Lawfare Daily: Trump's Cuba Problem

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Now, Turin, no-by-Ordible. To Kyuba, you know, to Nicaragua as well, they manage to stay afloat with economic pressure. And it becomes very difficult to do anything more than just in flake more economic pain. It's the Laugh Fair podcast. I'm Daniel Byman, the Foreign Policy Editor of Laugh Fair, with Happy Your Coralis, Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. In many ways, Kyuba is the best example of the longevity of a regime

despite 60 years of US efforts to weaken the regime's through sanctions. Today, we're talking about Kyuba and the Trump administration's efforts to put pressure on the regime.

“I'd wondering if you could begin by just setting the scene for us. How is what's been going on with the United States and Kyuba in recent months and what's changed and what has it?”

All right, well, the United States and Kyuba are currently experiencing one of the highest points of tension since the end of the Cold War. And the Trump administration has had a particular focus on Kyuba. The Trump administration has made two conclusions about Kyuba. Number one, it's a real problem for the United States security. Number two, it seems to be an easy problem to solve. In other words, it shouldn't be that difficult for the United States to produce some kind of political or economic change in Kyuba.

Now, they have been trying to produce a number of arguments on behalf of these statements and they're working on it. And so this is where we are in US Kyuba relations. The broader picture is that the United States has talked under the Trump administration of what's called the greater North American area of influence. And the idea is that the United States wants to be able to be hegemony, basically, you know, this is an area that would run, you know, from the North Pole, maybe including Greenland, going all the way down to the equator, nobody really knows.

And Kyuba seems to be the one piece of the puzzle that Kyuba and Nicaragua that seem to be the wrong color for the Trump administration. And so there is a lot of interest in Kyuba at the moment. Since taking office, what kind of pressure has a President Trump administration been putting that Kyuba?

There has been two tracks. First, demonstration effect.

The United States conducted this operation in Venezuela.

“I think people might remember that in early January, the United States intervened militarily in a very surgical operation in Venezuela to remove”

the dictator Nicolas Maduro and his wife and then appoint Maduro's number two person as interim president and begin to negotiate a change in foreign economic policy. So in so many ways, one could argue that this is being presented to Kyuba as you may be next. So there is a demonstration effect. Now, more by laterally between the United States and Kyuba, what has happened is the United States is claiming to be engaged in conversations with a Cuban regime.

And maybe get a new president, maybe produce a sort of like a successor to the current president who would be willing to negotiate with the United States.

“So this is happening while at the same time, the United States has intensified the economic sanctions.”

Kyuba has been living under US sanctions since 1960, and there have been moments in which the sanctions are intensified, sometimes relaxed, sometimes not enforced, under the second term administration. There has been a significant tightening of the sanctions.

There has been, for example, now basically an oil blockade to Kyuba, which is producing an energy crisis.

The United States has unsealed an indictment against Raul Castro, who was Fidel Castro's brother and who also governed Kyuba for a while. And he's a big shot in Kyuba. And they're also imposing more restrictions on state-owned Cuban firms. So conversations happening, but also tightening of the embargo with the demonstration effect of Venezuela. I want to step back now that we have a sense of what's happening with the United States and Kyuba. In addition to your expertise on Kyuba, you've written an extensively advanced way.

And more broadly on the question of authoritarian vulnerability and authoritarian resilience. And we could put that head on right now and just tell us what makes some authoritarian regimes vulnerable to pressure while others are less vulnerable.

“How do we sort out this big universe of dictatorships?”

So let me begin with a personal note. I'm Kyuba and American.

And I come from a tradition, a school of thought, where we have always thought that the right approach to dictatorships is to make life costlier for them economically costly.

It's unethical to do a lot of business with dictatorships. But we have faced a real complication and the real complication is that many times when you restrict the economic life of the dictatorships. If you don't kill them right away, if the attack doesn't destabilize you right away, the dictatorships learn to survive with the new environment and learn to adapt. They basically transfer the costs of those economic pressures to society. And they figure out ways of finding alternative trading partners, elicit means of engaging in trade.

And so they manage to survive economically by basically transferring the costs onto others. They also use restrictions to expand their elicit networks.

