Tag Archives: Cuba

Cubism 90 miles from our shores.

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            Communism failed in Cuba long ago.  From early on, the Cuban “Revolution” had to be subsidized by the Soviet Union.  That covered over many of the economic failings of a centrally-planned mono-crop agricultural economy.  The political failings were covered over by prisons and forced emigration.  Then the Soviet Union collapsed, the subsidies ended, and Cuban went into a downward spiral.  Conditions of life for ordinary Cubans have grown worse and worse.  All sorts of things were going wrong before President Trump’s recent blockade: rice production was falling; the electricity generation was falling, causing rolling blackouts; the predominance of sugar cultivation limited how much food farmers could produce.  Only an oil subsidy from Venezuela kept anything functioning.[1] 

            President Donald Trump is a lame-duck.  That means he’s free to try anything he wants.[2]  With regard to Cuba, he seems to want the Communist regime gone.  He got the successors to Maduro in Venezuela to turn off the oil tap.  Now, Cuba has run out of diesel and fuel oil, and gas stations are closed.  Garbage trucks can’t collect, so piles of trash line the streets in Havana and elsewhere.  Most of the electricity is turned off for most of the day to most of the people.  “Communism has ended light pollution!” 

            The director if the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, paid a call on the Cuban government.  The US would give Cuba $100 million in aid.  There was a catch: “new people” have to be put in place to carry out “meaningful reforms.”  That is, “y’all need to bolt to Spain and right quick.”  He got no takers. 

            Hamas in Gaza, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela, and Cuba: dictatorships are willing to allow intense harm to their “citizens” so long as they can hold onto power. 

            If Communism could collapse from a mere lack of popular support, it would have done so many years ago.  It is likely to collapse from an upsurge of public anger and action over the failures of the Revolution.  Should the United States be trying to hustle forward that collapse?   The collapse might be preceded or accompanied by a gigantic boatlift of refugees.  That would not accord with closing the southern border.  In Madrid cafes, Cuban Communists are going to blame the US for all their problems anyway, so why not?  Progressives will argue that overthrowing Cuban Communism creates a moral obligation to help on the part of the United States.  Moral obligation probably isn’t the first thought to occur to the Trump Whitehouse. 

            Viewed from an international relations perspective, Trump appears to be pursuing a “spheres of influence” approach.  He has yarded Nicholas maduro (and his wife) out of their palace in their jammies in order to put them on trial in New York.  He’s been trying to (and maybe succeeding) put the fear of God and the United States into Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum over government complicity in the drug trade.  Now he seems ready to bulldoze Cuba over the brink.  All Western hemisphere countries.  Meanwhile, he’s less forthright in support of Ukraine and Taiwan.  They’re in Eastern Europe and the Far East.  Perhaps that’s forcing things into a pattern that doesn’t exist. 

[1] “Cuba: Barely holding on as Trump turns out the lights,” and “Cuba: Trump’s next takeover target,” The Week, 29 May 2026, pp. 14, 17. 

[2] He doesn’t seem deeply concerned abut the impact of his actions on the electability of other Republicans. 

Durable Dictatorship.

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            One way of understanding why the 1930s and 1940s were so terrible is to look at the 1920s.  In the aftermath of the First World War, two European governments fell to revolutionary regimes.  The Tsarist, and then the Provisional governments fell to revolution from the left, Bolshevism.  The liberal constitutional Italian government fell to revolution from the right, Fascism.  In both cases, however, the revolutionary movements were stopped short of their radical hopes.  Powerful constituencies were willing to tolerate some change, but rejected anything that harmed their own interests. 

In the case of Russia, the peasantry formed the main stumbling block.  They controlled the food supply, they formed the majority of the population, and they had gained possession of both their own land and that of the aristocracy.  Communism threatened private property, their private property.  So Lenin settled for the “New Economic Policy”: private property in land, private commerce in food, and government control of urban industry and international trade.  There things stood until the arrival of Stalin.   

In the case of Italy, multiple “old elites” formed the stumbling block.  The aristocracy dominated the military and the bureaucracy, the monarchy remained an important focus of loyalty, and big business and big agriculture controlled the economy.  They wanted the Socialo-Communist left and the unions destroyed, but they wouldn’t tolerate anything that threatened their power.  So Mussolini settled for the trappings of dictatorial power for himself and jobs for his followers. 

In the 1930s Stalin and Hitler exploited changed conditions to carry through real revolutions.  For Stalin, it was the death of Lenin and the disputed succession that followed, coupled with the legacy of debates on the best path forward to an actually Communist Russia.  This allowed him to play off factions within Bolshevism while mobilizing the intense enthusiasm of younger Communists.  For Hitler, it was the immense shock of the Great Depression to the society and politics of the Weimar Republic, followed by the commanding needs of mobilization for war.  In both cases, all the old barriers to sweeping change were destroyed. 

These examples may have value in understanding why some authoritarian regimes survive while others fail.[1]  One theory holds that dictatorships born out of revolution endure because the revolution destroys the old institutions, eliminating both enemies and anyone who could provide an alternative; and because the revolutionary movement packs the institutions of power with fanatics committed to maintaining the new order.  This theory may explain why Communist Cuba, Communist North Korea, Communist China, and Islamist Iran all remain standing many decades after their creation.  

One thing not sufficiently emphasized by this analysis is the role of terror.  Right to the end of their lives, Hitler and Stalin commanded police forces that had deeply penetrated the nightmares of their subject people.  Fear compelled compliance. 

Why then did these supreme examples perish?  Hitler lost a war Germany couldn’t win.  The Soviet Union’s rulers lost their nerve at a critical moment in 1989.  Those lessons may have been lost on Western observers.  They aren’t likely to have been lost on current dictators. 

[1] Max Fisher, “How Iran’s Government Has Endured in the Face of Instability,” NYT, 21 June 2021.