What Does Marco Rubio Want with Cuba?
Given the catastrophic state of the Cuban economy, and the fact that there is no solution without including the USA, he will ask for the dismantling of the regime.
By Jorge Castañeda (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – Miguel Diaz-Canel, the hand-picked president of Cuba, has just announced that the island has not received fuel since the month of December. This means, among other things, that neither Russia nor Mexico delivered a single barrel of oil during January. It also means that Mexico, at least — but obviously Putin as well — has complied with Donald Trump’s instructions to suspend crude shipments to Cuba.
This clarifies the disagreement that arose between Trump and President Claudia Sheinbaum. As will be recalled, he stated a few days ago that he told Sheinbaum to stop supplying oil to the island. She said they had not spoken regarding Cuba, and that Marco Rubio and Mexican Foreign Minister Juan Ramon de la Fuente had spoken on the issue. Euphemisms aside, Trump obviously told the truth and Sheinbaum did not. It is not the first time, nor will it be the last.
There is another divergence regarding possible contacts or negotiations between Cuba and the United States. Trump has said there are talks; Cuba’s Foreign Ministry (MINREX) claims the opposite, setting aside technical conversations such as those that have always existed. The Madrid newspaper ABC maintains — based mainly on a text from just over a week ago by Carlos Cabrera Perez, a Cuban journalist based in Miami and Madrid — that the talks have indeed taken place. They were held in Mexico City since last week, and on the Cuban side were attended by Alejandro Castro Espín, son of Raul Castro and Vilma Espin; and on the US side, senior CIA officials. ABC even claims that these meetings took place under a kind of sponsorship or monitoring by Mexico.
For now, it is impossible to know whether this is true. As anyone who has studied the history of relations between Cuba and the United States since 1959 knows well, contacts frequently occur. The book Back Channel to Cuba, by William LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh, describes them with great precision and accuracy. When the thaw finally occurred in 2014–2015 between Washington and Havana, talks between Alejandro Castro Espín himself and Ben Rhodes from Obama’s team took place mainly in Canada. And the mediation, when there was any — since neither the Cubans nor the United States like third-party interference — was carried out by Pope Francis. Therefore, it is not at all improbable that such conversations are taking place.
What I can affirm, without much risk of being mistaken, is the content of those talks, whether they are happening now or in the near future. And that content runs counter to the direction described by ABC and assumed by many possible participants as observers, mediators, or facilitators: Mexico, Brazil, Colombia. For some supporters of the Cuban dictatorship, the talks can and should focus only on the economic reforms that Cuba may or may not carry out, and on the initial arrival of humanitarian aid, beginning with oil but also extending to food, medicines, and spare parts for the country’s power plants. In that scenario, as has always happened in such negotiations, Havana would release some — not necessarily all — of the more than one thousand political prisoners who survive in Cuban jails. Regime change, that is, the end of the dictatorship, would not be on the negotiating table.
It seems to me that this view is naive, lacking an understanding of what has happened in the United States in recent years, and driven by wishful thinking — or rather, too little, too late. Rubio, who will obviously direct the negotiations even if he does not personally participate in them, will not accept what Obama and Rhodes accepted more than 10 years ago. They will demand the end of the dictatorship, a regime change, and everything that this entails in a country like Cuba.
Given the catastrophic situation of the Cuban economy, and the fact that there is no short or medium term solution that does not include the United States, Washington will ask for what seems logical: dismantling the regime. This means: freeing all political prisoners, a timetable for holding elections in the near future, participation of all Cubans (whether from the island or from Miami), full freedom of the press, freedom to form political parties, to demonstrate, and to oppose, and the medium-term suspension of Cuba’s current Constitution, which among other things provides for the existence of a single party.
To think at this point, under these circumstances, that Trump will accept mere Cuban economic reforms in exchange for ending what is now — not before — truly a blockade on Cuba, is illusory. That era has passed.
Cuba should have accepted Obama’s suggestion: a gradual political opening that would eventually lead to a democratic transition. It did not. Perhaps because Fidel Castro, still alive at the time [with veto power], opposed it; perhaps because Rail Castro became afraid; perhaps because it is not in the DNA of the entire Cuban leadership to contemplate that possibility. Today there is no option left.
For many people such demands from the US will seem excessive. For ordinary Cubans who do not eat, do not drink, have no electricity, cannot get around or go to work, have no medicines, have nothing, it may be an acceptable exchange. Is it immoral? Possibly. Though then one would also have to weigh the morality — or rather the lack of it — of the entire Cuban regime for at least 65 years. Will the Cuban political elite accept it? Impossible to know. Perhaps they would prefer immolation.
This article was originally published in Nexos. Republished in Spanish by Confidencial.
It was translated and published in English by Havana Times.