News SOS for Journalists Latin America Culture

Photos Photo of the Day Videos

Lessons from the Venezuelan Laboratory for Cuba’s Transition

Six Months After the “Trump Formula”

By Yanet Rosabal Navarro (El Toque)

HAVANA TIMES – Six months have passed since the events of January 3 in Venezuela unleashed an avalanche of predictions about what would immediately happen in Cuba. At the time, an almost automatic “domino effect” was taken for granted—linked to the island’s energy dependence on Venezuelan oil—and fueled as well by the initial fascination with the US strategy toward Caracas. A hasty assessment of its success ended up being enthusiastically embraced by nearly the entire Cuban opposition.

Half a year later, expectations of a collapse through sheer inertia have collided with the true nature of the Cuban regime and its architecture of power, which is focused on survival and capable of absorbing the impact of external pressure while turning internal collapse into an excuse to mutate from Soviet socialism into its Russian, Vietnamese, or Chinese variants. All the while, the daily lives of Cubans are sinking into an underworld of scarcity, hardship, and repression.

Confidence in the “Trump formula for Venezuela” and the possibility of replicating it in Cuba has not been exclusive to a yearning exile community and a frustrated opposition. In February of this year, I warned in an article about the risks of drawing automatic parallels, and I was critical of the insistence on searching for a Cuban “Delcy Rodríguez.” I was concerned by the enormous number of overly enthusiastic analyses assessing possible candidates and timelines with the urgency of someone who does not want to arrive too late before the betting window closes.

Many have contributed to turning the Venezuelan process into the ideal mirror of an accelerated transition for Cuba: political actors, analysts, activists, and even representatives of the US government, with fairly explicit statements to that effect. And so we have arrived at the paradoxical situation—predictable, if you ask me—in which, while many Cubans both on and off the island await a “Venezuela-style” outcome. However, Venezuela’s democratic recovery is slowing to worrying levels, in a climate of opacity and uncertainty in which citizens’ demands are losing priority to Washington’s economic interests and the reshuffling of elites.

Half a year after those expectations arose, it is time to take a critical look at what has happened in order to understand why the collapse predicted in January has yet to occur. Let us try to clear away the fog of those initial forecasts and examine: How does the “Trump formula” work in practice? Why did maximum pressure lead to a reshuffling rather than the collapse of the regime? And where does Cubans’ real ability to influence their own destiny lie today?

Evidence of the Escalation

Understanding Cuba’s current situation requires reviewing what has happened over the past several months based on the facts. A systematic review of news about the Trump administration’s statements and actions during this period shows that the post-January 3 scenario in Cuba has not fulfilled predictions of the regime’s collapse, but instead has seen the implementation of a strategy of prolonged attrition in which two central dynamics intersect: an escalation of verbal threats shared by Washington and Havana, and a progressive economic strangulation that directly affects an impoverished society left to fend for itself, while the humanitarian crisis takes a back seat for the parties to the conflict.

A review of public actions reveals the........

© Havana Times