It remains a mystery why an administration that styles itself “America First” has prevented third countries from selling food and oil to Havana, exacerbating an ongoing humanitarian crisis. Most Cubans now survive on fewer than two hours a day of electricity, with hospitals struggling to supply patients on life support. The reason, in short, is that Team Trump’s policy toward Cuba now is almost exclusively driven by ideology, rather than rational statecraft. 

The ideology, in turn, is defined by Miami’s enclave of Cuban and other Latin-American exiles. Fundamentally stuck in their native lands, they’re determined to wield American treasure and manpower to redress old grievances. This, instead of attending to the home front, which in South Florida is racked by petty corruption, cultural maladjustment, and the politics of shouting down opponents instead of debating them. 

You could, in fact, call it a form of Third Worldism. 

Yet that term is, ironically, the vague omni-menace conjured by Trump administration hawks to justify their approach to Cuba, among other places. Last month, the State Department unveiled a 100-page report titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st-Century Communism. A seminal piece of MAGA propaganda, the document argues — laughably — that Cuba represents an existential risk to Americans through its sponsorship of “Third Worldism”: an anti-Western animus, replacing traditional Marxism, that supposedly unites resentful foreign hordes the world over.

Speaking with Fox News on the administration’s Cuba policy, Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed the report, stating: “To the average American, you see Cuba, a small country — but people forget that they actually are an influence and espionage superpower.” 

Rubio’s words were transparently aimed at integrating MAGA talking points with the, well, Third World grievances of his fellow Miamians. Figures like YouTube influencer Alex Otaola, businessman Marcell Felipe, and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.). In fact, it’s these Miami neocons — of mostly Cuban but also Nicaraguan and South American descent — who, in a sense, refuse to assimilate to “Northern” concerns and aspirations, even as they reside here. They also command disproportionate influence on US foreign policy.

 Within the confines of South Florida, it’s hard to miss signs of Third Worldism of a more mundane variety: dead people sign off on building inspections in the Cuban-American suburb of Hialeah; Miami’s notoriously corrupt city council also attempted to cancel 2025’s municipal elections. For decades in South Florida, “Cocaine Cowboys,” such as the infamous drug kingpin Sal Magluta, evaded justice, including one occasion when Magluta walked out of jail after bribing officials. In the past decade, attempted overthrows of not one, or two, but three sitting foreign presidents were plotted by private citizens in Miami, one of which resulted in the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse.     

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Of course, in Miami, English is a second language. Stumble upon the odd heartland tourist in Miami Beach — like my Appalachian in-laws — and you’ll witness MAGA horror at the sight of hedonistic spring breakers mingling with “too many Latins,” many of whom don’t appear to speak English. Indeed, they don’t. Roughly 75% of residents of Miami-Dade County speak Spanish, with 25% lacking English proficiency. Yet the irony is that many of Miami’s Latin invaders are among the most fervent “anti-communist” supporters of President Trump.

Enter the household of your typical MAGA Miamian for “cafecito,” and you’re likely to view an angry YouTube stream from city native Alexander Otaola. A testament to GOP inclusion, the flamboyantly gay Otaola is an archetypal Miami neocon. Much like Fidel Castro, the bearded pundit diatribes extemporaneously for three hours every weekday, railing against the perceived enemies of US-sponsored “freedom and democracy.” With an audience of around 1 million, his show, ¡Hola Otaola!, is interladen with infomercials for Miami-based plastic surgeons, gold chains, and “anti-communist realtors.”

In 2024, Otaola ran a failed campaign for Miami-Dade county mayor. Naturally, the erstwhile Nixon and Trump consigliere Roger Stone was an advisor; in their shared appearances, the pair’s exchanges were consistently moderated by a Spanish-language interpreter. The fact that the Otaola doesn’t speak English likely cost him with English-language voters. 

Much the same can be said of Otaola’s countless controversies over his censorious — some might say “Third World” — tendencies. The Miami YouTuber rightly derides the Cuban regime over its rampant censorship, surveillance, and state-sponsored humiliations of dissidents. Yet Otaola himself promotes routine boycotts of Cuban artists from his “red list” of those who perform on the island. 

