What Does Trump Want With Cuba?

Cuba is spiraling into a humanitarian crisis. The country’s long-standing economic and political turmoil reached new heights this week as the effects of the Trump administration’s oil blockade took hold.

The president’s targeting of Cuba is part of the administration’s broader attacks on the region, where the U.S. kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores earlier this year and has executed more than 140 people in boat strikes.

As the U.S. hurtles toward war with Iran and further military action in the Middle East and continues to fund Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Cuba is just the latest foreign policy arena where the Trump administration has further ensnared the U.S. This week on The Intercept Briefing, senior politics reporter Akela Lacy speaks with fellow reporter Jonah Valdez about how U.S. foreign policy is impacting the upcoming midterm elections and Valdez’s recent reporting on how a new anti-Zionist PAC has associated with influencers who have made statements that are outright antisemitic. 

Lacy also speaks to University of Miami history professor Michael Bustamante and Andrés Pertierra, a historian of Cuba specializing in post-1959 regime durability, about the crisis unfolding in Cuba.

Missing from mainstream news coverage of Trump’s attacks on Cuba and U.S. efforts to impose regime change in the region is a recognition of how Trump’s policies fit into his attacks on immigrants in the U.S., Bustamante says.

“One of the, I think, subtext of why this administration might be keen on government change in Cuba, like in Venezuela, it’s not just about being able to plant the flag and say, ‘We buried communism in the Americas. Something that no other president could do,’” Bustamante says.   

“It’s also about, we can deport more people. And so how does the Cuban American community react to that? That, I think, is an open question. Something that I haven’t seen linked yet to the conversation about regime change, per se.”

The Trump administration’s strategy is likely to backfire, Pertierra says.

“You don’t get long-term cooperation stability through fear,” he says. “So I don’t think it’s actually going to solidify the U.S. position in Latin America. I think it’s going to further weaken it.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. 

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter for The Intercept. 

Jonah Valdez: And I’m Jonah Valdez, reporter for The Intercept, also covering politics and U.S. foreign policy.

AL: We have been deep in midterms coverage. We had early voting in Texas start this week. The first real midterms of the cycle are less than a month away in March.

Jonah, you’ve been reporting on a new and interesting fundraising group that’s active in midterms this cycle — a group called the Anti-Zionist America PAC, or AZAPAC. Tell us a little bit about them.

JV: AZAPAC got its start in August, and so they’ve been around for a few months now, but really sort of hit traction online when they posted sort of like an ad video in November.

And the video is full of a lot of explosive imagery and language from Trump and Netanyahu shaking hands, to a lot of images of Israel’s bombs blowing up Palestinian civilian infrastructure, a lot of dead children. And in this, there’s this voiceover stating the whole thesis for the thing, which is “We need to get Zionists out of American politics. They are extorting Americans of their taxpayer dollars and they have too much influence over the U.S. government.” And they list some of their top enemies, which is AIPAC — which, Akela, you’ve reported on extensively — on top of the more moderate group J Street. So they’ve really positioned themselves as a group that is diametrically opposed to the pro-Israel lobby establishment in U.S. politics.

However, when you go a little deeper into its founder Michael Rectenwald, who is a former New York University professor, and the associations that he’s made with figures on the far right, the picture starts to be a lot muddier than just opposition of Zionism.

It’s a tricky thing, right? Because, as you know, it’s like the biggest weapon that the pro-Israel establishment has against the free Palestine movement, against any sort of advocacy to hold Israel accountable for the genocide in Gaza or any of its actions, is a blanket statement that all of that is antisemitic. A phrase that’s commonly used is, you know, claims of the genocide in Gaza is “antisemitic blood libel.” So you have this situation where this group is trying to be a very loud anti-Zionist voice, but is also making affiliations with figures who are very clearly interested in rooting their criticism of Israel in antisemitic conspiracy theories.

AL: Are they gaining a lot of traction? Are they raising a lot of money? Why should people care about what this group is doing?

JV: That’s a good question. I mean, the first FEC filings came out in January. And so from August when they were founded up until December, they raised about $111,000 — which in the grand scheme of things, when you’re going up against a PAC as large as AIPAC, it’s not a lot.

But I think why we should care about them is what makes them unique. And what makes them unique is they are very directly trying to win over support from not just the left, not just progressives, but also the right and growing criticism of Israel on the right, which has been a huge question mark for pro-Palestine advocates for the past year. Of like, how do we grapple with growing criticism of Israel among the Republican base or even further right than that, and people who are disaffected voters who may not have voted or even avoided voting for Trump altogether, but still have conservative views and are now criticizing Israel for its genocide in Gaza? How do we treat them? Should we ally with them? Should we get support wherever we can? Or should we be skeptical because of their other views?

And so AZAPAC is really, especially in its early months, really catered to that audience. And we see this with its founder Michael Rectenwald going on podcasts such as The Stew Peters Show. Which, if you’re not familiar with Stew Peters, he is a far-right white nationalist who has a show, a podcast that has gained popularity but really took off during Covid. But a big feature of his brand is what he calls the “Zionist occupation” of the government, and a lot of Jewish antisemitic conspiracy theories basically blaming Jewish people for all the issues, including domestic issues of the U.S. government.

He says the U.S. is “occupied” by “anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-American Jews who are not just working on behalf of Israel, but on behalf of a more broad Satanic Talmudic agenda that’s taken shape over thousands of years.” And in that same episode, he referred to Department of Justice Attorney Leo Terrell [as] the N-word, and also in another episode referred to Jewish people using another antisemitic slur. And this is just kind of run of the mill for folks like Stew Peters, who, again, the AZAPAC founder Michael Rectenwald is associating himself with, willingly, he told me, to gain support from other audiences to have a broad range of support.

