Is Cuba Trump’s Next Target?

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0:56This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Since the beginning of this year, President Trump has turned sharply from his promised focus on domestic issues, America first, to a series of foreign military adventures that have shocked many of his own supporters and much of the world. In January, there was the invasion of Venezuela and the seizure of its president, Nicolas Maduro. Then came the threatened invasion of Greenland. And now there's a war with Iran that has engulfed the Middle East, killed many hundreds of people, and threatens the entire global economy.

1:41And yet no sooner was the bombing of Iran underway that Trump and some of his allies began teasing a new move. Taking Cuba, that'd be a good honor. That's a big honor. Taking Cuba. Taking Cuba, in some form, yeah. Taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it, I think I can do anything I want with it. You want to know the truth. They're a very weakened nation right now. The U.S. has effectively shut off Cuba's oil supply, and the electrical grid had a near-total blackout last week. New Yorker staff writer John Lee Anderson has been to Cuba countless times in his career, and his most recent trip followed the invasion of Venezuela.

2:27I spoke with John Lee Anderson this past week. John Lee, the Trump administration, has recently said that the president of Cuba, Miguel Diaz-Canel has to step down. So let's start there. Who is Diaz-Canel? What's his role in the regime? And what would ousting him even accomplish? Diaz-Canel is the handpicked successor to Raul Castro. He's a party apparatchik. He was a provincial party chief. And he has served, how shall I put this, creditably as the face of the ongoing regime. And he's not had an easy time of it. There's been, as we know, a huge economic downturn in Cuba, et cetera, the falling apart of relations in Trump one and now Trump two.

3:19Biden did nothing during his four years to alter the things in Cuba, for better or worse. So, Diaz-Canel is a kind of, yeah, he's a working stiff, really, and doesn't have a huge amount of respect for the population, but nor is he seen as particularly evil. He's seen as the front man for the regime, which continues to be controlled from behind the curtains by the elderly Raul Castro and his family. So Raul Díaz-Canel, you know, he won his re-election three years ago. So he has two to go. He has to leave office in April 2028. He won his re-election. To give you an idea of the kind of politics on the island, under the slogan of continuidad, continuity, which, you know, doesn't appeal to people under 30 years old.

4:10And, you know, he's uninspiring. But uninspiring, the description you've given me when we've talked on the phone and in your coming piece about Cuba is of a Cuba in desperate straits. People are leaving and leaving and leaving. The streets are filled with garbage. That's right. There's blackouts all the time. The economy is in desperate straits. Events in Venezuela and elsewhere could not have been all that encouraging. So continuity seems a kind of a grim way to put it. Yeah, exactly. But you have to put into context that this is a regime that presents itself as the revolutionary continuation, which includes notions of sacrifice.

4:59In a way, there's analogies here to Iran, right? This idea of sacrifice, a common enemy, you know, the Yankee imperialist empire just there over the sea as ever oppressing us. You know, increasing numbers of Cubans don't believe that anymore, but they have little agency to alter the situation. And Díaz-Canel, you know, always succeeds in disappointing. He even defers, almost as if Raul Castro was the supreme leader, you know, as Iranian presidents do. So back to your part of your first question, you know, what does it do to remove him? Zip, because he has no real power. But I think for someone like Trump, you know, he's, well, as we know, he's rather simplistic.

5:46So he thinks we got rid of Maduro and now it's mine, Venezuela's mine. If we get Diaz-Canel out of there, it'll look good because he's the top guy. I have to say, though, John Lee, the war with Iran is not going particularly well. It's chaotic. The rationale for it has never really been explained coherently. The entire Middle East is in a state of chaos. us. Yeah. How do Cubans perceive this situation where the American president in the midst of all this gets up and rather blithely starts talking about regime change through the good agencies of the United States in Cuba? I think that the quagmire of the U.S.

