Is Cuba Next? Inside Washington’s Push for Regime Change

0:00Vera Bergengruen:Legal teams face more data and more scrutiny than ever. They need AI built for both. Relativity is the AI platform for legal work, delivering defensible AI that handles the tedious tasks so judgment stays where it belongs, with you. Learn more at relativity.com forward slash WSJ.

0:21Vera Bergengruen:Hey, What's News listeners, it's Sunday, February 1st. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal, and this is What's News Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news by reaching out to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world. On today's show, after toppling Venezuela's leader, the Trump administration is now seeking regime change in Cuba by the end of the year. Today, we'll be looking at the dire economic situation Washington believes could drive the island to the breaking point. And what else is fueling the thinking in Washington that now is the right time to dislodge a communist government that has weathered decades of external pressure?

1:00Vera Bergengruen:Let's get right to it. Joining me today as we set our sights on Cuba are a pair of Wall Street Journal reporters fixated on America's power projection abroad. On the line from Mexico City is Jose de Cordoba. And with us from Washington, D.C. is Vera Bergengruen. Jose, let me start with you. We have all seen the footage of mid-century cars rolling down the beachfront in Havana. Probably an overused visual when it comes to understanding the economic situation, in particular in modern Cuba. Though maybe not totally unhelpful. What should we be focusing on when it comes to the island? Paint us a scene of what has been unfolding there.

1:39José De Córdoba:Well, Cuba is in its worst economic crisis, probably since it became an independent republic in 1902. Blackouts last in the provinces for 20 hours at a time. On top of that, you have huge scarcity of medicines, all kinds of goods and food. People have access to food only if they have access to dollars, which are sent from family members abroad. Also, it's been hit by these mosquito-borne illnesses that have affected a lot of the population.

2:15Vera Bergengruen:All right, Jose, things already bad and may be getting worse. And this is where we can connect the situation in Cuba to what has recently gone on in Venezuela.

2:24José De Córdoba:Things are getting bad and are likely to get much worse very quickly. The reason for that is that Cuba uses roughly 100 ,000 barrels of oil per day. It pumps about 40 ,000 barrels of oil a day, which goes directly into its power energy sector, into its energy plants. So that leaves a deficit of roughly 60 ,000 barrels per day. Venezuela has been providing about 35 ,000 barrels per day. So it's been making up about half of the deficit that Cuba has. Now, since the U.S. captured Maduro, no Venezuelan oil has been getting to Cuba. So there's much less electricity to go around. There's much less gasoline.

3:11José De Córdoba:There's much less fuel to go around. So the island could basically hit a wall in what experts think will be four weeks to eight weeks, depending on how much fuel Cuba has stored, which is not known.

3:25Vera Bergengruen:And Vera, you report that the economic vulnerability that Jose has been describing there is very much feeding into Washington's calculus here, thinking that maybe it can try to pick off Cuba's government now.

3:36Luke Vargas:That's right. I mean, everything that Jose has been laying out has been feeding into CIA and other U.S. intelligence assessments that the intelligence community puts together and briefs to President Trump, to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and they have been looking at all of this. But now what they're assessing as well is that not only is the economy close to collapse, but the government itself has never been this fragile. And so they really are trying to think of what else they could do since they have this goal, as we reported, of trying to force out this regime by the end of the year. And on top of that, Cuba has this longstanding program where it has overseas medical missions where they send doctors to work abroad and a lot of that money comes back.

4:17Luke Vargas:one of its most important sources of hard currency. And since the Trump administration came back into the White House, we've seen Rubio and some other officials really put pressure on that as well, on some Caribbean islands and others who hire these doctors. So they're really kind of looking at the whole picture and trying to see what other valves they can squeeze shut in order to really put the full weight of the US pressure on this government right now.

4:41Vera Bergengruen:Fascinating, though, as we've seen, for instance, in North Korea, it can sound easy to go after sources of hard currency, but actually accomplishing that can be a little bit like a game of whack-a-mole. And there's more than just an economic component to this effort as well. It sounds like inspiration is being drawn from how the Trump administration got rid of Maduro, sort of the political leadership angle of regime change.

