Another Report on Cuba

The America First Policy Institute published a report on Cuba. I think it's actually a lot better than the State Department's report from last month. But I was mostly curious about the policy implications and what the report demonstrates is that the U.S. just has no options that it hasn't tried before.

Of the 12 policy recommendations, 6 of them say the U.S. should demand something of Cuba that we've demanded before and they've continued to ignore. "Break the Communist Party's Grip on Cuba" has been a priority since the 1960s. There's nothing new in the report telling us how it would happen now. There is quite a lot of demanding and requiring but how? 

Another is to increase economic pressure. It's unclear to me how this can be increased--the U.S. has been squeezing Cuba since the 1960s and the Trump administration has ratcheted it up even more. Increases have never worked before and no one can possibly know whether immiserating the Cuban people more will suddenly be different.

One of the interesting ones is to restore Radio Martí and TV Martí, which the administration dismantled. "The Trump Administration was right to target waste and inefficiency in these programs, but their underlying mission remains important." It never made sense to me why they were targeted since the main criticism they had received was that they were too conservative. 

The last recommendation is to "Keep Every Lawful Instrument of American Power on the Table." This is interesting for two reasons. The first is that it's really been true since 1959. The U.S. has used every action imaginable though obviously after the Bay of Pigs, invasion was not viewed favorably. Not even Trump seems to view it favorably. But the second is why the report uses the word "lawful." In a sense it may reflect how often illegal means have been used and how terribly ineffective they've been (there are tons of declassified documents on this).

To be fair, what other recommendations can there even be, legal or not? Cuba isn't Venezuela so I don't get the impression that the U.S. has found enough willing partners inside Cuba to do a snatch-and-grab. The U.S. has tried invasion, assassination, economic sanctions and deprivation, political isolation, denunciation, punishment of countries that do business with Cuba, covert harassment, intelligence gathering, immigration policy, individual sanctions, and everything else under the sun. At various times the U.S. has also tried to soften some of those policies as a carrot. I just don't know what's left.

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New State Department Report on Cuba

The State Department released a report on how Cuba has infiltrated the United States. I assume the authors see this as a transformational document. I also assume it will be cited in the case of a U.S. invasion. To give you sense, it uses the word "reportedly" 20 times. It purports to situate Cuba within every protest movement in the U.S. Jumping back and forth chronologically, it basically says there are few original protest ideas in the U.S.--they all come from Cuba. Fringe Cuba-linked groups control anti-ICE protests, that sort of thing. Overall, it's regurgitated McCarthyism.

Who's implicated?

--Professors (naturally!)

--Barack Obama (they had to get him in there somehow)

--Zohran Mamdani (ditto)

--anyone who doesn't approve of ICE tactics

--Black Lives Matter

--George Floy protests (which are labeled "uprisings")

--any kind of university protest (labeled "pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses")

With all the chronology jumping, it fails to show how support for the Cuban model is greatly reduced. In the past, yes, it was real and widespread, but that's not the case now. It also fails to acknowledge how you can simultaneously oppose the U.S. embargo and the dictatorship.

There are very, very few Communists anymore, but this report seeks to make it seem like there are. How much traction that gets remains to be seen. That may not matter anyway if the purpose is to justify foreign policy.

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Cuba Sanctions

The latest round of U.S. sanctions on Cuba include Miguel Díaz-Canel, the entire Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba, and even the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, which are the neighborhood-level groups that keep tabs on everyone (and are copied in Venezuela).

The point, of course, as with charges against Raúl Castro, is to provide the veneer of legal rationale for invasion. This is where it gets sticky. The Cuban and Venezuelan governments are dictatorships that do not care about their own citizens, so no one should feel sorry for them and they deserve sanction of some kind. But they are not a threat to the United States. Maybe China or Russia's presence is slightly enhanced, but not much more than that. Cuba doesn't fund guerrillas anymore. Its main export was to help Venezuela attack its own people and doctors (a complicated topic I am not diving into at the moment).

But U.S. policy is hurting the Cuban people even more. Yes, the command economy is a disaster, but it's really because of the U.S. that Cubans can barely function at the moment. The U.S. is directly causing the food shortages.

In short, the Cuban people are getting double-barreled by two governments that have no interest in their well-being.

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Raul Castro Indictment

The Department of Justice has unsealed an indictment against Raul Castro for shooting down the Brothers to the Rescue plane in 1996. The charge [INSERT DRAMATIC MUSIC HERE] is murder.