6:30in the Middle East, because of the Iran war right now, plays into the hands of the Cubans that are having to negotiate their survival or whatever with the Americans. They have, you know, a few days of oil supplies left. The Americans have been blockading them ever since they captured Maduro on the 3rd of January and not been allowing any other energy supplies to come into Cuba for the government's use. So they're in the sort of 14th round and it kind of gets the ropes here. They have to figure out how to get the Americans to give them some fuel. And of course, there's a front end, which is, you know, as we've heard through leaks, Marco Rubio basically wants an economic opening.

7:10He's not going for regime change, but a kind of Maduro-like thing where they find a del-sea and its regime kind of succession, stabilization. They don't want chaos in Cuba. But the tail end of that, of any package they are going to try to force the Cubans to agree to, will include some kind of notional political succession or transformation. The Cubans are very unlikely to agree to that because that would mean negotiating themselves out of existence. And as people on an island, they have nowhere to go. So they won't face bombs or guns like the Iranians are right now. It'll be more, we think, more like Venezuela.

7:48But these are people who have spent the last nearly 70 years conjuring up strategists to survive American strategies of containment, outright hostility, attacks, and usually bested them, and also negotiations. So if I'm them, I'm thinking to myself, the Americans have gotten themselves into a mess over there. This plays to us. So let's spin out the negotiations. Let's do some economic concessions, which we're already seeing talk about. but let's tread water on the political thing. You've been to Cuba a million times over your life. You wrote a terrific biography of Che Guevara and you've made two especially recent trips to Cuba, one in May and one in the wake of the invasion of Venezuela, much more recently.

8:36Just give me a sense of what it's like to walk around and be in Havana and other cities and towns in Cuba compared to previous trips? What's it like? Oh, gosh. I mean, look, since 2021, there's been an exodus. Nobody knows exactly, but anywhere up to 20 % of the population have left. That's incredible. It is incredible. And of course, it's an island. People have to pay to leave. And therefore, you can imagine if it had land borders, how many more would have left? Maybe similar to Venezuela, where about a third of the population has left over 10 years, right? Because of economic collapse, but primarily young people and anybody with skills.

9:20So you might be a doctor with a heart cardiac specialist in Havana, and you end up pushing some, you know, ancient person around Miami in a care home, you know, and that's the kind of, or driving an Uber somewhere. And that's kind of what's happened to a lot of Cubans. So when I first went back, I hadn't been in a while, I was struck by the emptiness of Cuba. And I went to Havana and three other towns in the interior. And everything was just empty. There was no people. I really felt the exodus. And, you know, I visited old friends. You know, the friends I have are mostly quite old people now. Some have died, some have left, their kids have left.

10:02Many of them are being sustained by the remittances their kids can send for wherever they're living, Spain. the United States. And the houses around them are empty and also inhabited in some cases by also elderly people because their kids and grandkids have left as well. When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a period that Cuba really struggled because they had been subsidized and propped up by the Soviet government. And then the Venezuelans stepped into the breach, and there was a relationship there that helped Cuba get from day to day. That's right. How is Cuba getting by at all? What's the economy?

10:44Yeah, I mean, I lived there during that period, David, in the early 90s, when the Soviet, you know, rug was pulled out from them. And, you know, people went from driving cars to riding bicycles. And in the countryside, they went from tractors, literally, to oxen. And the average Cuban lost, I don't know how much of their body weight. And there was a lot of suicide. And it was bad. It was bad when I was there in the early 90s. Then, as you said, Venezuela stepped in. Chavez and Fidel formed this Hugo Chavez, the late Venezuelan wannabe, really acolyte of Fidel Castro. And they did this oil for expertise deal.

11:21So, you know, Venezuelan oil that began, this was 25 years ago, for Cuban expertise in everything from, you know, doctors to teachers to sports instructors and, of course, intelligence and military security guys. And that's what's ended with Maduro. So, comparing that period of the early 90s following the Soviet implosion to the period now, there are differences, but also many similarities. These long blackouts. For instance, just yesterday, the national grid collapsed for the umpteenth time in Cuba. The whole electric grid went down in Cuba for how long? Yeah. I don't know exactly, but sometimes back in, I think it was October of last year, it went on for almost a week.