AL: Jonah, I know you’ve had extensive conversations with Mr. Rectenwald, but can you tell us a little bit about his responses to some of your reporting?

JV: I reached out hoping to have an open-ended conversation. Just giving everyone the benefit of the doubt when they say that they are trying to be critical of Israel. It’s like, OK, well, let me hear out what you have to say. 

But before our call, I did a little bit of digging — of like, how is he kind of framing the argument when he’s off-camera? Just going on his Twitter, his X account, and what I found was a lot of references, not just to Zionism, but a lot of references to what he calls the “Jewish mafia” or “Jewish elites,” which are pretty common dog whistles to the far right.

So I bring some of these questions to our conversation, and he gratefully agreed to talk with me on the phone. And [I] gave him a chance to let me know what his platform is, and he reiterated that he wants to end all U.S. military support to Israel. He opposes the genocide, wants to oppose the pro-Israel lobby in Congress, and he is pouring money into certain campaigns that are looking to unseat certain pro-AIPAC members, such as Randy Fine in Florida. 

Then I ask him about, well, what about the language that you use? Don’t you think that this risks kind of blurring the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism? And that’s when he started kind of going on the defensive, and he disavowed any idea that he himself was antisemitic.

At the time, I only knew that he was on The Stew Peters Show for one appearance. And he said that that was like a very uncomfortable situation for him and that he would’ve called out Peters, but he’s a very aggressive person on his show and he didn’t want to startle him or anything. After our conversation, I come to realize that he has actually been on The Stew Peters Show three to four times to promote AZAPAC.

So I call him back and press him on this more. I say, like, hey, what’s going on here? You’re clearly a regular, and I think you’re clearly trying to gain his support and the support of his audience.

This time, he said, Stew Peters really helped us out in the beginning and after appearing on his show a lot of donations poured in and I don’t want to throw him under the bus. And he didn’t rule out any future appearances.

AL: Who are the candidates that this PAC is working with?

JV: I want to highlight two of them that stuck out to me. One of them is Tyler Dykes. You might recognize him as a convicted rioter from the Capitol riots on January 6. He pleaded guilty to assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers, but also was accused, famously, of performing a Nazi salute on the Capitol steps while storming the Capitol building. And even before that, he was also convicted of taking part in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.  Actually, for that, he was also sentenced for carrying a burning tiki torch, which I guess there’s a charge in Virginia for carrying a burning object to intimidate.

Anyway, there’s also figures that AZAPAC is supporting, like Casey Putsch who is running for governor in Ohio. He posted a video where basically he is giving a lot of Hitler apologist statements. 

But there’s two other candidates that I wanted to mention who AZAPAC supported and endorsed, which is Anthony Aguilar, who is running as a progressive Green Party candidate out of North Carolina. And he was actually one of the whistleblowers from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation that blew the whistle on violence aimed at aid-seeking Palestinians in Gaza. He’s taken that moment into a whole political career. 

He actually decided to rescind his endorsement after The Intercept approached him — after we approached him — with our reporting on both Rectenwald, his statements, his associations with the far right, but also these backgrounds of other candidates that Aguilar’s campaign wasn’t aware of.

And it’s the same case for another recent AZAPAC endorsement, which is Greg Stoker, who is also a progressive Green Party candidate. He was part of one of the flotillas to break the siege in Gaza. And, you know, similar case where when we approached him with our reporting on Rectenwald and AZAPAC — decided to rescind his endorsement. And sure enough, as of this week, all mention of both Aguilar and Stoker’s campaign were removed from AZAPAC’s website, scrubbed from social media.

I think they are making a calculation similar to some concerns that I’ve raised in my reporting — it harms the movement.

AL: Jonah, we’re looking forward to reading your piece, which is up now. Thank you for walking us through your reporting. You know, while frustration over Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been a major focus of our reporting and covering how the Israel lobby is approaching midterms and how much voters still care about that — this is far from the only foreign policy issue that is top of mind for voters right now. 

We are potentially moving toward war with Iran, according to reporting from Axios on Wednesday. There is a very large aircraft carrier moving toward the Middle East.

Our episode today focuses on what’s happening as the U.S. is ramping up sanctions in Cuba. If you’ve been following The Intercept’s reporting, you know, we’ve been tracking the more than 140 people the administration has killed in boat strikes in the Caribbean. Amid these boat strikes, we hope you did not forget that the U.S. also kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

After toppling Maduro, the Trump administration demanded the Venezuelan government hand over its oil. This has led to a fuel shortage in Cuba, which largely depends on Venezuela’s oil. Now the Trump administration has Cuba squarely in its crosshairs. At the end of January, Trump signed an executive order declaring that Cuba constituted an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security — we’ve heard that one before — which has led to an oil blockade, which is now spiraling into a humanitarian crisis in Cuba as we speak. 

To understand what’s happening, I spoke to Michael Bustamante, an associate professor of history and chair in Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, and Andrés Pertierra, a historian of Cuba specializing in post-1959 regime durability. 

Here’s our conversation. 

Michael Bustamante and Andrés Pertierra, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Andrés Pertierra: Thanks for having me. 

Michael Bustamante: Thanks for having me.

AL: To start, Andrés, the last time you spoke to The Intercept in 2024, you were joining us from Havana, Cuba. You’ve since left. What can you tell us about what life was like for people in the country when you were last there?

