Cuban Response to Future U.S. Actions

José Ramón Ponce Solozábal (a psychologist with what looks like a fascinating background, including working in Cuban counterintelligence) just published an article in Military Review on the possibility of a "Cuban spring," which refers to the article I published there in 2012 on the same topic with Erin Fiorey, who at the time was a Latin American Studies graduate student here. Ours was very policy oriented whereas his is more political theory.

Sin embargo, la creciente oposición y la lentitud del avance económico, auguran la inexorable
participación en algún momento, por razones geográficas e históricas de los Estados Unidos
de Norteamérica, como acertadamente apuntan Gregory Weeks y Erin Fiorey. 

No obstante, el artículo de dichos autores, si bien analiza brillantemente la situación cubana,
enfoca mecánicamente la posible actitud de la Cuba futura en lo que respecta a la participación
estadounidense. La secuencia de hechos históricos en la relación Cuba-Estados Unidos narrados, conduce a inferencias como cálculo matemático,pero la constatación práctica, in situ, del sentir de esa población en la actualidad, hace pensar en un salto muy significativo, lo cual pone en duda que se produzca una postura no conveniente para Estados Unidos en el momento de la transición a la democracia; aunque aciertan en considerar que esa relación puede caminar por el “filo de la navaja”

The first part is a nice compliment, and then he makes an interesting (and certainly debatable) point that we're a bit too mechanistic in our assumptions about how Cubans will respond to some eventual U.S. action in Cuba. Especially based on the rest of the article, what I take this to mean is that he believes Cubans may well be more sympathetic to the United States once they have a choice and are no longer so tightly controlled.

My hunch is that the United States will be met with considerable skepticism, but I do have to admit that such an assessment is based on certain assumptions (the punishment of the embargo, historical animosity, among others) that could turn out to be wrong. I would argue that at the very least we should maintain those assumption until the opposite is very clearly evident. I can envision just blundering into a post-Castro context, intent on showing Cubans what they should do next.