In 2023, he staged a protest caravan to censure a book talk, on the US government’s preferential policies toward Cuban immigrants, by Boston University professor Susan Eckstein. Otaola’s protesters also heckled Eckstein during the event, calling her “comunista”; his student supporters naturally claimed that her presence on campus made them feel “unsafe.” As one Cuban-born attendee later told me, Otaola’s antics reminded him of nothing so much as the Stalinist tactics used by the Havana regime to humiliate opponents, known as “acts of repudiation.”

Reacting to the release of the Cuba Report, Otaola lauded Rubio and the State Department for documenting “step-by-step, minute-by-minute how Havana has been training, funding, and organizing [Left-wing] groups in order to destroy free societies.” To be sure, the body of the report documents the very real affinities — and, in some cases, linkages — between Havana and Leftist radicals like the Weather Underground and the Democratic Socialists of America; last week, DSA co-chair Megan Romer mouthed the revolting words: “Cubans have access to their democracy in a way that we do not.”

Yet the State report is, in some ways, a break with Miami-neocon orthodoxy. Contrary to the view of older exiles, who hold that Fidel was practically born a Communist, the State Department claims that Marxism “was not the original battle cry of the Cuban Revolution.” Instead, it was the far more insidious “Third Worldism”: a planetary struggle, erupting after World War II, between decolonized countries and “Western civilization itself.” Never mind that Washington supported postwar decolonization in Asia and Africa. 

Where is this stuff coming from? A possible source of inspiration may be the Cuban-American businessman Marcell Felipe. The head of several of Miami’s neoconservative jobs programs — including the media group América TeVé, Inspire America Foundation, and the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora — Felipe has been at the forefront of Cuban-American outreach within the MAGA Right.

As an attendee of the 2021 National Conservatism conference in Orlando, I was disillusioned to see Miami neocons like Rubio and Felipe alongside ostensible MAGA restrainers such as JD Vance and Michael Anton. During his address — titled, “Why Cubans Get the Marxist Threat” — Felipe presaged Rubio’s future report, arguing that Havana had adapted its communism in order to infiltrate US institutions via “cultural Marxism.” 

By definition, Miami neoconservatism is an evangelical, imperial ideology incompatible with the concept of national sovereignty. At every turn, Miami neocons, Rubio most notably, have found ways of integrating otherwise distinct foreign-policy objectives. Whether it’s fusing regime change in Cuba and Venezuela with the Iran war and the war on drugs, the view from South Florida hawks is that any and all evils trace back to a sinister, interconnected axis stretching from Beijing to Tehran to Moscow to Havana. “Third Worldism” is just the latest spin on this omnicause — one which conveniently centers Cuba and Iran.

Unsurprisingly, the Miami trio of lawmakers Carlos Gimenez, Maria Elvira Salazar, and Mario Diaz-Balart are the most consistently hawkish on everything from fomenting proxy wars against Russia in Ukraine, Syria, and West Africa to putting boots on the ground in Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and, of course, Cuba. Within the trio, the most emblematic is Diaz-Balart, whose roots trace back to the highest echelons of the pre-Castro dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

A darling of the gangsters Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, Batista turned Havana’s luxury hotels and casinos over to the US mob in exchange for a personal cut of casino earnings — a reality fictionalized in The Godfather Part II. In turn, his CIA-trained forces killed or disappeared at least 1,500 dissident Cubans during the 1950s. During this time, Diaz-Balart’s father, Rafael, served as Batista’s undersecretary of the interior and as majority leader in the Cuban House of Representatives. In many parts of the West, familial ties to a murderous Third World dictatorship would disqualify any politician in the eyes of voters. But in neoconservative South Florida, such ties portend a life term in Congress.

The irony is that Diaz-Balart’s father was a youth supporter of Batista going back to the dictator’s populist — and Communist-supported — first term in the 1940s. Batista featured members of the Marxist Popular Socialist Party in his cabinet until 1944 and maintained tacit support from the party until 1958. Indeed, the fact that opposition to Batista was both overwhelming and ideologically diverse contributed to the CIA’s pre-1960 determination that Fidel Castro wasn’t a communist; a further irony is that Diaz-Balart’s paternal aunt, Mirta, married Castro.