Just like Nicolás Maduro, Raul is a truly atrocious person that no one should feel even a modicum of sympathy for. They both actively crushed their own citizens for their own gain. But this indictment exists primarily to give a veneer of legality to some future military action that involves grabbing him. We needed to grab him and oh, by the way, we're also going to take over the government and funnel money back to the United States. Something along those lines.

Cubans, like Venezuelans and residents of badly gerrymandered districts here, deserve the freedom to vote for their own leaders. Cubans and Venezuelans further deserve not to give their natural resources to the United States. If the U.S. chooses to invade Cuba, the Venezuelan model suggests they won't get either one even though the Castro chokehold on the country might ease.

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Marco Rubio on Cuba

From a Fox News interview with Marco Rubio:

But in order for it to get better, they do need very substantial and serious economic reforms.  Those serious economic reforms are impossible with these people in charge.  It can’t happen.  And these people in charge aren’t just economically incompetent.  They have rolled out the welcome mat to adversaries of the United States to operate within Cuban territory against our national interest with impunity.  We are not going to have a foreign military or intelligence or security apparatus operating with impunity 90 miles off the shores of the United States.  That’s not going to happen under President Trump. 

There are two major problems here.

First, who are "these people in charge"? One would reasonably argue that it meant all the current decision-makers. But that is very much not the model Trump followed in Venezuela, where there is actually a functional opposition that can run a government. No such thing exists in Cuba. If "these people" refer narrowly to Miguel Díaz-Canel and maybe some of his closer advisors, well then fine. The same people (e.g. the military) would still be running the country but maybe the U.S. could claim it had cleaned house.

Second, China and Russia operating in Cuba is and has been happening under Trump, so it's not true that it's not going to happen when he's president. That may be nitpicky for what's just intended as a threat, but still.

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Venal Leadership in Cuba and Venezuela

I am at the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies conference. Yesterday Renata Keller presented a paper based on her book on the regional response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I've been finishing up the excellent podcast series on the crisis (which she also co-leads). The stark difference between that era and now has really struck me.

At that time, and in Venezuela, say, 20-25 years ago, the leadership was popular and committed to a particular political and economic project. Ultimately that's why the Bay of Pigs failed as did the 2002 coup in Venezuela.

What we have now are Cuban and Venezuelan leaders totally open to negotiation about ceding sovereignty because in fact they believe in nothing beyond self-preservation and access to power. Now we hear about the Castro family negotiating like a royal family, which they clearly view themselves as, while the Rodriguez's do the same in Venezuela.

Meanwhile, they negotiate with a U.S. president with no interest in democracy, which is precisely what gives them incentive to talk in the first place. I think the Venezuelan example gives them hope that they can sacrifice Miguel Diaz-Canel, who doesn't mean anything to anyone, hold onto power, and avoid consequences.

I just think any discussion of U.S. actions towards these countries needs to grapple with the venality of their leaders.

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Will Russia Do Anything For Cuba?

I had not thought all that much about what Russia would do if the U.S. attacked Venezuela and/or Cuba. I have countless posts about how Russian and Iranian influence was far lower than alarmists wished to portray. That said, the Russia-Cuba relationship is very old and deep, so I might have expected more than zero. But with Venezuela, it was zero.

And for Cuba it has been pretty much zero up to this point. The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement about Cuba and it is pretty vague:

"There has been a deliberate effort to ratchet up the atmosphere of confrontation," the ministry said in a statement on its website.

"Against this backdrop, Russia reaffirms its unwavering solidarity with the Cuban Government and its brotherly people. We firmly condemn attempts to grossly interfere in the domestic affairs of a sovereign state, intimidate it and engage illegal unilateral restrictive measures," it said.

It noted that Cuba today faces unprecedented challenges created by the long-standing trade, economic and financial embargoes imposed by the United States. "For our part, we are providing and will continue to provide Cuba with the necessary support, including material assistance," it said.

The main material assistance is needs now is oil and a commitment to defending Cuba militarily. The latter has not happened and I can't imagine it happening for a variety of reasons. Oil is more doable but hasn't happened yet. There appears to be a Russian oil tanker on its way but we'll have to see what happens. The rubber hits the road when the U.S. and Russia face off directly.