AP: I was there in 2024. Things were really bad already when I was there. The country was recovering from the Covid crisis more or less, protest waves had gone from a historic exception to part of the new normal. And while I was there, there were actually the beginning of what became, I think, in total six national blackouts. Six times that the entire national grid collapsed, usually for two to three days. Inflation was out of control. Wages had gone back to basically symbolic, at least if you were in the state sector. 

And there was just a despair, a generalized despair, that I had never remembered seeing before. I mean, people were always desperate and frustrated, but there was a despair of things ever getting better that was novel, that was kind of pushing people to leave en masse. In the last five years about 20 percent of the population has left the island, which is pretty extraordinary for a country not in a state of war.

AL: Recently, a reporter asked Trump about Cuba making a deal with the United States. Let’s hear Trump’s response.

Reporter: You’re warning Cuba to make a deal. What does that deal look like? What do you want them to do? 

Donald Trump: Make a deal. Cuba is right now a failed nation, and they don’t even have jet fuel to get for airplanes to take off. They’re clogging up their runway. We’re talking to Cuba right now. They have Marco Rubio talking to Cuba right now, and they should absolutely make a deal because it’s really a humanitarian threat.

AL: In that clip, Trump goes on to say, “There’s an embargo. There’s no oil. There’s no anything.” Michael, can you bring us up to speed? Tell us about the long-standing U.S. embargo against Cuba and the Trump administration’s efforts to increase pressure.

MB: I think it’s widely known that the United States has had a program of comprehensive sanctions on Cuba since the early 1960s that come out of the consequences of the Cuban Revolution, the nationalization of U.S.-owned properties and businesses, the emergence of Cuba as a kind of a Cold War flashpoint. That history has never gone away. 

What I think has changed over time is sort of the degree to which there are holes that are poked in that sanctions regime. There have been openings and closings — most memorably, perhaps, under the Obama administration that really moved to try to put relations with Cuba on a new footing and try to normalize diplomatic ties. In fact, they did that. But the sanctions as such have been codified under law since the 1990s, and that really limits the purview of what the executive branch can do on its own.

The first Trump administration when it came in promised to undo the “bad Obama deal” with Cuba, and it did so, piling on sanctions particularly by 2019 that certainly made things difficult — more difficult — in Cuba.

But the last decade in particular, I would say, has also been a time in which there is a greater and greater consensus inside Cuba, among Cuban economists, among Cuban social scientists, that the country itself is desperate for reforms of a political and economic variety, that the government has been slow — sort of slow footing. And those reforms are needed, not because the United States says so, but because foe and friend alike to Cuba have been been telling them so. 

And so the Cuban people are left in the middle, it seems to me, of a U.S. policy that particularly in the last few weeks has intensified even further in the wake of the ouster of Nicolás Maduro, and the particular vulnerability to that pressure that comes from Cuba’s own inability to put forth a reform program and do so successfully. 

So that’s kind of where we are. And right now, there are few lifelines available to Cuba in an economic sense. The Trump administration feels that it has the leverage and is trying to use it, albeit, as you heard the president admit, at a potentially, very significant humanitarian cost.

AL: Andrés, can you talk more about how these sanctions work and how they’re playing a role in the current state of Cuba’s economy and its prospects for governance? Walk me through how we got here, like I’m 5.

AP: I think that the most urgent sanction, which is the novelty here, is the current oil embargo.

Basically, the United States has declared it as a matter of policy that if you ship oil to Cuba, the United States government is going to increase tariffs and basically engage in punitive economic measures against your country. And so this obviously creates a huge disincentive for countries that even want to sell oil.

So Venezuela would give oil, it would sell it at below-market rates, it would aid Cuba for political reasons. That’s over, thanks to the change of leadership with Delcy Rodríguez. With Mexico, [President Claudia] Sheinbaum has made it clear that she wants to help Cuba. But she’s not really willing to cross Trump on the oil issue. So she’s sending every kind of aid except for oil. That is the real key thing that is basically causing the wheels to come off the bus, as it were. 

But if you’re talking about broader sanctions and regimes, you have Helms-Burton. Trump, during the first Trump administration, activated Title III, which had never been activated before, which among other things, basically says if you’re doing business in a way that engages with or uses resources that were nationalized by the Cuban government, never compensated owners for them, and the owners are U.S. citizens — blah, blah, blah, lots of caveats there — but basically that you can then be sued.

For example, if you have a cruise ship and it docks in a port that was owned by a Cuban who has U.S. citizenship, da da dah, you can then be sued. So the Carnival cruise ships died overnight. That entire sector just collapsed. And I actually had a friend who part of his business model was giving day tours for the tourists who were just there for the day — dead overnight.

Or another thing is, by Trump, and this is — I’m not sure if this is technically an economic sanction, this is not technically an embargo. But another policy that’s hurt Cuba is by putting Cuba on the [state] sponsors of terrorism list. That means that if you’re a European citizen who normally qualifies for an ESTA visa to come to the United States, you no longer qualify if you visit Cuba for a period of, I think, five years, which obviously also impacts the tourism sector.

Also the famous one is, if you have a shipping container and you dock in a Cuban port, you can’t dock in an American port for six months. Like there’s a lot of different measures that turn up the pressure, but really it’s the state sponsors of terrorism list plus the oil embargo that’s really like turning the volume up to 11, right now.

MB: I just wanted to add to that — Andrés has done a good job zeroing in on some of the more recent things and some of the more specific things. But of course, there’s just a broader trade embargo, right? Which means that U.S. companies, by and large, with few exceptions, cannot export goods to Cuba, nor can U.S. persons or actors or companies import goods from Cuba.

Now, there have been exceptions to that put in place over time. A big one came in the year 2000 for the export of food stuff. So it is legal to export food. In fact, a lot of the chicken that gets consumed in Cuba is from the United States. 