Naturally, all of this is glossed over by Diaz-Balart and other Miami neocons, who romanticize a pre-Marxist utopia on the island and ignore the legitimate grievances that led to the 1959 revolution in the first place. (In the same way, deluded progressives like DSA co-chair Ashik Saddique gloss over those who aided the revolution but nonetheless were jailed or executed for opposing Castro.)

Instead, the congressman devotes most of his time to regime change abroad; Diaz-Balart’s office features an autocrat collage of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Iran’s Ali Khamenei, Cuba’s Raul Castro, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega with the labels: “Arrested,” “Eliminated,” and “Indicted.” 

Accordingly, Diaz-Balart has celebrated the State Department’s screed against Cuban-sponsored “Third Worldism.” Yet much like his late relative-by-marriage Fidel Castro, the congressman has very recently embraced the anti-colonial cause elsewhere — in North Africa. 

Last month, tens of thousands of Moroccan migrants swarmed Ceuta, a city on the North African Coast which Spain has controlled since the 15th century. One could be forgiven for assuming that the Spanish-descended Diaz-Balart would be an avid defender of Spanish Christendom over the invading Muslim hordes. Quite the contrary: the Miami neocon has called for Moroccan annexation of Ceuta and its sister enclave, Melilla, arguing that the pair “are not in the geographic territory of Spain.”

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Wait — what happened to anti-Third Worldist zeal here? Shouldn’t an opponent of Third Worldism defend Christian Spain’s honor? 

Nope. Contrived as they may seem, the congressman’s words ultimately follow a neoconservative logic centered on Cuba. The Spanish government under Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has been harshly critical of Israel and of America’s conduct in Iran; the Islamic Republic is, of course, a staunch ally of Havana. In contrast, Morocco has taken pains to ally itself with Trump and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu — a fact which presumably validates the country’s decolonial grievances against Spain. This, even as Diaz-Balart condemns other forms of decoloniality as Third Worldism.

By far, the most damning aspect of Miami-neocon Third Worldism is the fact that the ideology is responsible for some of America’s worst homegrown terrorists. The State Department’s Cuba report rightly condemns Cuban support for Left-wing groups that carried out hundreds of bombings throughout the United States in the 1970s. “In one 18-month period between 1971 and 1972,” the report notes, “the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil” by homegrown radicals. Yet the report conveniently omits that some of these radicals were Right-wing Cuban-Americans, and many of their victims were fellow Cuban exiles who were perceived as insufficiently anti-communist.

In the same decade, authorities linked Cuban-Americans to 113 bombings in the United States, including the 1976 car bombing of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier, conducted in concert with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s intelligence services. Beyond the US homeland, Miami-based Cuban exiles were responsible for 45% of all bombings on the planet in 1974. In 1976, the Coordinación de Organizaciones Revolucionarias Unidas, headed by Miami terrorist Orlando Bosch, bombed Cubana Flight 455, killing all 73 people on board; CORU was likewise responsible for killing Letelier days prior. Bosch was eventually arrested before being pardoned by George H. W. Bush, thanks to lobbying by Miami Rep. Ilean Ros-Lehtinen, who called Bosch a “patriot and hero” upon his release.

The sad truth is that the uniparty in Washington has long condoned Third Worldism on the part of the Miami neocons; Bosch worked at various points for the CIA. The fact that Miami Third Worldism has risen to new heights under Trump owes largely to the president’s choice of Rubio as secretary of state. As MAGA apostate Pedro Gonzalez has argued, moreover, Trumpism can sometimes display the aspects of a Third World movement; last December, Miami-Dade’s Hialeah suburb announced the construction of a bronze, 12-foot statue of “Donald Trump the Fighter.” Whether in rhetoric or substance, Trump resembles many hostile and friendly Latin American caudillos.

Come what may, it seems clear that competing strands of tinpot Third Worldism will continue to hold sway over the most jingoistic and deluded in MAGA and the DSA respectively. In the unlikely event of a course correction in MAGA or Miami, the city’s neoconservative Latinos would do well to emulate their Mexican-American peers. Aside from a handful of US-based elite Mexicans, most Mexican-Americans — many of whom have lived in the United States for centuries — neither know nor care what goes on politically south of the border; adults of Mexican heritage likewise have one of the highest rates of English proficiency: at 69%, compared 59% of Cubans and 51% of Venezuelans.