Cuba just doesn't have allies willing to deal with the U.S. A big part of it is that the revolution is long dead. It's very similar to Venezuela in that ideals were once real and now are just pantomime. It's all just clinging to power at this point. Cuba was once widely admired in Latin America but that's a long time ago. Miguel Díaz-Canel is an uninteresting bureaucrat who does not generate even a modicum of admiration anywhere. Who would want to risk U.S. retaliation for that?

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Rebellion in Cuba and Venezuela?

Rut Diamint and Laura Tedesco have an essay in Foreign Affairs about Cuba, arguing that the long-standing revolutionary model is ending and that we don't know what will replace it. There is one part that I wonder about:

To be sure, many Cubans would likely perceive their government’s acquiescence to U.S. demands as an erosion of Cuban sovereignty, even a reversion to the island’s pre-revolutionary status as a U.S. client state. A rebellion by the military and parts of society cannot be ruled out.

Is this true? In both Venezuela and Cuba we have a strong revolutionary past that has long ceased serving its own citizens. Further, the people in power aren't the original leaders, who had strong personal followings. Instead, there are annointed leaders who mostly make their citizens' lives worse. These revolutions are long dead.

I am dubious about the "reversion" argument because it's over 60 years ago so very few people experienced it. I can see military leadership feeling threatened (as targets) but would rank-and-file Cubans want to fight for this revolution? What would the goal of such a rebellion be? Put some authoritarian technocrat back in power?

Nationalism matters. A lot. U.S. protectionism will wear thin, perhaps quickly. But people want solutions to immediate problems. The Venezuelan revolution was starting to fail before the U.S. government turned the economy screws on it. The Cuba revolution had suffered the embargo for many years but is a dependent revolution so was hurt even worse by the fall of the Soviet Union and the gradual decline of Venezuelan oil production. Obviously the Trump administration made things worse but they were already bad.

Venezuelans and Cubans will certainly fight for their countries but I am not convinced they'll fight for these governments. I especially wonder because up to this point Trump has avoided occupying forces that could become targets. An occupying force would change everything but that's not where we are up to this point.

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Cuba Has a Secret Plan

From Granma: Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel says Cuba has lots of support and plenty of governments and institutions ready to help it, but he can't talk about it.

Apuntó que, además de esas manifestaciones de solidaridad, «hay más cosas, cosas que no podemos hoy explicar abiertamente, porque el enemigo está en una persecución de todas las luces que se le pueden abrir a Cuba, de todos los caminos que se le pueden abrir a Cuba; pero sí les puedo asegurar, con todo sentido de responsabilidad, que Cuba no está sola.

«En un momento como este hay mucha gente, gobiernos, países, instituciones, empresas que están dispuestos a trabajar con Cuba y que ya nos han hecho llegar vías, mecanismos, intenciones de cómo podemos hacer.

So sure, you wouldn't want to publicize any of this, but it's difficult to supply anything secretly to Cuba. The trick is that Cuba badly needs oil and the U.S. has promised tariff retaliation for selling to Cuba. You can't get oil there without anyone knowing.

Both Mexico and Russia have publicly said they'll keep sending it (even though Donald Trump said Mexico would stop). However, Claudia Sheinbaum suggested that she might not want to suffer the tariffs. The loss of Mexican oil would be huge. Russia's supply is much smaller but every bit counts because Cuba cannot produce enough for its own needs.

So perhaps there are plans afoot to get some critical goods to Cuba, which can slightly ease the pain inflicted by the embargo and threats. Certainly, the Cuban government enjoys a level of international respect that Venezuela lacked (or once had, then lost as it became clear that Maduro and much of the regime wasn't even slightly revolutionary). But it may well be that the most important assistance will have to be public because it's in bulk.

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What Does It Mean for Cuba to be "Next"?

Donald Trump recently said that "“Cuba looks like it is ready to fall." But what does that mean? I don't really know and I have a sense he doesn't either. Here are possibilities:

1. There is a popular uprising that overthrows the regime. This is not likely given the tight control the government has on the population. There is no sign of it happening, at least.

2. Economic collapse leads to democratic transition. Things are bad right now. As I and others have argued plenty of times, the Special Period was disastrous and Fidel Castro held on. Economic deprivation alone does not cause regime change. So it's possible but not likely.

3. Economic collapse leads to Miguel Díaz-Canel resigning and someone more willing to work with the U.S. takes his place. This one would not involve democratic transition. Low likelihood but not impossible.

