Carlos Giménes, a US congressman, believes “this is not the time to blink; it’s time to finish the job”.
While we’re all distracted by the war on Iran, started to distract us from Venezuelan tyrant Nicolás Maduro, who was kidnapped to distract us from the brazen coverup of the Epstein Files, which will soon have to be unredacted to distract us from the sputtering US economy, Donald Trump has been eyeing a “friendly takeover” in Cuba.
If course, it isn’t friendly at all. If it happens, it will be, by any definition, a hostile takeover.
A couple of weeks ago, Trump followed his usual modus operandi by declaring a “national emergency” with respect to Cuba.
Nothing specific happened to bring about this “emergency”. Cuba was struggling along, run by its communist party, buckling under the weight of a 64-year-old US embargo that has achieved nothing, and presenting no new or unusual threat to the US mainland.
But that’s how Trump does business. Declare anything he feels is not in the interests of America a national emergency, which gives him extraordinary executive powers to bypass the legislature and rule by fiat.
Hostile act
In his recent executive order on Cuba, he threatened punitive tariffs on imports from any nation that supplies oil to Cuba, effectively cutting off the island’s fuel supply altogether. That order was not so subtly directed at Mexico, Cuba’s last main source of oil.
That order is also a hostile act. The word “friendly” can only be applied to it sarcastically.
The entire embargo against Cuba, whether justified or not, was hostile, intended to cripple its economy and restrict its ability to project power, either on its own behalf or on behalf of other world powers.
It is widely expected that the oil blockade will be the final nail in the coffin of the regime in Cuba, leaving the US free to extend its influence over one of the last communist holdouts in the Western Hemisphere.
Various statements suggest that Trump is convinced the US will not have to intervene militarily in order to topple the Cuban regime. It just has to be patient.
Carlos Giménes, a Republican congressman from Florida and himself a Cuban-born exile, believes that “Cuba is approaching its Berlin Wall moment,” and that the US must help to bring this about.
Opposing the embargo
This raises what I believe to be an important issue.
Despite condemning the Cuban regime (and South Africa’s official “solidarity” with that regime), I have long opposed the embargo on Cuba as a matter of policy.
That goes for any other sanctions that are motivated purely by the fact that a socialist or communist regime nationalised formerly private assets, like those on Venezuela.
I understand the desire to claw back at least some of the losses such policies cause, and the belief that economic pressure can (though it rarely does) bring about political change, but there is a bigger issue at play here.
When one raises the failures of the Venezuelan regime with left-wingers, the stock response is that its travails are (or were) the consequence of hostile economic warfare conducted by Western imperialists. Defenders of Zimbabwe’s socialist government likewise blamed foreign sanctions for its collapse.
This pattern recurs again and again. Capitalist imperialism, its monopoly over global financial institutions, or its hostile deployment of sanctions and embargos, always come up as excuses for the poor economic performance of socialist regimes.
This is why it has always seemed preferable to me, as a matter of policy, to allow countries like Venezuela and Cuba to fail on their own merits. Their failure in the absence of any “imperialist hostility” would demonstrate – to the socialist masses, socialist politicians, socialist journalists, and socialist professors – that it is socialism that rots a country from within, and not “Western imperialism” or any such anti-capitalist nonsense.
What is failure?
That’s also why I’m not convinced the metaphor of the Berlin Wall is appropriate.
What made the fall of the wall so powerful was that it was brought about by a spontaneous uprising of the people of East Germany.
East German citizens wanted what West Germany had: individual liberty and free-market capitalism. Less than a year after the wall came down, Germany had been reunited, and they got their wish.
In Venezuela, the US intervened to kidnap its anti-American president, but replaced him with his deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, who remains just as socialist and repressive with respect to the country’s people. The only change was that her hand had been forced as it pertains to American oil interests.
Rodríguez is a more pliable class of socialist gangster.
How does that improve the world? How does that demonstrate that freedom and capitalism have better outcomes than tyranny and socialism?
New Ayatollah
In Iran, Trump is already signalling his readiness to call off the war, calling it “very complete”, and naming Stephen Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio as the people who assured him that Iran was about to attack the United States.
The buck is certainly not going to stop with Trump, and if I were any of those individuals, I’d be polishing my CV.
Yet despite the campaign being “very complete”, the Iranian people failed to rise up and take over their government, as Trump had invited them to do, and the Iranian regime appears to be largely intact, under a new Ayatollah Khamenei who is reportedly even more hardline than his father.
What does that achieve to demonstrate to the world that liberal values and free markets are the only road to peace and prosperity?
It’s a fall, but not like the wall
If Cuba is forced to capitulate to the US, it will not be a “Berlin Wall moment”, because it will not have been caused by a popular uprising against the failures of its own regime.
It will be because it was strong-armed by a power that its regime has always depicted as an imperial aggressor.
Cuba certainly is falling. With no oil imports, the collapse of its power grid and public services like healthcare are only a matter of time. Food is increasingly scarce. Tourism is all but dead.
Betting markets give Miguel Díaz-Canel, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba and the island’s president, a one third chance of surviving to the end of the year. I’d be surprised if he makes it to June.
But it’s not falling in the way East Germany did in 1979.
The Trump administration has been talking to Raul Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, the grandson of Díaz-Canel’s predecessor, the now 94-year-old Raul Castro, and the great-nephew of Fidel Castro.
Castro fils is not only close to Raul Castro, but also to the officials in charge of the Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. (“Business Administration Group”, or GAESA), the state-owned military-industrial behemoth that controls more than a third of Cuba’s entire GDP.
Doing a back-room deal with the Castro family is incompatible with supporting a transition to popular democracy and free-market capitalism. It is incompatible with the outcome that East Germany enjoyed: to be welcomed into the family of liberal democracies.
Pyrrhic victory
While I welcome the fall of all of these regimes – because they are socialist, corrupt, brutally repressive, and/or theocratic, and therefore conflict with classically liberal principles – I don’t much care for how they are falling.
George W. Bush was naïve to think that establishing liberal democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq at gunpoint would be easy.
Trump obviously learnt a lesson, and did away with that all namby-pamby bleeding-heart liberation wokery. He’s doing “regime change”, but worse.
It doesn’t matter to Trump whether the new regime is democratic or committed to the human rights of its citizens. All that matters is that it is pliable and willing to do business with the US.
By doing so, he is vindicating the narrative that the US is merely an imperialist aggressor, and that socialist countries are failing only because of capitalist hostility and intervention.
That the US is content to prop up puppet dictators while invoking slogans associated with classical liberalism – “free speech and press”, “human rights”, “peaceful protests”, “free association” – poses a clear risk to the classical liberal project.
Unlike the Fall of the Berlin Wall, which signalled the resounding victory of liberal democracy over communist authoritarianism, the impending fall of Cuba – like Venezuela and Iran before it – risks tarring us all as venal and hypocritical, willing to condone authoritarianism as long as it is in our own political or economic interest.
Once again, the enemy of one’s ideological enemy is not necessarily one’s friend.
[Image: Havana.webp]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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