One of the, I think, Achilles’ heels of the Cuban economy is the degree of import dependence for foodstuffs. A lot of which has been coming over the last 10, 20 years through that loophole. But I think because of that, and because of loopholes like that, and then also because of the fact that the trade embargo per se is a bilateral thing, it doesn’t impact in theory the ability of Cuba to trade with France or Brazil or whatever else. You often hear this commentary, “Well, you know, embargo, what embargo if Cuba can trade with the rest of the world?” And that’s kind of true, but it neglects sort of the impact of the sanctions regime on global financial institutions.

The fact of the matter is that because the global financial system is so integrated and so tied into U.S. banking institutions — because particularly of Cuba’s addition to the state sponsors to terrorism list — any transaction that Cuba might want to do with an enterprise in Europe, say, but that has a link to a U.S. bank or that has a subsidiary that operates in the United States, they just don’t want to touch it. Cuba is radioactive. 

And so there are significant kind of extraterritorial effects of the U.S. sanctions regime that obviously don’t make it any easier for Cuba to do business elsewhere in the world, even when in some ways they can.

AL: President Barack Obama, as you mentioned Michael, tried to normalize relations with Cuba when he first entered office, lifting restrictions on remittances and travel to Cuba. In 2014, Obama and President Raúl Castro, Fidel Castro’s brother, took steps to fully restore diplomatic ties, and there were signs of positive economic outcomes as a result. Then Trump won in 2016, immediately reversed those Obama-era policies. Biden comes into office and tries to normalize relations again. Then Trump is back in office, this time increasing pressure on the country even more.

What has that back and forth on U.S. policy toward Cuba meant for the nation and what is driving the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts, which I will note that the United Nations is warning that the humanitarian situation will “worsen and if not collapse, if its oil needs go unmet.” Andrés, I’ll start with you.

AP: I think that the first thing the listeners should understand is that pre-1991 and post-1991 U.S. Cuba policy have similar but very different dynamics. In the context of the Cold War, you could make more arguments about Cuba as a national security threat. You could make these arguments, like Cuba is intervening in Angola and U.S. interests and all the rest, or U.S. support for guerrillas in Central America. Post-1991, the problem is more like a Jeep that’s stuck in the mud on the side of the road, right? Even though the consensus — 

AL: I love that image. Yes.

AP: The consensus post-1991 has long been, at least in foreign policy circles, like a rational Cuba policy would be normalization. It would be engagement. I mean, think back to the ’90s. What is the U.S. approach to China? More trade, more investment, more integration in the hopes that you’re going to defeat Communism with Nike and Coca-Cola. That’s similar to what people have been thinking about Cuba for a long time. But because of the fact that an increasingly well-organized Cuba lobby in a strategic swing state — like Florida — is able to basically leverage that. Not saying you can’t cross them; you can. Obama did, and he won Florida anyway.

But it increased the pressure. And part of it is, Cuba is not important enough to kind of escape those shackles of domestic politics. If it were a national security issue, then those domestic policy issues could be overridden much more easily. But it’s not, and that’s kind of the core problem. It can have this kind of lobby interest capture in a way that many other countries don’t. And I think that’s the core problem.

AL: Michael.

MB: First, just on the flip-flopping between relative degrees of openness and closeness in U.S. policy — it certainly doesn’t do anything to help, say, the investment landscape in a place like Cuba.

Imagine you’re a European company or whatever, and you’re watching this sort of flip-flop. You want stability in whatever the framework is in which you have to figure out how to operate. And by the way, that also applies to the increasingly important Cuban private sector, which has been growing slowly but surely through ups and downs in Cuba’s own internal regulatory framework. But in 2024, the Cuban private sector was doing more business just in terms of retail sales to the population than the Cuban state. And that is a very significant shift in kind of the internal economic logics of the place. 

But they also are contending not only with an unstable policy landscape internally and the sort of ups and downs of opening and closing to private sector expansion, which have not been helpful. They’re also dealing with the ups and downs of U.S. policy and thinking, OK, can I get a visa to go to the United States and think about sourcing goods in the United States under certain embargo loopholes? Well, are they going to close me off, are they not? Is the U.S. going to authorize investment, for perhaps, in the private sector with the notion that United States might have a strategic interest in supporting the growth of the private sector versus the state economy?

So the flip-flopping makes it very difficult to sort of envision a path forward. It means that I think both for Cuban officials, but also Cubans on the ground who are trying to push their country forward sometimes against the ways that their officials are not happy with. Everyone’s sort of playing whack-a-mole constantly, right? 

One thing I would just amend your description of the recent years slightly. And just to say that A, when Trump was elected the first term, he didn’t undo the Obama thing right away. It took a couple years and cruise ships kept going to Cuba for a couple years, and that was sort of an odd thing. Despite the rhetorical change, obviously. It’s really in 2019 when they put in place what they call a maximum pressure policy tied to a similar policy on Venezuela at the time.

And then the Biden administration, I think there was some expectation that when they came in, Biden would roll back the clock to what Obama had done. For better or worse, that didn’t happen. And part of that didn’t happen because when Biden comes in, he’s got a huge agenda. It’s the middle of the pandemic. Cuba’s not high on the geopolitical priority list, as Andrés mentioned.

And then when in July of 2021, Cuba was at the low point of the pandemic itself and the economic crisis that had been induced by it or worsened by it and there are these mass protests across the island. And the Cuban government responded to mass protests of people who wanted food, electricity, and greater political freedoms by throwing a thousand kids in jail. 