Until Miami neocons assimilate into the American polity by renouncing their faith in regime-change wars — and learning English — they will inevitably entangle the rest of us in the petty grievances of America’s Magic City.

The more the United States comes to dominate Latin America, the more Latin Americans will come to dominate the United States. 

Earlier this year, President Trump was taken with the idea of making Venezuela the 51st state. Such threats to annex portions of the Americas have become almost routine: Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal, and now Venezuela. Previous US expansion schemes failed in Baja California, the Yucatan, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and even Quebec.

Yet it is worth dwelling on what an American Venezuela would mean for the United States. The Bolivarian Republic has a population just shy of 32 million people. As the 51st star on the American flag, it would be the second largest state in the union by population, behind only California and just ahead of Texas. Allocated a fair number of electoral college votes, it would overnight become the decisive swing state in any US presidential election, with more people than Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio combined. 

Presiding over the greatest expansion of US citizenship to a Latin American population ever would be an ironic outcome for MAGA. By comparison, the Reagan Amnesty of 1986 extended a pathway to citizenship to fewer than 3 million undocumented immigrants, predominantly from Latin America. The Trump administration is currently trying to strip 600,000 Venezuelans living in the United States of Temporary Protected Status, a legal category that protects foreign nationals from deportation but does not offer a pathway to US citizenship. To then turn around and offer it to 32 million Venezuelans, who would then presumably be free to move across state lines, would be unexpected to say the least.

Assuming any deeper thought has been put into it, perhaps the kind of US citizenship envisioned for Venezuelans in this hypothetical 51st state is a second-class variety. This was the experience of the newly minted Mexican-Americans created by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and put the territories of New Mexico, and California under US control. The former Mexican citizens lost much of their land to white settlers during the Gold Rush, and were not able to call on the rule of law to defend themselves. De facto second-class status is already the case for US citizens of Latin American origin today, thanks to the Trump administration’s deportation policies and its reliance on racial profiling, a reality that has been driving an ever-growing number of Latinos away from Trump’s political coalition. Perhaps he simply hopes to create in Venezuela a population of US-citizen Latinos who would still like to vote for him. 

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In reality, the annexation of Venezuela is highly unlikely. Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez has been accommodating to Trump since the US capture of her predecessor, but even for her, the prospect of complete annexation seems a bridge too far. The prospect of a prolonged counterinsurgency is probably unattractive. Indeed, guerrilla resistance was a major factor in protecting Mexican territory in Baja California, Sonora, and the Yucatan Peninsula from annexation by the United States during negotiations for the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Members of Congress were also opposed, not just liberal opponents of the war, but also white supremacists. As slaveholder Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina put it: “Are we to associate with ourselves as equals, companions, and fellow-citizens, the Indians and mixed race of Mexico?” There’s probably at least one Groyper in the White House wondering the same about Venezuela right now. 

Yet, it is worth acknowledging that becoming US citizens would suit many Venezuelans, Cubans, and Mexicans just fine. Many risk life and limb merely to work in America, even without the hope of becoming citizens. As unhappy as Puerto Ricans are with their commonwealth status, at least they can move to New York City or Miami at will, and vote the moment they get there. Many Latin Americans are envious. 

Furthermore, decisions that dramatically impact Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela are being made in Washington every day. Everything from Mexico’s security policy to Cuba’s ability to import oil is being decided by the White House. And Nicolas Maduro, nominally the head of a foreign state, is being treated not as a prisoner of war, but as a common criminal arrested under US law, and charged in a Manhattan court. If the lives of Cubans, Venezuelans, and Mexicans are going to be shaped by the US presidency and their sovereign leaders subject to US laws, wouldn’t it be fair if they at least got to vote on it? 

Many more millions of Latin Americans will indeed get to vote. Whether naturalized immigrants or their far more numerous US-born descendants, they are already one of America’s largest voting blocs. The first Latin Americans to obtain US citizenship at scale were the conquered Mexicans of the Southwest. Millions more Mexicans would later migrate north into the former Mexican territories, often actively recruited as cheap labor to work in the extractive industries of the American West. American military conquest similarly created the other large and permanent US-citizen population of Latin Americans when it annexed Puerto Rico after defeating Spain in 1898. If you are unhappy that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is eligible to run for president, blame President McKinley. 

