Cuba has reached such a deplorable situation thanks to its own government that Trump ruled out the possibility of military intervention.
HAVANA, Cuba – “Venezuela has money and it has resources; here there is no p…”, was the main phrase that, with variations, was heard on the morning of January 3, shortly after the news of the capture of the former president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, by elite forces of the United States army. Surprised like almost everyone else, many Cubans let themselves be carried away by a wave of premature joy caused by the expectation, reasonable to a certain extent, that, after the fall of Chavismo, the next turn would correspond to Castroism and its continuity government headed by Miguel Díaz-Canel.
Optimism subsided after the press conference offered by President Donald Trump, where “oil industry” were the key words and there was not a single mention about the need to “cut off the head of the snake,” which would be Cuba, the intellectual author of the so-called socialism of the 21st century. In this section, Trump passed the ball to his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, who reiterated that the Island is a disaster and that, given what happened with Maduro, the regime in Havana should be, at the very least, worried. And it is, as was seen in the Anti-imperialist Tribune, where a hysterical Díaz-Canel shouted Homeland or death, we will win! (we will get under the bed).
It is early to make conjectures about the future of Venezuela, although Trump has already announced that the United States will control the country while the transition to democracy takes place, since Maduro’s departure does not mean, per se, the end of the dictatorship. From the Miraflores palace, Vice President Delcy Rodríguez demanded proof of life from the president, and from the streets of Caracas, Diosdado Cabello, surrounded by armed police, insisted that everything was fine. María Corina Machado and Edmundo González were only mentioned by the Republican when journalists asked him. The Venezuelan people, for their part, have not stopped celebrating the arrest of the satrap in every corner where he has ended up because of Chavismo.
Donald Trump did not even try to hide that the White House’s primary objectives are Venezuelan crude oil and compensating the oil companies expropriated by Hugo Chávez. That manifest interest is already being used by left-wing spokesmen to accuse the United States of rapacity, although none of them cared that Cuba sucked oil for free without giving back to the Venezuelan people more than ideological control and political repression disguised as medical cooperation.
Venezuela has a lot to offer under a democratic government. Cuba, on the other hand, has reached such a deplorable situation thanks to its own government that Trump, in statements to the New York Post, ruled out the possibility of military intervention in the largest of the Antilles. In his opinion, the Island is already having a bad enough time. Castroism will fall on its own and the delay will depend on the ability of Cubans to endure. The Revolution has ceased to be a regional paradigm. The misery and destruction caused by 67 years of communist dictatorship constitute a warning in capital letters for Latin American countries, many of which have democratically elected right-wing or center-right governments.
Inside the Island no one has any illusions. The only thing that hurts Castroism is losing money, so the White House just needs to turn off the tap on remittances and other rescue channels, and wait. What happens in Venezuela will stay in Venezuela, especially if some of the most heard voices in Cuban civil society flatly reject similar military action against the Díaz-Canel regime, under the pretext that freedom achieved thanks to third parties is not true freedom. In politics, we Cubans are like Melchora, one thing or the other doesn’t suit us, so we have a lot of suffering ahead of us.
Those who have spoken out against a hypothetical intervention on the Island trust in the “civic awakening” of the Cuban population that demands current and food in the streets, the cries for freedom remain isolated. At that rate, the 62,000 millennia will be more than a verse in a nightmare song, and in that time frame there will be plenty of days to go out and protest peacefully in a park if state security allows it, while the rest of the Cubans pretend not to notice that, along with the image of the Apostle, a handful of compatriots are trying to save what remains of the nation.