And so, like it or not, the Biden administration is not going to step into that moment and say, “Yeah, let’s open the doors.” I wish they had been more, had more foresight on the humanitarian front, but there’s also a pattern here of the Cuban government doing things over time that make the political optics fair or unfair for the United States to move its own policy ball forward more difficult. 

And when the Cuban president at the time says, you know, we’re sending out people to the street to combat these anti-revolutionaries, I mean, how do you think the United States is going to respond, even under a Democratic administration? So again, I just again and again, see that in this back and forth, the Cuban people are sort of caught in the middle of this geopolitical game between both governments. And we’re now seeing those consequences have really probably the most tragic effects that I’ve seen in my lifetime.

[Break] 

AL: Michael, for the Journal of Democracy, you recently wrote, “Many U.S. policymakers, diaspora leaders, and opposition figures have embraced humanitarian suffering as a tool of political change.” You’re touching on this — I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that and what effect the Trump administration’s pressure campaign is having on the Cuban people and the government? That’s some of the least of what I’ve seen in the reporting on this, about the real effects on the ground. And I’m also curious what has been the response from Cuban people to the U.S.’s latest efforts to oust the government?

MB: Those lines in the piece alluded to the fact that, in addition to the effort to sanction or disincentivize further oil shipments and really cut off oil, Cuban American elected officials and other voices in the community have been calling for further measures. Measures that would include cutting off commercial flights that still exist between the United States and various places in Cuba that are largely used by members of the Cuban diaspora to go visit and support their families. The ability of Cubans to send remittances to send gift parcels of various kinds, right?

All of these things are really very important lifelines for Cuban families in unequal ways, because not every Cuban on the island has family outside, and not everyone has access to those remittance dollars. But those remittance dollars are a vital lifeline.

I think the position of the elected officials is, is that any kind of economic lifeline to the Cuban economy helps the Cuban state stay afloat. And they are arguing that if the Trump administration is really going to try to crack down, you might as well go all the way if you want to use leverage and try to force them to the negotiating table or force the Cuban government to seed to U.S. wishes or whether opening to U.S. economic interests or political change — you got to cut off every source of supply. 

This has been a more delicate thing for Cuban American politicians to navigate in recent years because they’re well aware that many of their constituents are sending money to their families. Sending, you know, in a country that has — there’s no antibiotics, let alone basic painkillers, right? The care package that you can send really, really makes a difference. 

And just to put it into context, while it’s really hard to calculate the number of remittance or the value of remittance that go into Cuba because a lot of it is sort of in people’s suitcases. It’s thought that the income that the Cuban economy gets from this is really on par of what it has gotten in from something like tourism. So it’s a major contributor to the Cuban economy, but it’s sensitive to cut that off because it touches people. It’s one thing to say, “Down with the Cuban government.” It’s another thing to say, “You can’t send painkillers to your mom.” But lately they have been saying it. The Cuban American officials have been saying it. They’re calling for it. And I think they’re making a bet that you step up the pressure to 1,000 percent and you have a better chance of getting the Cuban government to seed. Of course, there’s a huge humanitarian risk there.

I think it’s a mistake in some of the reporting I’ve seen to attribute the degree of, say, the trash piling up on Cuban streets or the degree of the economic problems to just what’s happened since January. This has been a rolling train wreck for a while. What we’ve done is ratchet it up, and there’s this very dangerous game of chicken that’s happening between both governments. And I think as time passes, the more difficult it is for U.S. policymakers to allege that none of the suffering is on their hands, that this is only the Cuban government’s fault. I mean, it’s both. And again, the Cuban people are sort of caught in the middle wondering which side is going to back down first.

AL: Andrés, can you expand on that?

AP: I did want to say that a lot of people, and I think Michael has already touched on this, is a lot of people think, oh, Miami Cubans, and you’re thinking about a bunch of white Cubans who left between 1959 and 1975 — that’s a minority. 

Since 1980, not only do Cubans often come from working-class backgrounds, they grew up or were born under the revolution, they maintain closer ties. But many of them still buy in for reasons of extreme frustration with the Cuban government. So I think that even as I disagree with their policies, I do think it’s important for listeners to understand that this is not just the same kind of caricature of the white Cuban who left back in the day. This is like, I have classmates who are pro-Trump — or former classmates, because I did my undergrad in Cuba — and they are pro-Trump, despite being Black and Cuban. That is a dynamic that I think listeners should be aware of. 

But I agree with another thing that Michael said and I think is really important here, which is that it’s not just that this is going to hypothetically hurt people, but this is going to kill people and it’s probably already killing people. What happens when someone has an asthma attack, and there’s no meds at the hospital? Or someone has an asthma attack, and you can’t even get to the hospital because there’s no ambulance, there’s no transportation, there’s no gas? Something that’s small or should be small then suddenly becomes this catastrophic life-changing event.

I even met someone two years ago — two years ago, before this mess — whose father-in-law fell and broke his hip. And she was told by the doctors that she would have to import basically everything, including surgical supplies, not just medicines for him to have his hip replaced or his hip operated on. And I said, “But that means he’s not going to be able to walk.” And she’s like, yeah. 

That is the kind of impact that a maximum pressure campaign has. Which is why traditionally, it’s one thing to, for example, in World War I create this maximum pressure sanctions — no oil, no nothing — campaign against Germany in the context of aggression in World War I or World War II. Or even maximum pressure sanctions against Russia that’s invading Ukraine. Like, that is one thing. 

It is entirely another to have this policy against a government which is despotic, which abuses its citizens, which is incompetent, which does all of these things — I’m not trying to dodge any of that — which throws kids in jail, draconian measures, all that stuff. But then who’s footing the bill? It’s everyday people, and the politicians don’t take responsibility for that. They still try and dodge, by and large, their responsibility.