I mean, there is now a lot of scholarships suggesting that there are always exceptions, but sanctions and economic pressures on dictatorships in the current world that we're in.

If they don't kill you right away, they make you stronger. They actually solidify you. The hardliners become more entrenched rather than less entrenched and civil society, which is the force that you want to be strong in order to pressure to help you pressure the regime can actually become weaker. So we are this moment in the history of sanctions where the evidence on behalf of them producing regime change is really not that strong. Now, let me just talk about the exceptions.

They do work if you sanction a regime, if the regime that you're targeting really wants to have good relations with the West. This is the experience of South Africa in the late 80s under apartheid when the West imposed sanctions. The differences that South Africa, the targeted government of the apartheid government, really wanted to have good relations with the West. In Cuba, the government has no interest in having good relations with the West.

“Second, sanctions may not work at producing regime change at toppling the regime, but this is an important caveat.”

They can work in getting a bad regime to change some policies for the better. So, it's not like sanctions are absolutely useless and exclusively counterproductive. They don't tend to produce regime change, but they can produce some policy changes. And so this is where I think that the debate among scholars who are studying this issue is focused on at the moment.

From Russia to Iran, to Venezuela, to Cuba, to Nicaragua as well.

They manage to stay afloat with economic pressure and it becomes very difficult to do anything more than just in flake more economic pain. So, let's go back to a kind of a specific focus on Latin America. And I want to start with Venezuela.

“I think the Trump administration would look and say, this was a success.”

We did a military raid, we perfectly kidnapped the head of state and his wife. The loss of life was very low and is being trumpeted as a success for U.S. foreign policy.

Can you go into this debate? First of all, is this a fair assessment from the Trump administration?

And then second, is this a Venezuela specific policy? Like what made it work in Venezuela where it might work in other places like Cuba? All right. If your goal was to change the foreign policy and some of the economic policies of the regime, what the United States did in Venezuela was a clear success. If the goal is to democratize Venezuela and to create a system of shared prosperity, it's too early to say whether there was any success. The evidence is not pointing in that direction.

So let me say about the argument for it being a success. What is so remarkable about what happened to Venezuela is that the United States essentially launched a war against Venezuela, and in less than 24 hours the regime capitulated.

They arrested the main leader and the command structure of Venezuela immediately surrendered basically.

And surrendered in terms that were exactly what the United States demanded. The United States did not demand democratization, did not demand a change of regime. It's simply demanded that the country allowed US investments in its oil and mining sector, the country delivered, and also some changes in its foreign policy essentially stopped selling oil to Cuba. That the Venezuelan government delivered. It was a great form of capitulation.

Again, the demands by the United States about democracy were not part of the negotiations, and there hasn't been any deliverables on that front. And a system of reforms, sort of like an effort to get the country to simply allow foreign direct, to do more than just allow foreign direct investment in its oil and mining sector. We haven't seen the country produce market-oriented reforms and certainly no end of the dictatorship.

“Why does the connection with Cuba precisely because the administration thinks this is a resounding success?”

They may be tempted to think that it's replicable in the case of Cuba. And I and others feel that the Cuban government, the Cuban state, the Cuban military, is not going to be as likely to capituate that quickly and that unconditionally. Because, and here's the big difference, number one, they have greater capacity to fight. Number two, they have lived with antagonism with the United States for a while.

The Cuban government is not desperate for a U.S. bailout. Whereas one could have argued that a U.S. bailout was something that the Venezuelan government had been longing for for a while now. And number three, the Cuban government has far more capacity than the Venezuelan regime had. Not capacity to deliver human goods, but capacity to stay fighting.

“And so it may not be an easy capitulation. That's kind of where I think the model might end up not being fully replicable is applied to Cuba.”

The Venezuelan model applied to Cuba. Let me ask you on the capacity question, like, where does the regime get that capacity? Because you could look at Venezuela and say, there's oil wealth or there might be other things that you would think might help the regime.

What's keeping this government going despite really considerable U.S. and other country pressure on?

“The Cuban state is governed by a combination of three actors.”