4. Economic collapse leads to chaos. If even security forces are deprived enough to form their own criminal bands that could even threaten the government, then you end up with a Haiti-type scenario. I suppose this is possible but would be very protracted.

5. U.S. "Snatch and Grab" like Venezuela. In this scenario, the U.S. grabs Miguel Díaz-Canel and chooses a pliable government figure to run the country in a way the U.S. prefers. Possible but not likely. I don't think the Cuban government is as porous as Venezuela's, but I guess you never know. Cuba's entire political framework is built on independence from the U.S. so it would be crazy to see. Plus, I am guessing Cuban security forces are better prepared than Venezuela's to protect the president.

6. Full U.S. invasion. This might be least likely since it's not popular in the U.S. and would face significant resistance in Cuba.

Estimating likelihood is really difficult in any situation but even tougher with Cuba. The Cuban revolution has hung on through invasion attempts, blockades, sanctions, loss of its main patron, economic crashes, you name it. So it's hard to envision how such a thing changes. But low likelihood still means it can happen!

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End the Cold War Already

When do we get to end the Cold War? This year has been horrible in so many ways, and some icing on the cake is that I am pretty certain I haven't heard "socialist" and "communist" as epithets this much since, well, the actual Cold War. I had been thinking about this, then read this interview between Tim Padgett and Frank Mora, who is stepping down as director of FIU's Latin America & Caribbean Center:

So it's no secret you're a Democrat – but you're a Cuban-American Democrat in Miami. You support engagement with communist Cuba. Twenty years ago, more conservative Cubans might have called you a comunista. Do you still feel like a rare bird here in that sense?

Now you see a majority of Cuban-Americans agreeing with President Trump's view, which is a dramatic change in only a couple of years. But to be frank with you, Tim, that language, that rhetoric is coming back. The use of “socialism” and “communism” to try to discredit those who don't agree with the mainstream Cuban Americans is rearing its head again. And I think it's unfortunate.

This is exactly it. You get Black Lives Matter labeled as communist. AMLO gets criticized for talking to "communist regimes." Florida Governor Rick Scott says "The Communist Party of China is in for world domination…And so it’ll be a pretty dark world." Like we live in the Marvel Universe. And we'd be here all day if I started really listing all the inaccurate, simplistic, and even laughable ways the word "socialism" gets thrown around. Did you know that taking down statues of the Confederacy leads to socialism, because that's what happened in Venezuela? I bet you didn't, but you do now!

And so what does this mean in practice? As former Cuba Chargé d'affaires Jeffrey DeLaurentis put it in a recent op-ed:

It's as if we had regressed to the 1980s, when we looked the other way at the abuses of right-wing dictators and excoriated only those on the left.

That sort of thing in fact has happened since the 1980s (see George W. Bush and John Bolton) and I complained then too. Throw around words like "communist" and "regime," and you get ideological cover to go after your political enemies, wherever you might find them.

When will we finally be free of the Cold War? The example of the Confederacy tells us it could a long time, perhaps even long after you and I are long gone. The symbols of the Confederacy are a great cover for racism--hey, it's just heritage! "Communism" is also a convenient and tidy cover, and ideologues don't give those up easily.

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Cuba in the 2020 Presidential Election

I listened to a Zoom webinar on the implications of the 2020 presidential election on U.S.-Cuban relations, with Bill LeoGrande, Margaret Crahan, and Phil Brenner. Arturo López-Levy (who I talked to last year on my podcast) moderated.

LeoGrande thinks Biden is missing an opportunity, which I agree with. He characterized Biden as     having a strategy of "caution and avoidance." He could focus on remittances and family reunification, and follow Obama's strategy of reaching out to moderate Cuban-Americans. (Interestingly, he also thought Biden should probably pay a lot more attention to Puerto Ricans in Florida). He also figures there is a very good chance Cuba goes back on the state-sponsor of terror list.

Biden hasn't totally ignored Cuba. I criticized Biden's tweet going after Trump for failing to deny Cuba's place on the UN Human Rights Commission and how it smacked of hypocrisy, so was a bad strategy (unlike other tweets, he even put it out in Spanish). I got pushback on that, but it still makes sense to me--focus more on Trump's punishment of average Cubans and how it serves no purpose. Don't treat Cuban-Americans as primarily hardline. Normalization of relations was a popular move so stick with it.