And the fact that they are killing people and they’re doing it from the safety of Florida — which to me, beyond the intellectual component — to me just feels like, come on, if you really want to commit to this, you’re not even going to suffer from these policies that you’re enforcing. You’re not even going to take responsibility for it. And I don’t think it’s justifiable.

MB: Andrés is right, that it feels a little cheap to say pile on the pressure — pile on pressure from the outside — when you’re not going to be on the receiving end of it. But one thing that I think is important is that because of the tremendous recent migration from Cuba, some of the people who are calling on for piling on pressure do have family members in Cuba.

And they have grown embittered by the fact that they have to send remittances to their family in the first place. And this translates to more and more people I know on the island — I mean, of course there are people on the island who are horrified by what the United States is doing — but there are others who are saying, you know what? Between the sort of unwillingness to move the ball forward internally between our government officials saying we would rather sink in the sea than seed to the Americans when maybe we should seed a little because that would help me breathe too. And then the sort of hostility of the outside, I hear people saying more and more, listen, enough with the sort of middling approaches from the United States, whether it’s poke a little hole in the embargo this, or close down this. It’s either you rip off the band-aid of sanctions and let the economy breathe, and you just learn to live with the Cuban government — or send in the F-16s.

And I don’t say that to sound callous or to endorse that way of thinking, but that’s the mindset of many, many Cubans I know who are, I think, more open than they have ever been to some kind of drastic U.S. action, if it would at least maybe move the ball forward, even if there are tremendous risks that come from it, and rather that than this kind of slow-rolling humanitarian disaster that may unfold if the governments continue to just be playing the standoff over the oil shipments and other kinds of trade.

So I think there’s a thirst for decisive action, but of course this is an administration, if we want to go there, I think they’ve shown quite clearly in Venezuela that they’re not too keen on long-term boots on the ground and trying to do this sort of remote governance, in a sense, by proxy of the Delcy Rodríguez regime. In Cuba, that’s a much more difficult proposition to envision. And so one of the other things I argue in that piece of Journal of Democracy is that, ultimately, if the United States really wants to force regime change here, it might require a kind of forcing of the issue from the outside in a way that I think could get uncomfortable for more isolationist actors within the Trump administration. So that’s going to be very important to watch too — how that conflict internally in the decision-making process in Washington evolves.

AL: You also wrote, “Exile groups, for their part, are as numerous as they are competitive for influence and attention. With Marco Rubio as secretary of state, Cuban Americans have never held more sway in the U.S. federal government. But unlike during the heyday of the Cuban American National Foundation in the 1990s, there is no single organization or leader who can claim to speak for the entire diaspora community.”

I want to talk a little bit about Rubio’s influence here and of the Cuban diaspora, as well as what you describe as “credible architecture for political change.” And the question in the back of my mind here is also like, how much of what we’re seeing here is part of a lobbying effort on behalf of the Cuban diaspora or Cuban interests in the U.S. versus how much of this is just like, we don’t like communism?

MB: I mean, unquestionably, Marco Rubio has been highly influential, if not determinant in the direction of U.S–Cuba policy under this administration. He was certainly in the ear of the Trump administration, the first go around, albeit from the Senate. And it’s no secret that the secretary of state has had a long interest in seeing a different political and economic model in Cuba and believing that U.S. sanctions are the tool to achieve that. 

You know, everybody’s making the Venezuela comparison. So the parts of my piece that you cited come a little bit in response to that. U.S. diplomats have floated this idea that what we want is to combine external pressure with sanctions, with trying to find someone in Cuba to negotiate with. That for someone like Rubio, I find to be highly interesting from a political point of view because this is somebody who made his career in a sense — or at least part of his career, part of his foreign policy bonafide — arguing, as many Cuban American elected officials have, that any talks whatsoever with the Cuban government are tantamount to legitimizing a government that is illegitimate.

That was their response to the Obama normalization, and yet, in effect, what the president himself keeps saying, and Rubio confirms and denies — a little bit more, more unclearly — is that there may be talks underway. There’s a report in Axios that suggests that the secretary of state himself is actually engaged in a kind of a back-channel dialogue with Raúl Castro’s grandson, who is, let’s just say not a particularly beloved figure among most Cubans. How Rubio sells that to a Miami constituency, I think, is quite interesting. But that kind of deal-making impulse is very much in keeping with the Trump administration’s focus. 

And I also happen to think that in the Venezuelan case, Rubio has said in response to criticism, look, you don’t get a political transition overnight, a political transition is not something you cook for two minutes in a microwave oven. I think he’s right in most cases, right? This idea of the Cuban government or the Venezuelan government just kind of imploding and disappearing and to be replaced by something that’s unclear is a little bit of fantasy, I think, in these two contexts. And particularly in the Cuban context where, as I argue, there are opposition actors in Cuba and groups and certainly in exile, but there is nothing comparable to the figure of María Corina Machado that acts as a force around which both an internal opposition and a diaspora opposition can gravitate. And so I think the big missing piece here, in this vision of forcing change through sanctions and dialogue is, where’s the counterpart? And so that’s the paradox of this moment, too. 

I mean, you’ve never had Cuban Americans more influential in the foreign policy-making process toward Cuba, right? It’s not the Cuba lobby anymore. It is a Cuban American who’s the secretary of state. He doesn’t need to be lobbied perhaps in the same way that others needed to. This is his issue. But the Cuban American community is as divided as ever. Not necessarily in terms of their vision for change on the island, but who is to lead it and the politics — the intergroup politics — of this group or that group. I mean, that is as old as time and hasn’t gone away. And contrast with the moment in the 1990s when the Cuban American National Foundation was really the leading organization of the Cuba lobby, so to speak, and claimed, I think with a bit more credibility, to speak for the community as a whole. That’s disappeared. And there’s this sort of scrum of elected officials, influencers, you know, all sort of vying for attention. 