The friends of Fidel Castro and the original revolutionary leaders and those who have been ideologically favorable.

Then you have a political party and then you have the military. In so many ways, this is like an elite club. There are three branches of this elite club. A membership is granted if you prove to be significantly loyal and committed.

“In the case of Venezuela, membership into the top structure. When to loyalists, of course, but also to people who are very corrupt.”

People could buy their way into power. People pay to play in the Venezuelan regime.

I'm not saying that this isn't happening in Cuba. It's just that in Cuba, the state apparatus is comprised of truly committed ideologues and folks dedicated to the survival of this state. In addition, in the case of Cuba, the military makes a lot of money from the embargo, a lot of money. And they have been able to do this in 1990. In the case of Venezuela, the Venezuelan state started to experience the effects of sanctions only in 2019. And they didn't like them. Prior to that, they were making profits by still trading with the United States. So they were still thinking, "Oh, my God. Oh, my God. We don't like this sanctions regime."

But the Cuban regime is pretty much anesthetized to living with animosity toward the United States. So the folks who are in it, in the state in Cuba, have already sort of internalized the cost of the embargo and are not desperate for the embargo to disappear. So it's a very, the composition, the staff composition is different. Now, the other aspect is the fighting capacity. The Cuban regime was among many things, an incredibly functional military regime that fought wars in Africa, that supported military operations and guerilla operations throughout the world,

was trains their members received training in the Soviet camp and has a sense of professionalism that we now know the Venezuelan military never managed to match.

In fact, we've always known, for example, that in Venezuela, they were relying on Cuban security forces to protect the regime in part because the local regime forces weren't probably not that trustworthy or reliable. So who knows, at the same time, at the same time, the Cuban military apparatus hasn't been engaged in combat for a while, so I mentioned the fact that they may be rusty, but that this is a different type of military system seems to be a reasonable point to make when comparing Cuba to Venezuela.

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It is, like I said, an important factor in determining who belongs to the top tier of Cuba's ruling institutions, but it is absolutely absent across the population.

“I think what you find, almost everybody finds, that's why people who visit Cuba, especially US citizens who visit Cuba, one of the reasons they love going to Cuba is because Cuba is precisely because they have been told not to enjoy that fruit.”

They have enormous cravings for all things Americans, and I don't think Cubans today blame the United States for their misfortune. The Cuban government does, the Cuban society does not.

When President Barack Obama normalized relations with a Cuban regime in about 2014 to about 2016, he was the most popular person in Cuba.

“Almost since the Hades of Figales, popularity in 1959.”

And so this, to me, gives you a sense of, yes, anti-Americanism surviving the Americans, making money by keeping the Americans away. That is the mentality of the regime, but not the mentality of society in Cuba. When we look at the economic pressure of the United States is putting on Cuba, the logic usually is that by squeezing the economy, it weakens the country, it creates popular discontent, and this in turn puts pressure on elites to make concessions to the United States.

What we see in other parts of the world is sometimes this works, but we've also seen cases where it simply hurts ordinary people, but doesn't actually change government policy.

“When we think about sanctions on Cuba, where are we on that balance?”

Is this something that is actually shaping how the government approaches the United States of the world and shaping for the better? Or is it really just hurting ordinary people, but not doing much good? Well, I think, like I said, the United States has been imposing sanctions in Cuba since 1960, and the regime has been in place. There have been moments in which we have added more pressure, reduced the pressure, but it's there.

If you just look at the case, it's actually one of those cases where the regime has survived. The debate centers on whether you can force the regime to introduce policy changes through sanctions.

“And there the debate, I think, is a little bit more open. Let me just use a very recent development.”

The Cuban government has been resistant to introduce a number of important economic reforms. But just a few days ago, I can remember, but at the end of, you know, by mid-June, they announced 176-mil reforms, marketed reforms that looked at them, they are probably in writing, you know, on paper, they are the most drastic, the most significant reforms that I have seen in a long, long time in Cuba. There are folks who are arguing that this is responding to the United States, or at least, you know,

they are, they know that more pressure is coming, and this may be their way of saying, let's see whether we can lower the temperature. Others argue, it had nothing to do with external pressures, it had to do with other things.

