The Only Thing Trump Is Missing in Cuba Is a Plan

Mr. Zúniga helped lead negotiations with the Cuban government during the second Obama administration.

Cuba is undergoing its worst economic and humanitarian crisis in over a century. After nearly seven decades of authoritarian rule, much of the country’s population lives in extreme poverty, the power grid is collapsing, and people are fleeing the island in droves. Cuba is hurtling not toward socialism or capitalism but toward ruin.

Atop those miseries the Trump administration has heaped the threat of war and blocked most oil shipments to the island, bringing transportation, food distribution and other basic services to a halt. Administration officials have made clear that 2026 is the year they intend to bring down the country’s Communist government. The only thing missing is a plan.

I spent more than a decade working on Cuba as a U.S. diplomat. In that time, I both enforced and unwound parts of the American embargo on the nation that has been in place since the early 1960s, depending on the administration in power and the mood of U.S.-Cuban relations. Before now, I have never seen a greater level of desperation and anger at the government within Cuba, nor a greater willingness by the United States to use the suffering of Cuban citizens as leverage in our long-running dispute with their leaders.

For too long, Washington and Havana have allowed outdated grievances to dictate their relationship. This hostile status quo has done nothing to advance American interests and has only deepened the hardship faced by ordinary Cubans. It’s time to stop holding both countries hostage to history, and to build a better path that delivers progress for citizens on both sides of the Straits of Florida.

When I first served as a U.S. diplomat in Havana, from 2002 to 2004, the country was still recovering from a protracted economic crisis that had set in after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even as the popularity of Cuba’s leadership declined amid scarcity and repression, the Castro government retained bastions of support in the Communist Party, the armed forces and the security services. I saw how, for these groups, the Cold War remained very much alive, as it did for their rivals in the large Cuban American community.

By the time President Barack Obama assumed office, he viewed U.S. efforts to isolate and squeeze Cuba as Cold War-era anachronisms. He saw no reason to preserve a decades-long approach that had failed to deliver change or improve the lives of those we were supposed to be helping: the Cuban people.

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