Meanwhile Cuba, while not formally annexed, was subjected to near-total US economic and political control, a quasi-colonial reality only broken by Fidel Castro in 1959, though Trump is now attempting to reverse the outcome. The political and economic entanglements with Cuba created a vast Cuban diaspora in the United States, even before Castro came to power. For example, Marco Rubio’s parents came to Florida not as political refugees but as economic migrants two years before the Cuban Revolution. 

In more recent history, US trade policies like NAFTA created dislocation and job loss in Mexico’s agricultural heartlands, at a scale similar to the destruction of the Midwestern Rust Belt. Millions of Mexicans headed north to build new lives in the United States, very belatedly meeting the hopes of the Spanish Crown in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries to settle its vast North American empire with Catholic Spanish-speakers. And these pioneers in the 1990s and 2000s largely remain in the United States today, excluded from citizenship, essential for our economy, and having in most cases already produced US-born offspring. They are increasingly joining electoral populist revolts of both the Right and Left — and have proven to be open to Trump’s pitch. Yet if you deport their parents, they have the ability to punish you at the polls. 

Despite its recent Latino support, Trumpism first emerged as a backlash to the post-NAFTA wave of mass Mexican migration. Earlier Anglo-American backlash, such as the state-level efforts of Proposition 187 in California or Senate Bill 1070 in Arizona had already made immigration the defining conservative issue in the American Southwest, an issue that ultimately helped shift both states blue. The restrictionist tendency has found its champion in Trump. Yet the US has already become a Latin American country in ways the Trump presidency is unable to reverse. And this would still be true if every undocumented immigrant were somehow deported tomorrow. 

The United States is already home to more native Spanish-speakers than any country other than Mexico. Latin American cultural influence abounds — the Bad Bunny performance at the Super Bowl was remarkable precisely because of how mundane it was. And the American Right itself is ever more Latin American. In 2024, Trump won his second term in large part because of historic levels of Latino support. Marco Rubio, the first man since Henry Kissinger to simultaneously serve as both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, records tributes to the United States’ distinctly Hispanic and Catholic roots. The Border Patrol agents who shot Alex Pretti in Minneapolis are both Mexican-Americans. Hispanic authoritarians from Bukele to Pinochet to Franco are figures of open admiration in many corners of the American Right. The infamous Nick Fuentes is proud of his Hispanic heritage. In Donald Trump’s America, even our Nazis are Mexican! 

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Geopolitically, a US shift away from Europe and towards Latin America is also a defining feature of Trump’s second term. The White House endorses presidential candidates in Latin American contests as routinely as if they were governor’s races in a US state. And often, the MAGA label is attractive to voters in Honduras, Argentina, Colombia, and elsewhere in Latin America. Rubio’s “Americas First” foreign policy — experienced by Latin Americans as bullying and Europeans as abandonment — can nevertheless be read as Washington finally realizing exactly where it is and who it shares the continent with. The rumored possible shift in the US position on the Falkland Islands — from backing Britain to backing Argentina — should be understood as merely the geopolitical manifestation of America’s increasing Hispanization. The United States today is as much part of Latin America as it is the Anglosphere. It is, in Trump’s words, “OUR hemisphere.” And the more Latin America belongs to the US, the more Latin American the US will become.

It’s already happening. For Anglo politicians from the Southwest like Beto O’Rourke or George W. Bush, the ability to deploy Spanish is now an indispensable part of retail politics. Down the class ladder, white guys aspiring to work anywhere from a kitchen to a construction site need to pick up a fair amount of español just to talk to the other guys. Even Pope Leo, the first American Pope, is really more of a Latin American, admitting he would prefer to root for Peru in the World Cup over the United States. The pontiff is simply the highest-profile example of the reverse assimilation into Latinidad that will become an ever more common part of 21st-century American life.

