CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Cuba’s Fate Should Not Be in US Hands

Negotiations are ongoing between the US and Cuba as the Trump administration decides whether or not to apply the Venezuela model to Cuba. The US embargo remains in effect, with only one oil tanker—a Russian ship, loaded with 730,000 barrels of oil—allowed to pass through. Cuba’s economy, and especially its health systems, are on a knife’s edge. Questions persist about US aims: Does the US want regime change or economic change? Regime change would require another military squeeze, which Trump may want to avoid while the Iran war rages. Cuba’s warning of resistance to a military intervention also has to be considered by Trump. An economic opening by Cuba would presumably be attractive to US and other foreign investors, as was the case before the revolution.

Cuba’s president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, is not Delcy Rodriguez in Venezuela, who has opened the country to foreign oil and mining interests. According to Axios, the US may be backing Raul Guillermo Rodriguez Castro, the grandson of Raul Castro, still Cuba’s most powerful political figure. This practice of hand-picking pliable leaders of countries the US seeks to dominate has a history—for example, Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, Shah Reza Pahlevi in Iran, General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and now (again in Iran) the Shah’s son. Never has such puppetry led to democratic change and social justice. There’s no reason to believe US pressure this time will—or is intended to—improve the lot of the Cuban people.

The US may regard economic change without regime change as impossible. But they’re evidently trying. According to interviews with Axios, US officials, in talks with Cuban officials April 10, stressed that “the Cuban economy is in free fall and that the island’s ruling elites have a small........

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