The Twilight of Castro‘s Cuba
Let me preface this essay by reiterating my distaste for President Trump’s many authoritarian and populist impulses. Whatever his administration may achieve in the realm of foreign policy will neither negate nor diminish the risks and damage that his character, governing style, and anti-liberal predisposition pose to the U.S. constitutional order.
However, the President’s uninhibited, expansive, and adventurist approach to global affairs does present a unique opportunity to reshape the international system, reassert Pax Americana, preserve U.S. unipolarity, and even strengthen the very liberal world order that he and his inner circle so frequently malign.
Cuba is one flashpoint where the transformational ambitions of this administration collide with a status quo that has been in desperate need of change since the inception of communist rule in 1959.
Cuba has always been a potential base from which to threaten, attack, or intimidate the continental United States. No adversarial regime sits closer to the American homeland, and over the course of its decades-long, Stalinist-inspired rule, Havana has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to allow its territory to be weaponized by far more powerful enemies of the United States. During the Cold War, Cuba served as a force multiplier for the Soviet Union; today, it hosts a PLA listening station and maintains close military and intelligence ties with both Russia and China.
From the earliest days of the post-revolutionary period, the Cuban regime sought to externalize its internal repression and misery. Guided by a zealous ideological mission and a sense of strategic impunity, state-controlled Cuban mercenaries were dispatched to far-flung corners of the world to destabilize pro-Western governments or to prop up socialist regimes, as seen in Angola, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, and more recently Venezuela — all in the service of “spreading the revolution.”
Wherever Cuban intervention succeeded, it was invariably followed by repression, the absence of democracy, and economic stagnation. The Cuban regime has never hesitated to align itself with the forces of evil in the world, a tendency it now displays in its most egregious form by supporting Russia’s war effort in Ukraine — not with money or equipment, but with expendable soldiers sent into meat-grinder assaults to perforate Ukrainian lines.
In the 21st century, Cuba became the linchpin of what John Bolton aptly labeled the “troika of tyranny” in Latin America. When the Pink Tide swept socialist parties into power in Venezuela and Nicaragua, no regime was more actively involved in transforming these formerly democratic states into authoritarian proxies. It is time to break the cycle of repeated Cuban intervention in support of democratic backsliding across the region.
During the Cuba Libre era — before Castro, and before U.S. indifference enabled Fulgencio Batista — Cuba was a comparatively free and remarkably prosperous island, owing largely to its close economic, political, and military ties with the United States. Cuba is a natural partner of the U.S., whose intervention liberated the island from Spanish rule and its brutal campaign to suppress Cuban independence.
A free, democratic, and U.S.-aligned Cuba with an open-market economy would be an economic asset rather than a permanent recipient of humanitarian aid. Socialist rule in Cuba has, predictably, been an abject failure. Once a premier tourist destination and the world’s leading producer and exporter of sugar, Cuba now sees hotel occupancy rates hovering around 30 percent. Since COVID, hard-currency tourism revenue has fallen by roughly 75 percent, and what remains is funneled directly to the regime. Hotels are run by the Cuban army, while the predominantly Russian and Chinese tourists who still visit the island pay for all-inclusive packages in advance. As a result, very little money ever reaches the streets of Cuba, where it could support the few small businesses permitted to operate in an otherwise fully nationalized, centrally planned command economy.
The sugar industry — the other historic pillar of the Cuban economy — is now little more than a relic. Socialist economic policies devastated sugar production to such an extent that the island now depends on sugar imports to meet domestic consumption.
Meanwhile, Cubans lack basic necessities such as food, medicine, and cooking gas. Electricity and running water are available only a few hours a day, if at all, and many households go days without either. Garbage accumulates in the streets, and the poorest Cubans are often forced to scavenge for food, contributing to the spread of tropical diseases at a time when the already desolate healthcare system is crippled by supply shortages and chronic understaffing.
Instead of staffing domestic hospitals, the regime has dispatched roughly 20,000 Cuban doctors to 50 countries around the world. This medical export scheme exists not out of altruism, but because the Cuban economy lacks the productivity and efficiency to generate sufficient hard currency to sustain the regime and keep the state barely functional.
The socio-economic collapse of Cuba has unsurprisingly hit the poorest citizens hardest. Far from equalizing society, the Castro regime has widened the gap between a modest middle class — able to access hard currency through relatives in the United States or through specialized skills — and the poor, particularly Afro-Cubans in urban barrios, who are condemned to live in abject poverty as a direct result of socialist misrule.
Consequently, roughly a quarter of the Cuban population — about 2.7 million people — has left the country since 2020. Combined with collapsing fertility rates, Cuba’s population has now regressed to levels last seen in 1899.
The moment for regime change in Havana has arrived — not because it has never been attempted before, but because U.S. leverage over the island has not been this strong since the early 20th century.
The Cuban economy is nearing complete collapse. Ninety percent of its electricity generation depends on oil. While the energy grid requires approximately 100,000 barrels per day, Cuba produces only about 40,000 domestically. Worse still, this domestically sourced oil is highly acidic, rich in sulfur and heavy metals. It is both environmentally destructive and accelerates the deterioration of the island’s already decrepit power plants.