But what is the actual structure of governance that would follow a supposed fall of the Cuban government on the island? I don’t think it exists. And that might explain why this administration, even under Rubio, is flirting with this idea of some kind of negotiated exit, even as improbable or fantastical as that may seem at this juncture.

AL: Andrés, do you want to jump in?

AP: I agree with what he’s saying, and I think that also it kind of underlines this broader tension in the MAGA coalition, as it were. So you don’t just have these conflicting interests and all these positions within the Cuban diaspora, but you also have this coalition where you’ve got the more isolationist wing and you’ve got the hawkish wing.

The hawkish wing is obviously more the Rubio wing. While the isolation of swing is, I guess, more Stephen Miller and JD Vance, though, I’m not sure how seriously Trump takes Vance, but Stephen Miller at the very least. 

So you have all these conflicting interests, and this does seem to be narrowing the possible policies that the Trump administration is willing to do. So no boots on the ground. And this risks not only with Venezuela, with Delcy Rodriguez, that’s not a consummated regime change operation, right? They took out one person. They have someone who’s more pliable, but she’s in a very delicate position domestically.

So it remains to be seen how much of a transition there will be. There’s already like problems over how many political prisoners she’s released, you know, will she try and break free of this kind of quasi vacillation. So, not only is the Venezuela 1.0 model still a question mark, but you also have these tensions within the Trump coalition that severely constrain how much Rubio or Trump or anyone can have a coherent policy towards a country that is, you know, as Mike said, very different and very complex. 

For context, I mean, not only is it that Cuba has a very different level of dissident organization, all the rest — like look at Eastern Europe, look at the USSR. In almost all cases, accept in Poland with Solidarity, dissident movements were microscopic until the very end. In Cuba, you had attempts to organize a broader dissident organization. There was right after the 2021 protest, you had the attempts to articulate something called Archipiélago. That movement was broken. Its leaders were basically given the choice of exile or jail. And there is no leadership.

And so really what you would have to do is negotiate with the state, but then that creates the tension that Mike’s already talked about, which is OK, how do we do that without pissing off these people? It seems like they’re going to piss off part of their coalition no matter how they handle it, even if the current approach is “successful,” right? So it’s really like even seeing things in terms of whatever they’re doing right now is successful, it is going to create problems down the road for them. And I’m not sure that it is going to be successful in the way that they think it is. 

AL: For both of you, what do you think mainstream media, particularly in the U.S., is missing in how it’s covering the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Cuba right now?

MB: I mean, part of it is what I said already. I think there’s some missing context that this humanitarian crisis — like, it didn’t just start. There was already a humanitarian crisis. 850,000 Cubans came to the United States since 2021. That is the largest Cuban migration in history ever. That’s happening for a reason, right?

So where we are now hasn’t come out of nowhere. And I think there’s a kind of a presentism in coverage sometimes that is understandable but I think is missing a little bit of the boat of this wider history. That’s one thing. 

To shift gears slightly to another issue that’s been kind of in the ether, particularly in the diaspora, all throughout this period, and certainly since Trump retook office, is the subtext of migration policy. And thinking about how the Trump administration has treated the historic numbers of those Cubans who came in recent years and sort of revoked status. Long story short, 400 to 500,000 Cubans of that giant recent exodus have some kind of indeterminate status that the Biden administration gave them, that the Trump administration has either tried to pull away or seems less likely than Biden ever was to sort of convert it to permanent status.

Deportations have been increasing, and they’ve been continuing even since January at a slow clip or relative to the size, but nonetheless significant. And so I think one thing that would even in a circumstance in which a Cuban government falls — there’s a regime insider that becomes the Delcy Rodríguez of Cuba, the best-case scenario that the Trump administration can imagine — the politics for the Cuban American community are going to be really important to watch because one of the, I think, subtexts of why this administration might be keen on government change in Cuba, like in Venezuela, it’s not just about being able to plant the flag and say, “We buried communism in the Americas. Something that no other president could do.” It’s also about, we can deport more people. And so how does then the Cuban American community react to that? That, I think is an open question. Something that I haven’t seen linked yet to the conversation about regime change per se.

AL: Andrés.

AP: One of the core things that I think a lot of the coverage has kind of struggled with is how to balance systemic failure from embargo policy in a particular Trump-era policy. And I think that part of the problem is that if you talk to a lot of people, especially politicians or activists, you’re going to get either it’s all the fault of the government, or it’s all the fault of sanctions, and there’s no real room in between or even like the beginnings of a framework to understand how to approach this.

And I think that, not only to mention it in the same breath is important because it’s clearly both factors. But also something that might be helpful for journalists covering this to think about is, think of the systemic economic and policy failures in Cuba as kind of an immune disease. People often miss that because these systemic failures, these policy problems, the unreformed nature of Cuban agriculture — meaning that a country that is a historical ag exporter is importing previously about 60 to 80 percent of its food. Now, I don’t doubt, somewhere around 95, like they’re importing everything at this point.

Like these are things that are aggravated by the embargo, but they’re not caused by the embargo. And that you need to see the embargo as multiplier rather than cause of why the system just is struggling to breath. Why there’s kind of like a pneumonia — economic pneumonia — in the country right now.