It is natural then for both Republicans and Democrats to want to elevate Latino candidates to win over an increasingly Latino electorate. Based on recent 2028 polling, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio is a frontrunner for the Republican one. The 2028 campaign for the White House could well be between a Miami Cuban and a Bronx Boricua. That’s what a Monroe Doctrine gets you.

A Latino-on-Latina presidential contest in 2028 would be an objectively funny way to finally bring the Trump era of American politics to a close. A political movement which began with “Build the Wall” as its defining slogan and has lately devolved into “annex Venezuela” was never going to reverse centuries-long migration and demographic patterns. Whether these changes usher in a Lusotropical Neoconservatism or a Mestizo Socialism remains to be seen. Yet the arc of the moral universe is bending inexorably towards Latinidad. This may be the future that MAGA deserves: oprime 2 para inglés. 

And so Pedro told Tony his life story: his rustic childhood in Villa Clara, his polio diagnosis, his days in Havana, his stint as a lector in a cigar factory, reading adventure novels to the cigar rollers. Pedro also told Tony about the greatness of the United States. One day, sitting on the porch, Tony made a promise to his grandfather: when he grew up, he would “lead an army of exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro and become president of a free Cuba”.

Even after Little Tony had become US Secretary of State Marco Antonio Rubio, he never forgot that promise. In his memoir An American Son (2012), in which he reminisces about that Miami porch, he describes Pedro as his “tutor”. And it seems he is still trying to make him proud. Since January, the Trump administration has been closing in on Cuba. It has tightened its embargo and sent the US navy to circle the island like a shiver of sharks. The US Justice Department has also indicted former leader Raúl Castro for murder. As always, the Cuban people are bearing the brunt of the US campaign of maximum pressure. Blackouts take place daily, and food and medicine are hard to come by. And as always, the pinchos grandes are comfortable in their fortified mansions, with their back-up generators and well-stocked fridges.

Against this dramatic backdrop, rumors abound that the US will invade. “Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years,” Trump mused back in May, “and it looks like I’ll be the one that does it. So, I would be happy to do it.” Rubio’s message has been much the same of late. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to change the trajectory of Cuba,” he said, “as long as these people are in charge.”

Whether this is fighting talk or just bluff is anyone’s guess. Given the Iranian quagmire, Trump and Rubio might choose instead to play the long game with Cuba. “What we’re trying to teach them is there are no escape valves,” Rubio told Axios last week. “One of the things we’ve lost in American foreign policy is the concept of patience and persistence. My level of confidence is that when this administration is over, at a minimum, Cuba will be on an irreversible glide path toward a different future.” The future Rubio envisions is pretty clear: he wants to bring down the communist leadership and privatize the economy. And he is prepared to wait. It’s difficult, however, to imagine Cuba resisting for that much longer. 

For Trump, getting the better of Cuba is a crucial part of his Donroe Doctrine. After getting rid of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, he wants to further US dominance in the Southern Hemisphere. Despite its tiny size, Cuba carries huge symbolic significance. It was the outpost of the Soviet Union during the Cold War and today is a Chinese ally. American presidents since John F. Kennedy have tried to oust the communist regime. Not one has even come close. To pull it off would be legacy-defining. After Trump’s humiliating climbdown in Iran, he needs a win to restore his tough-guy image — and Cuba makes for easy prey.

For Rubio, however, this is personal. He has been harboring a grudge against Cuba’s leaders since childhood, biding his time. Dale tiempo al tiempo, as the Latin American proverb goes. Give time to time. Now, at last, he may be nearing his grand finale. In a video message in Spanish to the Cuban people, Rubio promised “a new path between the US and a new Cuba”. He added, “The only thing standing in the way of a better future are those who control your country.” 

Their country is also Rubio’s, although he has never set foot there. He was born in Miami in 1971, 12 years after the revolution which saw Fidel Castro sweep into power in Havana. Castro promised to free the island from the rule of Fulgencio Batista, a military strongman backed by the US. But it soon became obvious that Castro had no interest in democracy. In 1961, he came out as a Marxist-Leninist and aligned with the Soviet Union. Between 1959 and 1973, more than 600,000 Cubans emigrated to the United States. Castro called them gusanos (worms). They called themselves exiles. The vast majority settled in Miami, congregating south of downtown in a cheap neighborhood now known as Little Havana. Soon there were Cuban eateries and Cuban barber shops and Cuban jewelry stores. Castro’s kid sister, who hated him, even opened a pharmacy there.

