Cubans are begging for the US to finish the job

When riots broke out recently at a prison in Cuba’s Ciego de Avila province, the videos that circulated showed something remarkable: Inmates were shouting, “Long live Trump!”

Think about that for a moment. Cuban prisoners — men with little left to lose and every reason to resent American power — were cheering the U.S. president. That image tells you more about the state of U.S.-Cuba relations than a decade of think-tank white papers.

I recently spoke with Camila Acosta, the Havana correspondent for the Spanish newspaper ABC and one of Cuba’s most prominent independent journalists. Acosta has been detained, surveilled and threatened with charges that could have sent her to prison for 30 years. She keeps a bag packed with basic items in case she is arrested on her way out the door. State Security stations a patrol car outside her home 40 to 50 times a year, simply to stop her from doing her job.

She is not someone who speaks lightly or from a position of safety. Which is why what she told me deserves serious attention in Washington.

“I’ve spoken to people who say, ‘Let the Americans just come in already. We can’t take this anymore,'” Acosta told me. “That shows you the level of desperation in Cuba.”

She does not claim to speak for all Cubans. Independent polling inside the country is essentially impossible. But the fact that some dissidents now talk this way marks a significant psychological shift inside a nation long defined by resistance to U.S. intervention.

After graduating with a journalism degree in 2016, Acosta was assigned to Canal Habana, a state-run Havana television station, for the mandatory “social service” period required of Cuban graduates. “The Communist Party directs the entire editorial policy of practically all media outlets,” she told me. “They told us what we could and could not say. I wasn’t really doing journalism — I was acting as a government spokesperson.” She left within two years, then spent about a year in what she calls a “detox process” from the indoctrination before joining the independent press.

The cost was immediate and personal. Her grandmother, a Communist........

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