AL: Both of you have touched on the fact that this is happening right after our kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro. And I won’t say unprecedented because it’s not unprecedented, but probably the most U.S. intervention in Latin America that we’ve seen since the coup spree of the ’50s through the ’80s. What does this mean for Latin America more broadly?

Michael, I’m really glad you brought the immigration policy into this, but you know, we’ve killed people in boat strikes in the Caribbean. And as you mentioned Andrés, people are probably already dying now from the most recent sort of ratcheting up of these sanctions. 

But as we’ve talked about, it’s not being covered in the same way. So I wonder if you could just speak to that and sort of what you were expecting to see in the future.

MB: The conversation about Cuba policy is intimately related to broader conversations about U.S. national security strategy. If you read that national security strategy that was put out by the administration late last year I believe, I think what was so striking to many folks was how far it leaned away, even from the rhetoric of kind of great power competition and more that we will let China and Russia do their thing, but it’s really about spheres of influence.

And so I think, all this business about the revival of the Monroe Doctrine, the “Doroe” doctrine, and aggressive force projection, to put it mildly in the Western Hemisphere, feels like deja vu for someone who teaches about the history of U.S. intervention in Latin America in the early 20th century quite often. So it’s inseparable from that. There’s this notion that the administration feels that this is our hemisphere. I mean, they’re using this language much more boldly and baldly than I think we’ve seen since, I don’t know, Teddy Roosevelt or something.

What I think is interesting about this moment is that Latin America itself as a region has had its own backs and forths in terms of the ideological direction of leadership but right now is in a moment of largely or sort of more of a swing to the right with few exceptions. You know, [Gustavo] Petro (Colombia) and Lula (Brazil) are exceptions in the regional political landscape. And also, there’s no love lost in much of the region even on the center left for parts of the region, for someone like Nicolás Maduro who, you know, Venezuela became the source of a mass exodus in its own right that impacted a number of countries and became a political problem across the region.

So I think part of that is why you don’t see many voices in the region necessarily standing up and criticizing too much what the administration has done in Venezuela. The critiques have been more pro forma, but also because those governments that might be more likely to critique those actions, they’ve got their own fish to fry with an increasingly transactional administration that’s wielding tariff threats in new ways. That explains why Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, to go back to an earlier point, is sort of caught between a rock and a hard place with regard to the demand that she stop Mexico’s own oil shipments to Cuba. And I don’t think the Cuban government can count on the kind of regional support that it might have in prior moments. 

If you go back 10 years ago, part of the reason that Obama does what he does on Cuban normalization is because he’s hearing an earful every time he goes to a regional summit that the path to improving U.S. relations with Latin America as a whole coming out the George W. Bush years is to get away from sort of unilateralism and interventionism or the threat of that. And that the way to signal to the region that you’re turning the page is to fix your problem with Cuba and get policy on a more normal, practical footing. And guess what? The Cubans are also reforming and there’s a path here. The regional landscape right now is very, very, very different — very different politically. And so Cuba is much more isolated than it has been in a long time.

You hear voices on the center-left also saying, you know, the Cuban government here, yes, what the United States is doing is horrible and using Cuban people as cannon fodder for this policy that increases humanitarian suffering with the goal of getting the Cuban government to seed or come to the table. But man, the Cubans have had a decade or more — 30 years since the end of the Cold War — to get their economy on at least a little bit stabler footing. And they’ve kind of opened themselves up to this in a way, right? Which is not to blame the victim per se, but it is a complicated story. And I think Cuba’s more isolated on the regional front than it’s been in a while because of it.

AP: There’s a reason that the United States just didn’t really do what the Trump administration is doing anymore, right? Like that really in your face, just do it, break some things on our way to fixing it solution or approach to Latin America. There’s a reason we moved past that.

And I think that a return to that is going to create a backlash. The exact way that this backlash is going to take form we won’t see it for a while. He’s going to cow various governments into obeisance for a bit, but you don’t get long-term cooperation stability through fear. You get them to temporarily cooperate while they now figure out a backdoor, other guarantors.

So I don’t think it’s actually going to solidify the U.S. position in Latin America; I think it’s going to further weaken it. Not least because I mean, if you look at who is the main trade partner of a lot of Latin America, it’s not the U.S. anymore, it’s China. China’s investing. This is not the USSR, where the USSR even at peak was a fraction of the U.S.’s GDP and had real trouble exporting their economic model. This is a country that can compete with the U.S. on its own terms, and in fact can excel because like they, oftentimes the Chinese don’t really care as much about, is this country a dictatorship? Is this country going to be able to pay us back reliably? They’ll just do it.

So, I don’t even think that purely in a Machiavellian sense, this is going to create a coherent policy or an effective policy. And another way that I think this is going to create a likely backlash and actually strengthen authoritarian tendencies among the left, is look at the overthrow Jacobo Guzmán in 1954 in Guatemala, which was a seminal moment for many Latin Americans during that period, not at least many of those who created the Cuban Revolution, but also look at [Salvador] Allende in 1973. And I understand that’s more complicated. It wasn’t just a foreign coup. It was like a lot of domestic factors. But what I’m trying to say is, the lesson that a lot of people on the left took was, a democratic path to policies that we want is impossible, ergo realism dictates that we take a different road. And does that mean that we’re going to see guerrillas pop up tomorrow? Probably not. This seems to be set to supercharge that tendency, even if we can’t exactly foresee what direction or manifestation it will have in practice.

AL: I want to thank you both for helping me and our listeners understand this even a tiny bit better. Michael and Andrés, thank you both so much for taking the time to speak with us on The Intercept Briefing.

MB: Thanks a lot. 

AP: Thank you.

AL: That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

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