5:03Luke Vargas:That's right. That's what Jose and I have really been trying to prod, because when you speak to Trump officials, you know, they're kind of riding high. They think that this operation to depose Maduro was very successful. They're working with what remains of the Maduro regime to prioritize getting oil, getting these resources. Trump, he feels like he's gotten a good deal. He exerted sharp but minimum military pressure to an extent and he got what he wanted. They're trying to find a similar model that they can apply to an extent in Cuba and see if there's people within the Cuban government working with them to produce some kind of deal that will eventually squeeze out this regime.

5:39Luke Vargas:When we actually ask what kind of deal, quote unquote, they're looking for, what could the Cuban government really offer? We haven't really gotten clear definitive answers on that, except for the government to just go away. Even if they were to squeeze out this government, what would come next? In Venezuela, they have a very particular model that's extractive. They're getting the oil. They're working with the remnants of this government. That would, for many reasons, just never work in Cuba. But for now, because they think that it was so successful, they are trying to emulate it, at least in the sense of finding people within the regime that they can talk to and then see what comes next.

6:12Vera Bergengruen:Fascinating. We've got to take a very short break. But when we come back, we'll look at some of those hurdles, Vera, that you were mentioning that could make U.S. efforts to orchestrate a leadership change in Cuba so difficult in the months, potentially years to come. Stay with us. Legal teams face more data and more scrutiny than ever. They need AI built for both. Relativity is the AI platform for legal work, delivering defensible AI that handles the tedious tasks so judgment stays where it belongs, with you. Learn more at relativity.com forward slash WSJ.

6:50And we're back.

6:51Vera Bergengruen:Jose, Vera there before the break was explaining that there is not yet a concrete plan for changing the government in Cuba. She noted a few times, Cuba is not Venezuela. And maybe the most notable thing that distinguishes them for the purposes of the conversation we're really having here is that Cuba's communist leaders have been around for decades. They have experience with withstanding U.S. efforts to bring an end to their rule.

7:13José De Córdoba:Yeah. As far as we can tell, there's no concrete plan that the U.S. has for affecting regime change. Cuba has been a totalitarian Stalinist state for almost as long as the Soviet Union was. People tend to forget that. There's no other political organization allowed in Cuba aside from the Communist Party, unlike Venezuela, which has a very robust opposition movement, which could put, you know, hundreds of thousands of people on the street and which won two presidential elections. In Cuba, there is no organized opposition because it's not allowed by law, and there's barely the shadow of a civil society at work.

7:57José De Córdoba:So it's a very different place. Also, Cubans have been living in this Stalinist system for almost 70 years. You know, the weight of that is huge. People, for the most part, all during that time, have chosen to emigrate rather than to try to form a political movement to challenge the government. In all that time, from 1959 to now, there's only been two days in which there were protests large enough to challenge the government. One was in 1994 in Havana called the Maleconazo, and the other one was just a couple of years ago in 2021. That shook the government because there were protests all over the island.

8:46José De Córdoba:Well, the government was able to put down both protests within a day. So the repressive capacity of the government is very high. I say, you know, that they're masters at managing poverty and administrating repression.

9:02Vera Bergengruen:I want to jump in on that because as Jose is presenting the situation, the state has, they're very good at putting down popular protest and people have instead voted with their feet, leaving the country as opposed to leading to some mass protest movement. But at least figuratively, this is not really a broad hearts and minds campaign. Putting yet more economic pressure on the islanders doesn't seem like it would really help in that respect. That's right.

9:28Luke Vargas:But again, I think one of the most interesting things is that it's unclear, even if they were to identify in with the Cuban government, what actually they would be asking of this person. And one of the really important differences with Venezuela is Venezuela, for a long time, despite having this particular government, a lot of its insiders had a lot of exposure to, especially through its oil industry, to lots of people. They had massive offshore accounts. They dealt with these big oil companies. They dealt with international officials. And they just had a very different exposure and understood how the world worked and a potential place for them in it in a way that the people who run Cuba's government are really loyalists.