Rubio grew up not far from Little Havana. Although he lived between the ages of eight and 13 in Las Vegas, where his father worked as a hotel bartender, he is a true product of Cuban Miami. He liked to tell people that his parents fled Cuba in 1959, the year of the revolution. This origin story fueled his rise in the Republican Party of Florida and later in national politics. In 2009, during his run for the Senate, he tweeted: “Thank you USA for welcoming my parents 50 years ago.” Two years later, Rubio told an interviewer that “the direction we’re going in Washington, DC, would make us more like the rest of the world, and not like the exceptional nation that my parents found when they came here from Cuba in 1959.”

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Except that’s not quite how it happened. In 2011, two American reporters, Manuel Roig-Franzia and Alex Leary, broke a big scoop: Rubio’s parents had actually settled in Miami in 1956, three years before the revolution. At the time, Castro was in Mexico plotting the revolution. This means the Rubios left Cuba in search of the American dream, rather than to escape communism. In Miami’s exile community, pre-Castro economic migrants are derided as verduleros (vegetable street vendors).

One can guess why Rubio preferred to say his parents arrived in 1959: it surely made for a better, neater story. Critics who insisted he lied purely for “political gain” were missing the point. His attempt at self-mythology tells us a lot about how he sees himself and his political mission. It seems Rubio has internalized his community’s history. Three years naturally makes a big difference to journalists, but I imagine they make little psychological difference to a Cuban kid growing up in Miami.

“Look, that’s not the way it was discussed in our family or by many people in the exile community,” Rubio explained after the story broke in 2011. “It’s more about the loss of their home country.” In the minds of Cuban exiles, their native island is akin to the promised land. “Next year in Havana!” is a popular slogan in Miami, a riff on the Jewish phrase, “Next year in Jerusalem!”, pronounced during Passover.

Besides, Rubio’s grandfather, Pedro, did leave Cuba after Castro’s takeover. He had actually first moved to the US in 1956 to be closer to his daughters, according to Roig-Franzia’s 2012 biography of Rubio. But after the revolution he moved back to the island. He struggled to make a living in the US and didn’t want to be a burden to his family. At the time, there was still hope that something positive would come out of the revolution. Pedro even found a decent job as a clerk in a government ministry. But he couldn’t stand the oppressive atmosphere. Soon, he was back in Miami.

Immediately after the revolution, Cuban exiles began plotting ways to reverse it. Young Rubio wasn’t the first to dream of toppling Castro. As early as 1960, the US government had set out its Cuba policy in a secret memo: “to bring about the replacement of the Castro regime with one more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the US.” How would it do that exactly? “Covert action.” And who would carry that out? Cuban exiles, for the most part.

The opening shot in the contrarrevolución came in 1961, when the US landed 1,500 Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in southern Cuba. Castro’s forces were ready for them and struck back hard. The only chance of success would have been for the US to provide air support. President Kennedy refused, and the invasion was defeated. But the exiles, and the CIA, never stopped plotting to take down Castro. Through the decades, Miami buzzed with intrigue. 

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Rubio came of age in this feverish urban swamp. At home or in his car, he would tune in to Radio Mambi or WQBA, which broadcast round the clock about the evils of Castro and the heroism of the exiles. This time, the master plan would work out, this was the one. Next year in Havana! Business deals and secret plots were hatched at corner tables at restaurants like Versailles or the Tropical. And violence was never far away, as journalist Ann Louise Bardach reveals in her 2004 book Cuba Confidential. Hardline exiles targeted anyone deemed too soft. Dialogueros, who supported negotiations with the Cuban government, were traitors. And there was only one way to deal with traitors: with a bullet to la cabeza. Between 1973 and 1976, anti-Castro groups carried out more than 100 attacks in South Florida. The exile banker Bernardo Benes told Bardach that “Miami is like Guatemala”. Benes lived in constant fear for his life after brokering a deal in 1978 that freed 3,600 political prisoners from Castro’s jails. “No one is interested in free speech in Dade County. Only in Havana.”

