“The US should be careful what it wishes for in Cuba.”
Three weeks ago, Cuba hit what seemed to be at the time rock bottom. “We have no fuel, no more reserves,” the country’s energy minister, Vicente de la O Levy, told the public. Since then the US government has further tightened the screw, announcing fresh sanctions on Cuba’s president, some of his immediate family and the Cuban business mega-conglomerate GAESA.
In recent days, waves of foreign businesses, including European hotel operators that have been on the island for decades, are fleeing out of fear of having their assets frozen or getting locked out of the US financial system. Jobs continue to be destroyed and livelihoods wrecked as the economic noose tightens around the world’s longest-sanctioned nation.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned on Monday that the recent expansion of US sanctions is causing widespread harm to the population and endangering lives.
“The fuel restrictions imposed since early 2026 and recent tightening of extraterritorial sanctions, taken together, are directly harming Cubans, especially the most vulnerable,” said Türk. Children are dying because doctors lack access to essential medical supplies and medicines. This is unacceptable.”
While conditions on the island deteriorate, frustration is rising in Washington over the Cuban government’s refusal to crumble in the face of such pressure. When the 95 year-old former President Raúl Castro was charged with murder just over a month ago, it was widely assumed that a kidnapping similar to that of Nicolás Maduro would swiftly ensue. That hasn’t happened.
From The Guardian:
The USS Nimitz, an aircraft carrier, has just left Jamaica, to the south of Cuba. Surveillance aircraft circle the island. John Ratcliffe, the CIA chief flew into Havana to meet Cuban intelligence leaders, and according to US broadcaster CBS brought the “operator” responsible for killing 32 Cuban security guards in the Venezuelan operation.
However, the US should be careful what it wishes for in Cuba. That is the warning of an op-ed published by Dr. Hal Philip Klepak in The National Interest, a prominent US bimonthly international relations magazine.
Though the National Interest is published by the Center for the National Interest, a DC-based public policy think tank that was set up by Richard Nixon, and was founded by Irving Kristol, the godfather of Neoconservatism, it is today broadly associated with the realist school of international studies.
There’s plenty of realism on offer in Dr Klepak’s article. Firstly, he rebuts Rubio’s characterisation of Cuba as a “failed state which poses a threat to the United States” to justify the Trump administration’s tightening of sanctions, the near-total fuel blockade, and repeated threats of military strikes against the island:
This claim flies in the face of some three decades of assessments made by the Pentagon and by SouthCom. As of the mid-1990s, congressional requests to the Department of Defense regarding the extent to which Cuba constituted a threat to the national security of the United States received, in the clearest form, an assessment of the island as in no way such a threat, except if disorder prevailed and caused a mass exodus to the United States and the wider region.
Since then, security cooperation with the island has proven the point, with active collaboration on illegal narcotics interdiction, illegal migration control, natural disaster relief, and even toxic waste disposal. The DOD joined other departments in welcoming the idea of opening up to Cuba under President Barack Obama, and cooperation grew until the first Trump administration…
In a region plagued by criminal networks and narcotics trafficking, Cuba has long been a remarkable outlier. The US government-funded Global Organized Crime Index ranks Cuba 168th out of 193 countries in terms of criminality. For comparison, Haiti, right next door, is 35th. Jamaica is 53rd. And the United States itself is 60th.
Indeed, it is often forgotten that before the revolution of 1959, it was not Caracas or Bogota that were the center of drug trafficking in the Americas. Rather, it was Havana that enjoyed that dubious distinction.
Since then, Cuba has worked intensely not only to control the spread of illegal narcotics use within the country but to cooperate actively in the Caribbean region and on the world stage to stymie the trade in these substances. Its success has been remarkable, and the country has dozens of active cooperation agreements with other countries to combat the scourge.
The US State Department in 2016 recognized this achievement: “Cuba is not a major consumer, producer, or transit point of illicit narcotics…Cuba’s intensive security presence and interdiction efforts have kept supply down and prevented traffickers from establishing a foothold…Cuba dedicates significant resources to prevent illegal drugs and their use from spreading, and regional traffickers typically avoid Cuba…
The Cuban government is responsible for its own share of crimes. Still, its long-term stability, strong institutions, and commitment to law enforcement have made it an island of order in a region rife with criminality. That’s critical for US national security.
While Cuba may not pose a security threat to the US right now, that doesn’t mean it won’t in the future. The ultimate goal of all the economic privations Washington has imposed on the people of Cuba — the five-month fuel blockade, causing widespread hunger, water shortages and lack of medical treatments and care, leading to the preventable deaths of countless patients — is to instigate a popular rising. That may not have happened yet, but it doesn’t mean it won’t.
Nick Corbishley 