He had a quick win in Venezuela. His Iran war is dragging on. Now, US President Donald Trump’s attention is wandering – towards Cuba.
“I do believe I’ll be having the honour of taking Cuba,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday Australian time.
“Taking Cuba in some form. I mean, whether I free it or take it. I think I could do anything I want with it. You want to know the truth, they’re a very weakened nation now.”
He’s already toppled two leaders so far this year.
Though not changed their regimes.
Venezuela’s President Maduro was removed in a daring commando raid in January.
Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei was bombed in his home in February.
But the temptation of the island nation just 145km from the coast of Florida has never been far from President Trump’s mind.
“Cuba is ready to fall,” he declared the day after President Maduro was seized.
Just three weeks later, the 47th President of the United States proclaimed Cuba to be a clear and present danger.
He accused the communist government of “extraordinary actions that harm and threaten the United States”.
So the White House tightened sanctions and threatened steep tariffs for any nation that supplied it with oil.
Two months later, Havana is on its knees.
“It may be a friendly takeover. It may not be a friendly takeover. It wouldn’t matter because they’re really, they’re down to, as I say, fumes,” President Trump declared.
He already has military forces concentrated in the Caribbean. They were there for the Venezuela raid. They remain for the ongoing “war on narcoterrorism”.
“If Cubans refuse to bend the knee, Trump could send the US military to knock them to their knees,” warn national security analysts Professor William LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh.
Caribbean showdown
President Trump wants Cuba’s Communist Party Chairman Miguel Díaz-Canel out.
He also wants US corporations in. As soon as possible.
Chairman Diaz-Canel isn’t impressed.
“The US publicly threatens Cuba, almost daily, with overthrowing the constitutional order by force,” he posted to social media earlier this week.
“In the face of the worst scenario, Cuba is accompanied by a certainty: any external aggressor will clash with an impregnable resistance.”
He’s maintaining Cuba’s decades of overt defiance of its overbearing neighbour.
But, behind the scenes, he’s supporting “serious” negotiations with Washington.
“In the weeks ahead, the only thing Cubans can be sure of is their country’s deterioration,” warn international relations analysts Professor Rut Diamint and Laura Tedesco.
“(This means) longer blackouts, more protests, more arrests, accelerating emigration. Cuba is feeling pressure from both outside and within. The revolution seems close to its final chapter, yet the manner of its demise – and what will follow – is still unknown.”
Chairman Diaz-Canel knows a showdown is looming.
“Cuba is gonna fall pretty soon, by the way, unrelated, but Cuba is gonna fall too,” President Trump said.
“I’ve been watching it for 50 years, and it’s fallen right into my lap because of me; it’s fallen, but it’s nevertheless fallen right into the lap. And we’re doing very well.”
His Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, is a Cuban American. His political career was built upon opposing any normalisation of relations between the two neighbours.
“He’s doing some job, and your next one is going to be, we want to do that special Cuba,” Mr Trump said of Mr Rubio last week.
“He’s waiting. But he says, ‘Let’s get this one finished first.’ We could do them all at the same time. But bad things happen. If you watch countries over the years, you do them all too fast, bad things happen. We’re not going to let anything bad happen to this country.”
Manufactured crisis
Cuba has been ravaged by economic crisis for decades.
In part, it is because of rigid Communist Party controls and endemic corruption.
But long-term economic sanctions are also playing their part.
Havana has been at odds with Washington for over a century.
The island was surrendered by the Spanish after the 1898 war with the United States. The territory was occupied until 1902, when a compliant government was installed on the condition that the White House could intervene at any time.
Corruption and extreme wealth inequality led to a revolution in 1959. Fidel Castro overthrew the US-backed government of Fulgencio Batista.
A mass exodus of landed gentry and Castro’s determination to forge close ties with the Soviet Union soon saw relations between the neighbours collapse.
US-imposed embargoes have been a fact of life ever since.
Now, blackouts are affecting the country’s 11 million people almost daily.
And President Trump’s oil blockade is biting hard.
Hospitals are cancelling surgeries. Schools and businesses are closing. Cooking gas is scarce. And diesel shortages are restricting the distribution of food and water.
The lack of fuel is also behind growing mounds of rotting trash piling ever higher in Havana’s suburban streets.
“Without access to foreign oil, the Cuban economy is now in free fall – and Cuba’s revolutionary government risks collapse,” warns Professor Diamint and Tedesco.
And hot, hungry Cubans are getting angry.
They’ve been taking to the streets in protests. Last week, in the city of Morón, they trashed a Communist Party office.
Chairman Díaz-Canel says their anger at the blackouts and fuel shortages is “understandable” and their “complaints and demands are legitimate”.
But he warns he will not tolerate “violence and vandalism that threatens citizen tranquillity and the security of our institutions”.
Troubles come to a head
President Trump issued a January 29 executive order outlining his intentions towards Cuba.
“The United States has zero tolerance for the depredations of the communist Cuban regime,” it reads.
“The United States will act to protect the foreign policy, national security, and national interests of the United States, including by holding the Cuban regime accountable for its malign actions and relationships, while also remaining committed to supporting the Cuban people’s aspirations for a free and democratic society.”
It’s a stance that sounds a lot like that against Iran.
President Trump accuses Mr Díaz-Canel’s regime of supporting “numerous hostile countries, transnational terrorist groups, and malign actors adverse to the United States”.
But, as with Tehran, the US President is talking up chances of a deal with Havana.
“They want to make a deal so badly, you have no idea,” he said earlier this month.
The Cuban Communist Party admits discussions are taking place, and are “a very sensitive process that is conducted with seriousness and responsibility”.
The White House, however, is demanding a steep price.
“A purely economic deal would be a surprise, given the hard-line position of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has said for years that the government in Havana must go,” argue Professor LeoGrande and Kornbluh.
“But recent statements by him and other Trump officials as well as reports about negotiations underway suggest that the administration might settle for something less than regime change – just as it has in Venezuela.”
Chairman Díaz-Canel will have to go.
But his regime may remain. If it does the Trump administration’s bidding.
The Trump card
“The rapidly escalating conflict in Iran could delay Trump’s decision on Cuba, though not necessarily,” Diamint and Tedesco write.
“Trump is difficult to read and notoriously unpredictable; he may well see the prospect of a rapid dismantling of the Cuban dictatorship as a much-needed foreign-policy win.”
Venezuela was a public relations coup.
Iran much less so.
With international and domestic pressure mounting, a fresh distraction may be politic.
But Cuba will get its say.
And, like Iran, it may not be what Trump wants.
“Trump’s rhetoric, his new National Security Strategy, and his aggressive policies toward Venezuela and Cuba, all imply that Washington regards the Western Hemisphere as a region where other countries are allowed only limited sovereignty,” state LeoGrande and Kornbluh.
“(That’s) an idea Latin Americans spent most of the past century trying to overcome.”
Such intimidation threatens to backfire.
“Demands from Washington for political change, even symbolic ones, may be too bitter a pill, and too blatant an affront to Cuba’s sovereignty, for any Cuban leader to swallow,” they warn.
So Trump’s new Cuba is unlikely to be any different from the old Cuba.
“Even if Cuba’s new era looks different on paper, it will almost certainly resemble the old one in the instability and restrictions Cubans face in their daily lives,” add LeoGrande and Kornbluh.
“To be sure, many Cubans would likely perceive their government’s acquiescence to US demands as an erosion of Cuban sovereignty, even a reversion to the island’s pre-revolutionary status as a US client state.
“A rebellion by the military and parts of society cannot be ruled out.”
