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Kelly McParland: 'Free' Cuba could carry a heavy price

Rebuilding a regime-changed Cuba would require Washington's long-term commitment and enormous expenditures, not something it's noted for

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Among the foreign lands Washington is busy trying to seize, reconstruct, reorder or bend to its will, Cuba arguably has the least to offer a flagrantly profit-oriented administration.

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Greenland has minerals and strategic advantage; Venezuela has oil and regional opportunity; Iran has oil and a menacing presence threatening to regional interests. Cuba has Cubans and not a lot else, unless you count nice weather, pleasant beaches and a run-down capital filled with scenic but mouldering architecture holding a certain allure for tourism.

Kelly McParland: 'Free' Cuba could carry a heavy price Back to video

What’s in it for U.S. President Donald Trump’s team, then, other than finally removing a burr that’s been under the U.S. saddle since Fidel Castro overthrew a deeply corrupt but U.S.-friendly government in 1959, turning the island into a Soviet ally just a short boat-ride away across the Florida Straits?

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As usual, it’s tricky to guess what motivates the Trump White House when there’s no obvious financial advantage to be had. Cuba is anything but a windfall waiting to happen. For decades, it survived as a communist client state, living off handouts from Moscow. Since the collapse of the Iron Curtain, it’s been propped up by friendly regimes with similarly autocratic policies and anti-American impulses.

China, Russia and especially Venezuela all pitched in to ensure Castro and his successors remained an ongoing irritation to a succession of presidents. Given its decrepit economy trade or commercial concerns had little to do with its attraction; that lay in its status as a reliably belligerent and anti-democratic outpost just off the American coast, willing to offer support and protection to fellow despots seeking convenient locations for spy bases, military installations and the like.

Until Washington’s recent raid on Venezuela, Caracas was Havana’s most enthusiastic supporter and supplier of vital oil supplies. When Washington sent in troops to snatch President Nicolás Maduro, Cubans were among the security team protecting the Venezuelan strongman. With Maduro in a New York jail, the lifeline has been firmly shut off, along with any other help Caracas used to offer.

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Moscow has made a show of sticking around, pledging to continue oil and wheat shipments despite threats by Trump officials. In return, it gets cannon fodder: after North Korea, according to U.S. officials, Cuba has become the biggest supplier of foreign troops for the charnel fields of Moscow’s war on Ukraine.

Beijing provides technology, communications and expertise in operating the vast surveillance network the island’s repressive leadership uses to keep the population under control despite the ruinous state of the economy, lack of basic essentials and daily struggle just to survive. Numerous reports indicate a key attraction is a recently-established listening post able to intercept military, commercial and civilian communications across much of the southern U.S. coast.

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A country so decrepit it needs regular handouts just to survive hardly represents a plum juicy enough to satisfy the Trump team’s hunger for foreign trophies, suggesting the U.S. strategy has as much to do with foiling Chinese or Russian aspirations as it does with finally winning its 65-year effort to overturn Castro’s victory, a decade after the man himself expired.

While the island does have nickel and cobalt deposits, neither of them much exploited due to the lack of finance, equipment or reliable power supplies, its chief exports aside from rum and cigars are the doctors, nurses and medical services it provides under licence to a host of other Latin American countries while its own hospitals have suspended basic surgeries due to the lack of essential medicines and supplies.

The island’s beaches and tourist resorts have for years been a crucial source of income, with Canada at the top of the visitor list, but post-COVID traffic has fallen off substantially. Both Air Canada and WestJet announced this week they were suspending all flights due to an ongoing shortage of jet fuel. Empty planes will be sent to pick up thousands of Canadians in need of a ride home.

The result of the successful U.S. squeeze on Cuba’s most elemental operations is a country bordering on collapse. “Cuba is penniless,” the Wall Street Journal asserts. It can’t pay for fuel, it can’t keep the lights on or the buses running, it can’t operate the hospitals or stock the shelves or pay for the things it most desperately need. Washington has all but quarantined it from any offers of help. What’s left is an increasingly desperate population, many of them eager to join the millions who have fled over the years, often at considerable risk to their lives.

Almost three million Cubans are believed to have left since 1959, often in waves tied to politics and levels of hardship. The vast majority settled in Florida, sending back billions of dollars annually in remittances to help friends and relatives still suffering under the strangling tentacles of state control. Over the decades, they’ve built a large, successful voting block, well-organized, politically active and largely dedicated to ridding Cuba of communism. Entire generations have been raised on the notion that the ancestral homeland must be freed

Trump’s secretary of state Marco Rubio is one of them, the son of Cuban exiles and so anti-communist he remains officially banned from visiting China.

As America’s top diplomatic and acting national security advisor, Rubio’s the highest-ranking, and possibly the most powerful Hispanic figure in U.S. history. Not surprisingly, he’s popular among a Cuban diaspora that reaches well into the back yard of Trump headquarters at Mar-a-Lago, and told a Senate Foreign Relations committee session in the wake of Maduro’s capture that Washington would love to see a similar change of regime in Cuba.

“There’s no doubt about the fact that it would be of great value, a great benefit to the United States if Cuba was no longer governed by an autocratic regime,” he said.

Noting that the U.S. first embargoed the country in 1962, he added: “It requires regime change in order for us to lift the embargo.”

Cuban Americans represent a significant block of Republican support in a state that has backed Trump in all three presidential bids. The danger in delivering their dream of a “free” Cuba is the prospect of what might follow. There’s no guarantee a post-communist Cuba would embrace American values any more than happened in Iraq or Libya after U.S. interventions, or is likely in Iran should the mullahs be ousted. Equally possible is another Haiti: lawless, anarchic and ripe for gang warfare, a potential narco-state just across the water.

Rebuilding a regime-changed Cuba would require enormous expenditures and a long-term commitment from Washington, something it’s not been noted for. In Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam it’s tended to withdraw the troops and cut the budget once initial efforts flagged. It would be a lot harder to walk away from a similar failure when it’s taking place just a quick boat-ride from the president’s beachfront home.

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