Trump's hawkish Cabinet pick heightens pressure on weakened Cuba

Cuba is hemorrhaging people as the economy falters. Now, the country is coming under fresh political pressure as one of the government’s archrivals is poised to start calling foreign-policy shots in Washington.

With Donald Trump headed back to the White House and hawkish Sen. Marco Rubio picked as his secretary of state, the island’s leadership is bracing for what comes next. Hunger, blackouts, hurricanes and earthquakes already have the country reeling, and speculation is building that the incoming administration will further tighten the screws.

“There’s nothing very positive that can be expected from a Trump administration,” said Omar Everleny Perez, a Cuban economist based in Havana who has taught at Harvard and Columbia universities and worked as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. “In the minds of most Cubans is the thought of getting out.”

During the presidential campaign and on Capitol Hill, Trump and Rubio have talked about the need for regime change in Havana. For the Florida senator, the issue has particular significance: He’s the son of Cuban immigrants, and has made his heritage and opposition to communism central to his conservative political identity.

That makes it all the more likely that Trump will bring back the “maximum pressure” approach of his first term, when he tightened sanctions and scared off investors by returning Cuba to a list of state sponsors of terrorism.

A spokesperson for the incoming administration declined to comment directly on policy toward Cuba, noting only that Trump was elected “to lead our country and restore peace through strength around the world.”

The island of 11 million people is staggering under inflation, food shortages, crop failure and the repeated collapse of its power grid. A full 10% of the population has fled the country since 2020. As tempers flare and public discontent grows, Cuba has stepped up arrests of dissidents and warned citizens not to protest.

Trump’s incoming team likely will “look for creative ways to exacerbate the chasm that is existing right now in Cuba between the people and the regime,” said Jose Cardenas, who worked on Latin America issues under former President George W. Bush and now serves as an independent consultant in Washington.

Though President Joe Biden left much of Trump’s previous Cuba policy intact, Cardenas expects the new administration will quickly take action against both President Miguel Diaz-Canel in Havana and Nicolas Maduro in Caracas as a signal to its voting coalition. Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate since 1988 to win Miami-Dade County, the home to many Cuban exiles.

Rubio will “seek to regain some momentum and go on the offensive — but not in a provocative, ham-handed way,” Cardenas said.

It isn’t yet clear how the incoming administration’s stance toward Latin America will be affected by Trump’s pledge to round up migrants and deport them en masse.

Rubio will have to figure out how to navigate that promise along with the US’s long-standing practice of offering an escape to people fleeing far-left regimes in the region, according to Ana Sofia Pelaez, the co-founder of the Miami Freedom Project, which works with migrants in South Florida. In 2023, the Biden administration allowed Cuban, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan and Haitian migrants to apply for two-year emergency visas. More than 125,000 Cubans have entered the US under the program.

“You can’t raise the alarm about Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua and then say these people don’t have a reason to be here,” Pelaez said from Miami. “How can you say ‘This is terrible, and people should rightfully seek freedom,’ and then not receive them humanely?”

On top of its economic and humanitarian woes, Cuba is also facing questions of legitimacy, according to Andres Pertierra, a Cuban-American historian who was doing doctoral research on the island for eight months this year until the power crisis forced the archives to close.

Since the revolution led by Fidel Castro, the government has ruled with a tacit bargain: Caribbean communism couldn’t provide the same level of material goods as US capitalism, but it would build a robust social safety net. It would also foster a sense of collective pride, despite the imposition of a security state that severely restricts political rights.

But that setup has unraveled, and “this is probably the biggest point of weakness and vulnerability in the government’s history since 1959, not least because Fidel is not there,” Pertierra said from Madison, Wisconsin.

The Cuban embassy in Washington didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In almost every regard, the situation in Cuba is worse now than it was in the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union brought hunger and hardship in what’s euphemistically known as the Special Period.

“Education is imploding, health care is catastrophic — there’s no medicine, there’s no equipment, the infrastructure is falling apart,” Pertierra said.

One difference is that those with enough money can still buy food. But while allowing the nascent private sector to import and sell groceries has prevented the weight loss Cubans suffered in the late 1990s, it also highlights “the inequality and the broken promises of the system,” said Pertierra, the son of a lawyer who defended Elian Gonzalez’s return to Cuba in a bitter custody case against the boy’s Miami relatives more than two decades ago.

State-run media recently provided a grim snapshot of the hunger crisis: Some 1,615 people have been convicted of illegally killing cows this year, risking prison terms of up to 10 years.

That Cuban society is now divided into those with access to hard currency — often thanks to relatives abroad — and those without is fueling increasing discontent.

Everleny Perez, the economist, argued the Cuban regime’s best chance of surviving the next Trump administration is for the government to make good on its promise to support the private sector.

“The state has to go beyond this view that the private sector will erode its power,” he said. “Its power is eroding all on its own.”

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—With assistance from Stephanie Lai.