By Daniel McCarthy
President Trump has shown Cuba’s Communist rulers two ways their reign over the island can end: the Maduro way or the Khamenei way.
The Cuban regime is a mix of gerontocracy, nepotism, and socialism — its official face is President Miguel Diaz-Canel, but supreme authority still emanates from the 94-year-old Raul Castro, brother of Fidel Castro, the state’s founding dictator.
Though the long-lived Castro clan seems to prove only the good die young, no one beats the actuarial tables in the end, and Raul’s days are drawing short.
Cuba is overdue for a profound change, and Trump is determined to bring it about.
It’s been a lifelong goal of the Cuban-American who now serves as secretary of state, too.
What Trump and Marco Rubio have planned won’t look exactly like the operation that captured Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, or like the obliteration of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and most of his senior staff in the war now being waged against Iran.
But Cuban officials have seen just how far the Trump administration is willing to go.
They’ve been educated by example, and now they have a choice to make.
Do they work out a deal with America, or do they take their chances with an administration that’s become very comfortable with the use of force?
For now, Trump is using economic leverage to bring Havana around.
“The Cuban government is talking with us, and they’re in a big deal of trouble,” Trump said Feb. 27.
“They have no money. They have no anything right now,” he went on, before musing, “Maybe we’ll have a friendly takeover of Cuba.”
Venezuela suggests what that would look like: Maduro is gone, but the rest of the regime is still in place with Maduro’s deputy, Delcy Rodriguez, in charge.
Yet Rodridguez is cooperating with the United States — more than Maduro ever did, at any rate.
Diplomatic relations have been re-established, and economic connections are burgeoning.
Venezuela isn’t free, but it’s freer than before, and Trump is keeping the socialist regime on a short leash: If its leaders don’t want to wind up like Maduro, or Khamenei, for that matter, they can’t behave toward their own people or America the way Maduro did.
Maduro’s fall was a crushing blow to Cuba, which depended on cheap fuel supplied by Venezuela in the spirit of Marxist comradeship and mutual anti-Americanism.
Now Havana’s red regime is alone — and poorer than ever.
That gives Trump and Rubio an opening to bring change to Cuba through economic rather than military persuasion, with the threat of force, however, unmistakably lingering in the background.
As early as January, according to multiple reports, the Trump administration was on the hunt for Cuban government insiders who might be willing to work with America to remake the regime from within, much as Maduro’s ouster was facilitated by elements close to his own inner circle.
Some of the administration’s overtures are hardly covert — last month Axios reported that Rubio has been having, in the words of an unnamed American official, “‘discussions’ about the future” with Raul Castro’s influential grandson, also named Raul (or “Raulito”).
In late February, Trump eased export controls and began allowing American companies to start exporting diesel and other petroleum products to Cuba.