We'll never know, but we do see, we do see policy changes fluctuating, and one could perhaps imagine that fluctuations in external pressure may have something to do with that.

But again, whether there is the collapse of the regime, in many ways Cuba is the best example of the longevity of a regime despite 60 years of US efforts to weaken the regime through sanctions. Let me also say one more thing. There are folks, and this is not ridiculous argument, there are folks who will tell you that, up until now, the sanctions have been relatively soft, because there have been too many loop holes, because the United States allows remittances, because the United States doesn't punish the guilty people, because there hasn't been a full blockade.

So there is a camp out there of folks who have argued that, look, look, don't say that sanctions don't work, because in the case of Cuba, the sanctions have never been that tough.

That's an argument that's there, it is true that the US embargo on Cuba has had many loop holes, and not fully enforceable, and one has to at least be able to recognize that's that side of the debate. So we've talked through sanctions a bit in your article argues that Venezuela's style approach is probably not going to work in Cuba. So what would you recommend? What should the Trump administration do differently?

So let me begin by saying, I am not a consultant, and that's not my profession, and I always think that political scientists and the political scientists are better at addressing why issues are never black and white.

So I feel a little bit uncomfortable making recommendations, but here's what I would have to say, any approach to Cuba requires three fronts.

The first is you definitely need to get this regime to open up its economy. It's ridiculous how unliberalized the economy is. Number two, you also need to reform the state. You may have any economic opening, but if you do not reform the state, if you don't introduce technical competence, pragmatism, the right approach to a system of governance that is dedicated to running things effectively and not trying to do everything.

That's a very important thing in internal reform of the state. Less partisan and more technologically competent.

“And the third thing is you need to have democratization. By democratization, this is what I mean, and I want to be very very honest.”

The communist, the Castro communist form of rule has been governing Cuba for 67 years, their time is up. It is very important for these folks to realize that there is another side of Cuba and that they need to negotiate a way to let the other side be part of discussion of how you reform the institutions, the economy and the state. To not include sectors from outside of the ruling party would be the opposite of democratization. Ideally, ideally there has to be alteration in office. So any good approach to Cuba has to tackle those three aspects at the same time.

My fear with what's happening with US Cuba relations is that the US government seems to be mostly interested in changing the first part of the equation, the economic system and only partially and my take would be you want to be really comprehensive. Take advantage of the leverage that the United States has at this point to make these changes happen. Now, let me just say one thing, how do you incentivize? How do you incentivize the current elites to do this? That is the difficulty.

“You could course them into doing it, but I think it would be important to use in addition to some degree of coercion, some kind of commitment by international actors.”

To a transition in Cuba where international actors ensure that no party is going to suffer huge harms, even the ruling elite. That stepping down from power will not mean their complete elimination. It'll mean a new stage in their lives and opportunity to remake themselves perhaps, but not for them to feel that this is the end of the line for them. So there is something that could be done for the United States providing a top a sort of security shield.

But the security shield should never be applied so that the state under ruling elites survive intact.

Let me go to my last question, which goes directly off your point. Let's say regime change does occur. What happens? What does it actually look like? Is there a coherent opposition? Is there a governing alternative? What do we see in other parts of world sometimes is regime change simply leads to chaos? But in this case, can we be more optimistic? We don't look unlike in Venezuela where there was a real democratic leader, an organized political parties that proved electorally viable? That doesn't exist in Cuba. What you can have in Cuba is you do have very small organizations.

“These organizations are active, they're weak, but they're active. What you need to do is to create a spring for these organizations to flourish.”

And then you create a legal system where you say, "All right, there's going to be some kind of primary, some kind of organization in my take two years, go out and cultivate vote and come back with the vote."

The Cuban opposition is full of people who have been thinking about liberty and freedom forever. They are not novices at this.

They simply are embryonic at this point, but that is something that with a little bit of time and the right conditions can lead to a flourishing civil society and new political parties ready to compete in a new election.

“So that's, I think a very optimistic and I hope accurate. I'll look for us to end on. Have you ever thank you very much for joining us today? My pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.”

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