Meanwhile, Venezuela is a wild card. Crahan notes rumors of a lot of illegal Venezuelan money coming to Republicans during the campaign. I hadn't heard that before. Regardless, the "Democrats are soft on Maduro and want the U.S. to become like Venezuela" will certainly be a major message.

As usual, all eyes on Florida in a U.S. presidential election.

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Bernie's Cuba Statement

A small kerfuffle as Bernie Sanders talks about Cuba. Here is the bit:

Sen. Bernie Sanders has sparked controversy with a 60 Minutes interview in which he appeared to partly defend certain aspects of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s rule late Sunday. The Democratic frontrunner made the comments when asked by host Anderson Cooper to clarify remarks he’d made about Castro in the 1980s, when he argued that Cubans didn’t rise up against the dictator because he’d “transformed the society.” “We're very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba but you know, it's unfair to simply say everything is bad. You know?” Sanders told Cooper. “When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?” 

He went on to clarify that the imprisonment of dissidents under Castro should still be condemned. “Unlike Donald Trump, let’s be clear, you want to—I do not think that Kim Jong Un is a ‘good friend.’ I don’t trade love letters with a murdering dictator. Vladimir Putin, not a great friend of mine,” he said.

Go read Patrick Iber's Twitter thread arguing this is no big deal. I agree mostly, but not totally. Where I would differ is that this is not about "accuracy" per se. Did Fidel Castro create popular literacy programs? Yes. Were there lots of other reasons people didn't rise up, some of them because of repression? Yes. Is it possible to give an accurate answer that does not praise a dictatorship? Yes. Is that smarter in a presidential election? Yes.

That's where you need to remember your audience and avoid political tone-deafness. The audience, of course, is mostly Florida. I do not know empirically how many Floridians who are in the fence and think about foreign policy as a reason to choose, but praising Fidel Castro is generally not a good political move. Crafting an effective message now is a good idea.

It's early and Bernie isn't the nominee, so this is a tempest in a teapot. But looking forward it's good to have a plan for how to respond to questions about Cuba and Venezuela. That is true for any candidate, but especially for Bernie because he's made so many statements in the past and they will be brought up endlessly.

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Latin America in the Campaign

Not long ago, the State Department said Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans was irrelevant because they were not being deported anyway. That is simply a lie. Now Democrats in Florida are taking this issue into the campaign season. That's a smart political move.

As Republicans met Thursday in the state where President Donald Trump finds his strongest Hispanic support, Democrats jeered his administration's detentions and deportations of migrants who've fled Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. 

"We need a good immigration policy. We need to stop these deportations. People are being deported who have a right to be here under the law," Rep. Donna Shalala, D-Fla., said Thursday, adding: "They need more judges. They need more lawyers. People who are being deported, many of them don't have lawyers."

A lot of people are being deported, with thousands more in the backlog.

So far this fiscal year, which began Oct. 1 and ends Sept. 30, 2,060 Cubans have been ordered deported, as well as 1,031 Nicaraguans and 599 Venezuelans.

This is where support for Trump gets weird. He gets credit from conservative Latinos for his hardline stance against the three countries, but the actual policies he chooses have an entirely negative impact on the people on those countries. More specifically, he does what he can to strangle economies and then run away from the responsibility of helping the people fleeing the strangle.

Conservative Latinos may like his anti-socialist rhetoric and conservative social stances, but it makes sense for Democrats to remind voters constantly of the human cost of the administration's Latin America policies. As is often the case, demography will matter. Younger Cubans don't have the same views as their older counterparts, for example.

Democratic candidates, with the exception of Bernie Sanders, have been vocal in opposition of the Maduro government but more receptive of Venezuelan refugees. That's a message they need to repeat. I don't hear them talk so much--if at all--about Cuba, where Trump is even limiting remittances. They need to do so, and to highlight when the administration just lies about the effects of its policies.

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Who Replaces Cuban Doctors?

The Trump administration wants Latin American governments to expel Cuban doctors. Now, the program is indeed terrible in a number of ways. The doctors themselves are not treated well and, as the article points out, leave their families behind so they won't defect. The fact that they want to defect in the first place tells you something.

But here's the problem that gets far too little attention. Those doctors are providing important services to the poor and they may not be replaced. Brazil famously kicked Cuban doctors out and could not fill the vacancies. Some who did fill them quit quickly. Ecuador just expelled them in November 2019, as did Bolivia. El Salvador did so in April, though the number was quite small. Did those governments replace those doctors? There is reason to believe they did not.