10:06Luke Vargas:It's just hard to imagine from the people we've spoken to what's in it for them if they betray that. We don't really see a situation where they can stay in power for very long. It's much more of a binary than there is in Venezuela, where now they have this kind of pseudo capitalist holdover government.

10:24Vera Bergengruen:Though this is a big political holy grail, it sounds like the administration's thinking goes, something that has been desired by so many successive U.S. governments to see a change in leadership in Cuba, maybe now is the time. Worth giving it a shot, which brings me to my final question to both of you, starting with you, Vera. I mean, what should we be watching for to assess whether this U.S. effort is taking shape?

10:46Luke Vargas:Trump told people in his first term that he wanted to do something that President Kennedy in the 60s wasn't able to do, which was, you know, he sees it as part of his legacy. He sees it also as a really important part of his national security strategy. You know, both parties see Cuba as a malign actor, that its government is basically, everyone would be better off if it went away. And now that the U.S. government has trained so much of its attention on the Western Hemisphere, it's kind of with Venezuela going one way. It is the holy grail. It is this thing that they all really want to do. At the same time, I think there would be, depending on who you speak with, quite a bit of concern that if you really just squeeze this government and this economy to a catastrophic breaking point, it's going to create a humanitarian catastrophe.

11:30Luke Vargas:And from the perspective of Trump's base and from the Republicans, especially now that it's a midterm year, having to involve the U.S. even further in Cuba to basically stop it all from falling apart or to stop massive suffering is something they don't want to do. I think they're going to be a little careful about how much they actually want to involve the U.S.

11:50Vera Bergengruen:And Jose, to you, what will you be watching? I imagine it's kind of, you know, if the U.S. does further squeeze the Cuban economy, how do the people of Cuba react? And then I guess there's a question of do any of Cuba's friends, if we can call them that, Beijing, Moscow, stick out their necks to help the island?

12:05José De Córdoba:I think there's very little to expect from Cuba's friends, Russia and China. Russia is bogged down in the Ukraine war. They're really the only one of Cuba's friends who has oil to give. They've given oil very intermittently. China has no oil to give, and they are very commercial. Cuba is unable to pay them anything. And as for Mexico, the U.S. is pressuring Mexico right now to try to cut off oil, the oil that Mexico has been sending, which is a small amount. So from Cuba's friends, expect very little.

12:46Vera Bergengruen:And the Cuban people, they respond to U.S. pressure, and especially if the economy approaches the breaking point, maybe that the CIA thinks it could be nearing.

12:55José De Córdoba:I think Cuba's people are enormously fatigued. I don't see them going out into the streets and trying to overthrow the government. No one wants to be Fidel Castro's last victim. And at the same time, since now there's a lot of expectation that the U.S. is going to solve Q.S. problem, I think it's very possible that it would feed the passivity in the sense of they're just waiting for the United States to act. But for Q.S.'s future at this point, it's really what I see is a lot of despair, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of fear.

13:34Vera Bergengruen:That's the Journal's Jose de Córdoba in Mexico City. And joining us on the line from Washington, D.C., the Journal's Vera Bergen-Gruen. Jose, Vera, thank you both so much. You're very welcome. Great. Thanks for having us. Thank you. And that's it for What's News Sunday for February 1st. Today's show was produced by Hattie Moyer with supervising producers Sandra Killhoff and Melanie Roy. I'm Luke Vargas, and we'll be back tomorrow morning with a brand new show. Until then, thanks for listening.

14:07Vera Bergengruen:legal teams face more data and more scrutiny than ever they need ai built for both relativity is the ai platform for legal work delivering defensible ai that handles the tedious tasks so judgment stays where it belongs with you learn more at relativity.com forward slash wsj