12:07You can't get gasoline for love or money. And some people with dollars on the black market find ways, of course. But basically, there is no fuel. They haven't received any in three months. So that's disappearing. John Lee, what does somebody like Marco Rubio, who seems so influential when it comes to Cuba policy and the Trump administration, what does he want? What are these negotiations with the Cubans about? out. The package, as I understand it, that the Americans want, start with a sweetener. That is to say, you open up economically to investors, be nice to private enterprise, which will help you anyway, and will allow us to sort of invest and da-da-da, and make money, and we will start to allow fuel in.

12:57Or it might even be, we will sell you the Venezuelan fuel you used to get for free, And then you'll owe us. So the point, what they're trying to do is basically make Cuba a dependency of the United States in the same way that Venezuela is now a neo-dependency. And this new imperialism has Trump's name all over it. Yesterday when he talked, he was like, I can do whatever I want with it. He didn't say we, the United States. He said I. It's all about him. Is there any way in the world you envision a better future? What would have to happen? There does have to be a shift by the party. You know, it's, look.

13:37In Cuba, the communist party. In Cuba, yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, look, yes, you do have to have joint ventures. You already have an entrepreneurial class in Cuba. So there's already an island-wide networks of conspiracies evading state control, right? So you need to legalize that. You need to bring it out to the surface. Cubans are incredibly resourceful people. as they've had to be. And, you know, like people everywhere, they want to live good lives. They want to make money. So you might as well get over yourself and let them do that. But that means that's the end of the ideology and which is already at the end of its rope.

14:14But it's also the end of the Communist Party, inevitably, no? I would think so. Yeah. Yeah. The fact that it's remained as long as it has has to do with the fact, I think, a lot of it's geographic. The fact that it's an island. You know, it's just harder to change things on an island. However, this could be tougher than the Americans think. Even Rubio, whom I think has adopted, interestingly, a more sophisticated policy approach with both the Nazis and Cuba than I would have expected. But it's got this imperialist kind of veneer, which one wonders, really, is that going to work forever? This idea of making countries dependencies in this new era, will it last beyond Trump?

14:59And I think that they may be, as we've seen with Iran, the Iran intervention, you know, this arrogance, a hubris, a kind of denialism about history and human nature and a lack of knowledge about other countries and their past. And so quite apart from whether or not the Cuban Communist Party goes down the ditch, I don't think there'll be too many lamentations about it in Cuba, there will still be residual nationalism that's going to rear its head. And at some level, it may well cause these negotiations to be difficult, more than difficult, and strung out over time. And on the one hand, the Cubans who are having to do these negotiations are looking at Iran and they're thinking, the Americans are in this quagmire.

15:45This benefits us. On the other hand, they're thinking, we've got to get some energy supplies somewhere here. So they're going to go into this like maybe a canny poker player. And they're handicapped because of the fuel thing. But on the other hand, they may have some resources that the Americans can't see right now. And one of those resources, it may sound paradoxical, is the fact that, you know, there's already been some protests and some unrest on the island. That could spread further. Yes, that threatens the regime, of course, but they have the ability to suppress most of it. However, it's also a threat to the United States because if chaos begins in Cuba and the people they want to stabilize it, i.e.

16:26the remnants of the Communist Party and the military, you know, are incapable of controlling that chaos. You have chaos not, you know, not 700 or 800 miles away, as is Haiti, you know, but 90 miles away. And you could be seeing, you know, a re-immigration flood to the United States if there's real chaos on the island. John Lee Anderson, thanks so much. Thank you, David.

16:53You can read John Lee Anderson on Cuba at newyorker.com. And you can subscribe to The New Yorker there as well, newyorker.com. In a moment, I'll be joined by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of Cuba, Ada Ferrer. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

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20:52This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We're talking today about the United States and Cuba and the Trump administration's threats lately of a takeover there. Trump would certainly not be the first president to intervene in Cuba. America's troubled relationship with the island goes back centuries. To get a clearer view of the relationship, I spoke with the historian Ada Ferrer, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2022 book, Cuba, An American History. Ferrer herself left Cuba as a small child, coming to the United States with her mother back in 1963, when Castro's regime was arguably at its peak.

