. Hugh Karshi, a British black actor, gave a lecture in 1998 suggesting that as a black actor, he would want to not do Othello at all.

1:03:46He gave a lecture in which he said, I am left with a nagging doubt. If a black actor plays Othello, does he not risk making racial stereotypes seem legitimate and even true? When a black actor plays a role written for a white actor in black makeup and for a predominantly white audience, does he not encourage the white way, or rather the wrong way, of looking at black men, namely that black men, or Moors, are over-emotional, excitable, and unstable. And Hugh Karshi concludes, of all the parts in the canon, the Shakespeare canon, perhaps Othello is the one which should most definitely not be played by a black actor.

1:04:22And despite this, 17 years later, Karshi took the role himself and did play it at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he had the ingenious idea of pairing the Moor Othello with a black actor playing Iago so that both the protagonists themselves, both the emotional one, the one who was worked upon, and the one who does the working, were challenged the stereotypes together. But as you think about these stereotypes and expectations, here's the thought that came to me again on the rest of the way home, that maybe the problem isn't the play. Maybe the problem is the audience. And maybe the problem is that as we grapple with the three exits from the dilemma of the flimsiness of the proof, the supervillainous Iago, the flawed Othello, or the flirtatious Desdemona, that the reason we don't readily put our hand on any of the doorknobs to those exits is because we are so fearful of the prejudices in ourselves that we don't want to see a logical exit from the dilemma that might in any way appeal to the prejudices which are in us, and maybe not in the play, and maybe not in Shakespeare's mind, but in our minds.

1:05:25And as we confront why is this plot so difficult and how do we get out of it, we are forced to confront why am I uncomfortable? What is wrong with me that I am uncomfortable with the literary solution to a logical problem of human psychology? Maybe I need to look not to change the play, but to change myself. These plays long predate us and long outlast us. They are produced under social conditions very different from our own, and they'll continue to be watched under social conditions very different from our own. And that reminds us that we ourselves, we're the accidental and contingent factor here, and that maybe the things that we believe and so strongly fear and so strongly believe to be true, maybe those are just passing shadows too, and that we are ourselves products of a society that will change after we are gone and that was changed before we arrived.

1:06:17Before saying goodbye, I need to make a correction to two mistakes I made in last week's program. The interview with David Blight, where we talked about the 14th Amendment and my preliminary monologue about Brexit. I made a mistake in the Brexit segment where I said that Norway was a member of the European Customs Union, but not the European single market. In fact, it was the other way around. I should have said that Norway is a member of the European single market, but not a member of the Customs Union. I just misread my notes, glancing up and down. I have no excuse. It was correct in the notes.

1:06:52I bungled it, and I apologize. And to the astute experts on Norwegian participation in the European Union, thank you for bringing this mistake to my attention. The second mistake I made, I made without notes, and this one is really inexcusable, that at a couple of points in the discussion with David Blight, I said that it took two-thirds of the states to ratify a constitutional amendment in the United States Constitution. In fact, it takes two-thirds votes in both the House of Representatives in the United States Senate, and then ratification by three quarters of the states. And again, I have no excuse for that mistake, and I regret my error.

1:07:23And thanks to the many people who brought that mistake to my attention, I winced with every repetition because, of course, I don't know how I made it, the mistake. It's just a reminder of the danger of speaking rather than writing. And I thank everyone who brought it to my attention. That's it for this week's program. Thanks to Patrick Oppmann for joining me today. Thanks to all of you for watching and for listening. Remember, if you're minded to support the program, the best way to do so is by subscribing to The Atlantic, where you see all the work of all of my colleagues. Please consider sharing and subscribing to this program on whatever platform you use.

1:07:56Thanks so much for watching and listening to The David Fromm Show. See you next week. Bye-bye.

1:08:25This episode of The David Fromm Show was produced by Nathaniel Fromm and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew Edwards. Claudine Abad is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Baldez is our managing editor. Logging off, rebuilding our attention spans, trading in smartphones for dumb phones. Why are people trying to get off their screens? And what are they really after? I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. And I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're exploring the often fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology.

1:09:06and examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.