Historically, Cuba relied on Venezuelan and Mexican crude to bridge this gap. Both lifelines have now been severed in a striking demonstration of U.S. primacy in the region.
Within weeks, the rolling blackouts that have long plagued Cuban life will cease to be temporary and become permanent. The total collapse of the energy grid is imminent. Hospitals will lose power. Public transportation has already been shut down. Refrigeration, cooking, air conditioning, and water supplies will not merely be restricted for hours each day — they will disappear indefinitely. Rooftop water reserves will run dry, and the subsistence agriculture envisioned by the regime as a workaround to U.S. economic pressure will fail without fuel for tractors and equipment.
Beyond the overwhelming pressure exerted by an energy quarantine, the United States retains additional tools to further tighten the screws. Through international sanctions, Washington can deny Cuban doctors visas, rendering them useless as a hard-currency source. Further travel restrictions could shut down the informal air bridge between Miami and Cuba that funnels cash and basic goods to the island. Remittances from the Cuban diaspora — amounting to roughly $2 billion annually — can likewise be blocked at will by the U.S. government.
That said, the looming economic catastrophe is only one of two reasons Cuba’s regime could be toppled by the United States in 2026. During the bipolar Cold War era, the U.S. — mistakenly, in my view — refrained from strangling the revolution in its cradle out of fear of direct confrontation with the Soviet Union. Cuban counterintelligence and internal repression proved adept at neutralizing CIA-led destabilization efforts through terror and enforced cohesion.
This calculus changes entirely in the event of a direct U.S. military operation. The Cuban armed forces, now largely symbolic, would be incapable of resisting such an intervention.
The United States has already demonstrated in Venezuela that it can decapitate a regime with a significantly larger and more capable military. Cuba’s armed forces have atrophied since the end of the Cold War and now field fewer than two dozen active fighter aircraft — all of which would be destroyed before they could be fueled or leave their hangars. The remainder of the military’s equipment is hopelessly antiquated.
The bipolar order that once afforded Cuba a measure of protection is long gone. It has been replaced by unipolarity and global U.S. hegemony, meaning that any American intervention in Cuba would face little to no meaningful opposition from foreign powers — just as U.S. action in Venezuela failed to provoke a serious response from Russia, China, Iran, or even Cuba itself.
It is time to decisively relegate Castro’s Cuba to the dustbin of history. With minimal U.S. effort, the island can be liberated, one-party rule dismantled, the Stalinist internal security apparatus disbanded, and its former prosperity, democracy, and alliance with the United States restored — to the detriment of America’s adversaries, beginning with Ortega’s Nicaragua, which would surely be next in line.
To paraphrase Saruman the White, Cuba, My Lord, is ready to fall.
However, the President’s uninhibited, expansive, and adventurist approach to global affairs does present a unique opportunity to reshape the international system, reassert Pax Americana, preserve U.S. unipolarity, and even strengthen the very liberal world order that he and his inner circle so frequently malign.
Cuba is one flashpoint where the transformational ambitions of this administration collide with a status quo that has been in desperate need of change since the inception of communist rule in 1959.
Cuba has always been a potential base from which to threaten, attack, or intimidate the continental United States. No adversarial regime sits closer to the American homeland, and over the course of its decades-long, Stalinist-inspired rule, Havana has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to allow its territory to be weaponized by far more powerful enemies of the United States. During the Cold War, Cuba served as a force multiplier for the Soviet Union; today, it hosts a PLA listening station and maintains close military and intelligence ties with both Russia and China.
From the earliest days of the post-revolutionary period, the Cuban regime sought to externalize its internal repression and misery. Guided by a zealous ideological mission and a sense of strategic impunity, state-controlled Cuban mercenaries were dispatched to far-flung corners of the world to destabilize pro-Western governments or to prop up socialist regimes, as seen in Angola, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, and more recently Venezuela — all in the service of “spreading the revolution.”
Wherever Cuban intervention succeeded, it was invariably followed by repression, the absence of democracy, and economic stagnation. The Cuban regime has never hesitated to align itself with the forces of evil in the world, a tendency it now displays in its most egregious form by supporting Russia’s war effort in Ukraine — not with money or equipment, but with expendable soldiers sent into meat-grinder assaults to perforate Ukrainian lines.
In the 21st century, Cuba became the linchpin of what John Bolton aptly labeled the “troika of tyranny” in Latin America. When the Pink Tide swept socialist parties into power in Venezuela and Nicaragua, no regime was more actively involved in transforming these formerly democratic states into authoritarian proxies. It is time to break the cycle of repeated Cuban intervention in support of democratic backsliding across the region.
During the Cuba Libre era — before Castro, and before U.S. indifference enabled Fulgencio Batista — Cuba was a comparatively free and remarkably prosperous island, owing largely to its close economic, political, and military ties with the United States. Cuba is a natural partner of the U.S., whose intervention liberated the island from Spanish rule and its brutal campaign to suppress Cuban independence.