If the United States insists the doctors leave, U.S. policy should include some means of replacing them so there is not simply a vacuum. The U.S., perhaps in conjunction with international organizations, should fund medical training programs and incentivize trained medical professionals to work in areas that need it (Dr. Fleischman in the show Northern Exposure suddenly came to mind). But let's not pretend that the doctors are somehow there for show as a way for Cuba to project soft power. They do serve a political purpose, of course, but they are helping people who won't get help otherwise.

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U.S. Occupation of Cuba and Iraq

Once the U.S. occupies a country, it is not so easy to get it to leave.

U.S. State Department in 2020 regarding Iraq:

“At this time, any delegation sent to Iraq would be dedicated to discussing how to best recommit to our strategic partnership — not to discuss troop withdrawal, but our right, appropriate force posture in the Middle East,” State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said in a statement. 

Ortagus stressed that “America is a force for good in the Middle East” and that the purpose of the U.S. military presence in Iraq is “to continue the fight” against the Islamic State. She did not reference Iraq’s request.

 U.S. State Department in 1906 regarding Cuba:

I am much distressed by the events which have occurred since we left the United States to attend the conference at Rio, but I do not think there is just reason for the friends of Cuba to despair of her liberty, her independence, or her success in self-government. You will recall that the provision of the Cuban constitution and the treaty, under which the United States is now acting, provides the right “to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence,” and you will perceive in the terms of Secretary Taft’s proclamation that such is the purpose of the Government of the United States.

And as always, some in the occupied country benefit and want the U.S. to stay, while many others vocally do not. Cuba had to wait many years before the U.S. gave up its self-ordained right to send troops whenever it wanted, and even then its interference was such that it led to revolution.

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Regional Integration and the Cuba Thaw

John de Bhal, "Never Thaw that coming! Latin American regional integration and the US–Cuba Thaw," Third World Quarterly 40, 5 (2019): 855-869.

Abstract (gated):

Existing accounts of the US–Cuba Thaw correctly identify the decisiveness of Latin American states in pushing the 2014 change in US policy towards Cuba. Problematically, however, these accounts overlook a range of regional integration projects pursued by Latin American states that prove pivotal in ascertaining the central dynamics of the region in shaping the Thaw. This article argues that these regional integration projects are imperative to understanding how Latin American states were able to alter US policy towards Cuba, for three reasons. First, these initiatives, and Cuba’s role in these projects, are central to understanding why Cuba came to be a unanimously ‘regional’ issue for Latin American states of all political persuasions; second, the challenges to US dominance in the region provided by these integration projects were ultimately what gave Latin American states their teeth in pushing the Obama administration to reconsider its policy towards Cuba; and third, a consideration of this broader regional context more thoroughly illustrates the strategic nature of the change in policy towards Cuba as an attempt by the US to salvage its ability to influence regional affairs in response to these integration initiatives that excluded it from the region’s architecture.

The idea here is that regional integration (even if partial and imperfect) forced the Cuba issue. Most of Latin America had rejected the U.S. stance toward Cuba for years, but the integration efforts made it clearer that regularized Cuba relations were a precondition to greater U.S. influence.

It would be interesting to use this argument as a stepping stone to understand the transitory nature of the thaw. To have an impact, the U.S. government has to define influence in terms of cooperation. The Obama administration was sandwiched between two governments that viewed influence more in terms of power projection, with Trump obviously at the extreme in that regard.

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Will Trump Lose the Hardliner Vote in Florida?

The clash of bases for President Trump is, as so many other things in the administration, unusual and self-defeating. On the one hand, we have the traditional appeal to Cuban-Americans and now also Venezuelan-Americans about harsh policies toward those respective governments. Freedom and all that. On the other, we have the appeal to the racist and rabidly anti-immigrant base, which does not want non-white immigrants of any kind.

That creates what the Associated Press describes today for Cuba.

Since the end of the Obama administration, the number of Cubans deported from the U.S. has increased more than tenfold to more than 800 in the past year as the Trump administration enforces a new policy inked just days before it took over. It is also imposing its own sharp limits on who is eligible for asylum. That’s an unwelcome development for growing numbers of asylum-seeking Cubans who had long benefited from a generous U.S. approach and their government’s unwillingness to take its people back.