21:32I spoke with Ada Ferrer this week about what a military campaign would mean to Cubans and to the large Cuban-American population in Florida and beyond. So Ada, Donald Trump said this about his intentions toward Cuba. It may be a friendly takeover. It may not be a friendly takeover. It wouldn't matter because they're down to, as they say, fumes. That's what President Trump has said. How do you react to a statement like that? Well, they are down to fumes. He's assuming there's a difference between a friendly takeover and an unfriendly takeover. In my opinion, there's no such thing as a friendly takeover of Cuba.

22:14And if you know any Cuban history and any history of the relationship between the two countries, you can't listen to those words and not cringe. John Lee Anderson was just there for us and is about to publish a piece about what he saw and what he heard. And it's pretty desperate. My guess is that you speak to people there as best you can. But tell me what it's like. It feels total. You know, it's just, there's a sense of hopelessness, of, there's a complete lack of confidence that the current government in Cuba can find a solution to anything. and it's affecting every realm of daily life. And it's gotten worse since Trump has cut off the shipments of oil to Cuba.

23:19It's gotten a lot worse over the last three months, but it was already devastating. You already had hospitals, parts of which were crumbling, literally. I know someone in Cuba, this was in December of 24, who needed hip surgery because she fell and broke her hip. The family had to provide the prostheses. They had to buy it on the underground market themselves because the hospital couldn't provide it. They had to provide medicine. They had to bring sheets. They had to bring food. The other thing they had to provide was blood because the hospital could not keep stores of blood. The government can't even pick up garbage, and that was true even before, right?

24:06So there's a sense in which there's a lot of basic services that they can't provide. The responsibility for that failure is at the feet of the Cuban government, at the feet of the United States. Where do you place it? Both. The Cuban people are so desperate right now that they are much less interested in the question of who's to blame. In some ways, they don't quite care who's to blame. They just want something to change. So I think that's the mood right now. In terms of what I think, the U.S. embargo is a policy that has harmed the Cuban economy. There's no question about that, right? From the very beginning, it denied Cuba access to its major and natural market, right, 90 miles away.

24:52Cuba turned to the Soviet Union and found salvation there, right? But in some sense, it never became an economically independent nation. It relied on the Soviet Union for decades. The Soviet Union collapsed. It sent the Cuban economy into a tailspin. And then Venezuela stepped in with oil, right? But there's no saviors anymore. If you look at what the Cuban government has been investing in over the last years, there's tremendous investment in the tourist industry, but remarkably surprisingly little in things like agriculture or infrastructure or even education, health, and so on. So they've made decisions that have contributed to the current crisis.

25:46The state of Florida and its politics has been for years influenced by Cuban Americans. Right. And the usual stereotype of that is that they're quite conservative, especially on this issue. Mm-hmm. Are they still? Absolutely. I think a majority of Cuban Americans would welcome some kind of action by Trump and Rubio to force a change in Cuba. I think what many people don't think about when they think about Cuban-Americans is how diverse the community is, not politically necessarily, but in terms of when they arrive. So most Cuban-Americans, most Cuban-born people in Miami arrived in the very recent past.

26:32That means that they grew up in a communist society. They went to schools. They recited poems about Che Guevara or their parents did. They came out of that system. And this ongoing developing crisis over the, you know, in some ways over 30 years, but very, very, in an accelerated manner over the last five or six years. What that means is that the people who are eager, many of the people who are eager for that kind of action from Trump and Rubio, aren't these old Cuban Americans who lost property 60 years ago. It's people who had, you know, never had much property to be taken. And that also means that that distinction that's traditionally drawn between Cubans on the island and Cubans here is not quite as meaningful as it was decades ago.