CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Cuba: Blockades and Capitulation…or Canny Compromises?

Pete Hegseth meets with on board the guided-missile destroyer USS Hudner during his visit to Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Feb. 25, 2025. Photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Alexander C. Kubitza, Department of Defense.

Events in Cuba have flown under the radar lately, but big changes are afoot. Noted by PBS June 19 but only belatedly by anybody else, Cuba’s new free-market reforms include 176 measures “to further decentralize Cuba’s state-run economy…[with] more space for private businesses, imports and exports without state intermediation, free hiring of personnel, authorization for private banks and investment by Cubans abroad.” There will even be fast-food chains on the island. If this echoes to you the so-called opening up of Eastern Europe after the Soviet collapse, you’re onto something – namely the corporate blueprint for privatizing a state-run, aka communist, economy. This was not inevitable for Cuba before Donald “Nail the Commies” Trump quite repulsively blockaded the island, but once he did, it arguably became so.

Cuba’s state monopoly on foreign trade and centralized production are now kaput, PBS reports. However, in a happy sign of governmental sanity, “Cuban authorities cautioned that…measures will not be viable if the U.S. does not lift the energy and financial embargo on the island.” So, Mr. Trump: no end to sanctions and the blockade, no free-market “opening up” of Cuba. The blockade will be the key test. Sanctions have been around, doing their insidious damage, forever. But the blockade is Trump’s signature barbarity, and if these reforms don’t inspire enough magnanimity in the Washington despot to end this brutality, this siege, then all bets are off.

You’d think Trump would seize this opportunity to try to freeze the Russians and Chinese out of the Caribbean, and he may: Moscow was the only power in the world that broke the energy blockade. It boldly sent the Anatoly Kolodkin tanker with 730,000 barrels of........

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