So remember that Obama ended the infamous "wet-foot, dry-foot" policy, so that part is not new. The big difference is that Obama viewed it as part of an overall policy of engagement:

During my Administration, we worked to improve the lives of the Cuban people - inside of Cuba - by providing them with greater access to resources, information and connectivity to the wider world. Sustaining that approach is the best way to ensure that Cubans can enjoy prosperity, pursue reforms, and determine their own destiny. As I said in Havana, the future of Cuba should be in the hands of the Cuban people.

Trump kept the new immigration policy and ended the engagement, and even though Obama was an active deporter-in-chief, Trump takes it to an entirely new level with a blanket policy of basically wanting to deny asylum to anyone. And he also cut consular services to make it almost impossible for anyone to get a visa legally.

I've written before about how he touts his hard line against Venezuela, which exacerbates emigration, then refuses to allow Venezuelans to find refuge in the United States.

The big question is how this affects Florida in 2020. Trump won the state by only just over 100,000 votes so he cannot afford to lose many voters. Now, many of those voters are the other base, the one that likes tough talk but does not want more non-white people coming in. But what would it take for Trump lose the hardline Cuban-American and Venezuelan-American vote? Whoever becomes the Democratic candidate would be well-served to bring up the refugee/asylum issue.

For the time being, Trump's position is entirely anti-immigrant and everything else is subservient to that. People who have his ear (such as Marco Rubio) will try to get him to find some solution, but there is no way to know if he would follow it.

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Why Did Fidel Castro Endorse Salvador Allende?

Rafael Pedemonte, "The Meeting of Revolutionary Roads: Chilean-Cuban Interactions, 1959–1970," Hispanic American Historical Review (2019) 99 (2): 275-302.

Abstract:

Fidel Castro's endorsement of Salvador Allende's revolutionary program in August 1970 was determined by global transformations and changing priorities within both Chile and Cuba. Since 1968, favorable prospects for the Left encouraged Havana to abandon its radicalism premised on the inevitability of armed struggle. Prior to 1970 Chile gradually promoted rapprochement with the socialist world and lessened Cuba's hemispheric isolation, imposed by the Organization of American States. It is within this framework that the meeting between Cuba's and Chile's revolutions has to be understood. Allende, knowing that Castro's support would push the radical Left to side with Popular Unity in the 1970 elections, sent a delegation to convince the Cubans that socialism could be achieved by peaceful means. These events and strategic discussions within Chile and Cuba reveal how the history of the Left needs to be placed in a broad context defined by the complex unfolding of domestic, hemispheric, and international transformations shaping Latin America in the 1960s.

It's a look at the local and global contexts that framed the Cuban decision to embrace Salvador Allende's peace road to socialism, which previously Fidel Castro said was impossible ("electoral opium" and all that). For example:

--The USSR was threatening Cuba if it didn't stop promoting revolution in Latin America, so this was a way to smooth things over.
--Fidel Castro was isolated in the region and wanted to expand trade and other ties. Allende's decision to restore diplomatic relations was a critical starting point.
--The Chilean Social Democrats started that process earlier, so Chile was a propitious place for Fidel to acknowledge political change that did not overthrow the existing order.
--Salvador Allende need the endorsement to get the radical left to vote for him.

Fidel and Allende needed each other:

The encounter between the Cuban Revolution and the Chilean road to socialism in 1970 was not just a response to the contemporary conjuncture but also the fruit of a long-term evolution rooted in previous developments and molded by a complex set of factors.

This is also a reminder that even radical movements can exhibit strong pragmatic impulses. I've made the case for some time that even leftist Latin American governments are more pragmatic than typically portrayed.

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Podcast Episode 65: U.S. Policy Toward Cuba

I know it's been a while!

In Episode 65 of Understanding Latin American Politics: The Podcast, I talk with Arturo López-Levy, who is Visiting Assistant Professor of international Relations at Gustavus Adolphus College, Minnesota. He has a Ph.D. in international Studies from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies of the University of Denver. He has published articles about Cuba, Latin America, and the U.S. policy towards Latin America. We talked about U.S. policy Cuba, based on an article he recently published in NACLA. We ranged from Trump administration goals to reaction in Cuba, to what economic consequences we might see as a result of U.S. policy.

Link to his NACLA article.

Link to his Análisis Carolina article.

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