A free, democratic, and U.S.-aligned Cuba with an open-market economy would be an economic asset rather than a permanent recipient of humanitarian aid. Socialist rule in Cuba has, predictably, been an abject failure. Once a premier tourist destination and the world’s leading producer and exporter of sugar, Cuba now sees hotel occupancy rates hovering around 30 percent. Since COVID, hard-currency tourism revenue has fallen by roughly 75 percent, and what remains is funneled directly to the regime. Hotels are run by the Cuban army, while the predominantly Russian and Chinese tourists who still visit the island pay for all-inclusive packages in advance. As a result, very little money ever reaches the streets of Cuba, where it could support the few small businesses permitted to operate in an otherwise fully nationalized, centrally planned command economy.
The sugar industry — the other historic pillar of the Cuban economy — is now little more than a relic. Socialist economic policies devastated sugar production to such an extent that the island now depends on sugar imports to meet domestic consumption.
Meanwhile, Cubans lack basic necessities such as food, medicine, and cooking gas. Electricity and running water are available only a few hours a day, if at all, and many households go days without either. Garbage accumulates in the streets, and the poorest Cubans are often forced to scavenge for food, contributing to the spread of tropical diseases at a time when the already desolate healthcare system is crippled by supply shortages and chronic understaffing.
Instead of staffing domestic hospitals, the regime has dispatched roughly 20,000 Cuban doctors to 50 countries around the world. This medical export scheme exists not out of altruism, but because the Cuban economy lacks the productivity and efficiency to generate sufficient hard currency to sustain the regime and keep the state barely functional.
The socio-economic collapse of Cuba has unsurprisingly hit the poorest citizens hardest. Far from equalizing society, the Castro regime has widened the gap between a modest middle class — able to access hard currency through relatives in the United States or through specialized skills — and the poor, particularly Afro-Cubans in urban barrios, who are condemned to live in abject poverty as a direct result of socialist misrule.
Consequently, roughly a quarter of the Cuban population — about 2.7 million people — has left the country since 2020. Combined with collapsing fertility rates, Cuba’s population has now regressed to levels last seen in 1899.
The moment for regime change in Havana has arrived — not because it has never been attempted before, but because U.S. leverage over the island has not been this strong since the early 20th century.
The Cuban economy is nearing complete collapse. Ninety percent of its electricity generation depends on oil. While the energy grid requires approximately 100,000 barrels per day, Cuba produces only about 40,000 domestically. Worse still, this domestically sourced oil is highly acidic, rich in sulfur and heavy metals. It is both environmentally destructive and accelerates the deterioration of the island’s already decrepit power plants.
Historically, Cuba relied on Venezuelan and Mexican crude to bridge this gap. Both lifelines have now been severed in a striking demonstration of U.S. primacy in the region.
Within weeks, the rolling blackouts that have long plagued Cuban life will cease to be temporary and become permanent. The total collapse of the energy grid is imminent. Hospitals will lose power. Public transportation has already been shut down. Refrigeration, cooking, air conditioning, and water supplies will not merely be restricted for hours each day — they will disappear indefinitely. Rooftop water reserves will run dry, and the subsistence agriculture envisioned by the regime as a workaround to U.S. economic pressure will fail without fuel for tractors and equipment.
Beyond the overwhelming pressure exerted by an energy quarantine, the United States retains additional tools to further tighten the screws. Through international sanctions, Washington can deny Cuban doctors visas, rendering them useless as a hard-currency source. Further travel restrictions could shut down the informal air bridge between Miami and Cuba that funnels cash and basic goods to the island. Remittances from the Cuban diaspora — amounting to roughly $2 billion annually — can likewise be blocked at will by the U.S. government.
That said, the looming economic catastrophe is only one of two reasons Cuba’s regime could be toppled by the United States in 2026. During the bipolar Cold War era, the U.S. — mistakenly, in my view — refrained from strangling the revolution in its cradle out of fear of direct confrontation with the Soviet Union. Cuban counterintelligence and internal repression proved adept at neutralizing CIA-led destabilization efforts through terror and enforced cohesion.
This calculus changes entirely in the event of a direct U.S. military operation. The Cuban armed forces, now largely symbolic, would be incapable of resisting such an intervention.
The United States has already demonstrated in Venezuela that it can decapitate a regime with a significantly larger and more capable military. Cuba’s armed forces have atrophied since the end of the Cold War and now field fewer than two dozen active fighter aircraft — all of which would be destroyed before they could be fueled or leave their hangars. The remainder of the military’s equipment is hopelessly antiquated.
The bipolar order that once afforded Cuba a measure of protection is long gone. It has been replaced by unipolarity and global U.S. hegemony, meaning that any American intervention in Cuba would face little to no meaningful opposition from foreign powers — just as U.S. action in Venezuela failed to provoke a serious response from Russia, China, Iran, or even Cuba itself.
It is time to decisively relegate Castro’s Cuba to the dustbin of history. With minimal U.S. effort, the island can be liberated, one-party rule dismantled, the Stalinist internal security apparatus disbanded, and its former prosperity, democracy, and alliance with the United States restored — to the detriment of America’s adversaries, beginning with Ortega’s Nicaragua, which would surely be next in line.
To paraphrase Saruman the White, Cuba, My Lord, is ready to fall.