The exile community was hierarchical. The Rubios, who had working-class jobs and went out for pancakes every Sunday morning, were nowhere near the top. El jefe was the late Jorge Mas Canosa, the billionaire founder of the Cuban American National Foundation. His statue now overlooks Miami Beach. He was a power broker who spoke like a heavy in a Forties film noir. Once, when lobbying a congressman, he reportedly said: “If you cooperate with me you get the honey. Otherwise, I hit you with the jar.” Another heavyweight exile was Rafael Díaz-Balart, former brother-in-law of Fidel. At the turn of the century, two of his sons went into politics and were elected to the US Congress. In Little Havana, they were hailed as the chosen ones, destined to free their homeland. 

Yet it was a young campaign volunteer who would reach the top. By now, people called him Marco. After graduating from law school in Miami, Rubio set his sights on a political career. At 34, he became the speaker of the Florida House of Representatives. Five years later, a US senator. And at 53, Secretary of State. Among ambitious Cuban-Americans, he was never the most likely to find himself in this position. Others were richer, better connected. And yet here he is. A talented, hungry politician with a killer instinct. 

Now comes his biggest political test yet. Rubio has long been seen as the archetypal Republican hawk. His idol is Ronald Reagan. Growing up, he writes in his memoir, his grandfather Pedro would tell him: “America must be a strong country.” That belief in American exceptionalism motivates Rubio as much as his hostility towards the Cuban regime. To be sure, US leaders shouldn’t conduct foreign policy based on desires of revenge. And if they are the children of immigrants, they shouldn’t import their parents’ feuds. But this isn’t the case here: Rubio’s feud with Cuba is also America’s feud. The island nation remains a hub in the anti-American axis. 

When Rubio was 13 and still went as Tony, his grandfather Pedro was admitted into hospital. He didn’t have long. Tony was at his bedside throughout, and as Pedro died he took his hand. “I swore I would do something with my life and make him proud,” Rubio wrote in his memoir. Decades later, he is in the unique position to vanquish one of America’s oldest foes, and avenge his family. Will he succeed?

The report does indeed read like a criminal indictment. It chronicles the 75-year history of espionage and political subversion by Fidel Castro’s regime against the US, as well as the relationships between current Left-wing organizations in the US (like the Democratic Socialists of America and the National Lawyers Guild) and operatives in Havana. 

If intended as a piece of prewar propaganda, it’s a curious one. Grandiose title notwithstanding, the report does little to prove that Cuba in 2026 remains the powerhouse of intelligence and political operations that it was in the Seventies or even the early 2000s. If anything, it shows that the seeds of political subversion that Cuba sowed on American soil in those earlier decades have become self-sustaining. 

But if the report fails as a military cri de coeur, it provides a brilliant summary of the political strategy of Third-Worldism — pioneered by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and now practiced by governments and organizations worldwide from South Africa to Hamas. And in the process, it turns a mirror back on the United States, asking what it is that makes free societies like our own uniquely susceptible to subversion by overseas Left-wing totalitarians.

The report begins by establishing a central fact in Cold War history that remains little-understood. This is that by the time of the Cuban Revolution in 1953, the Soviet Union and Cuba were practicing fundamentally different types of communism. And it was the Cuban type that would dominate the international politics of the late 20th century. 

On top of Russia’s class-struggle communism, Cuba superimposed an element of racial and ethnic struggle. By identifying liberation from white colonial oppressors with a communist command-and-control economic system, Cuba and other Third-Worldist political movements were able to maintain the approval of the mostly rural poor populations they controlled, even while making their lives materially worse.

Castro and Guevara’s Third-Worldist communism also appealed far more to the ethnically-diverse First World than the ideologies of Stalin and Khrushchev did. And observing this, Leftist governments around the world were quick to emulate Cuba, finding that they could attract a broad base of public support inside nations like the United States by appealing to a racial or ethnic “coalition of the oppressed”. This strategy helped Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, among others, to build fifth columns of support within the US, sowing internal divisions over American foreign policy toward those nations. More importantly, Third-Worldism allowed communist ideologues to strike a blow against the capitalist powers by convincing them to degrade themselves from within.

The strategy’s secret was its ability to achieve impressive foreign influence for minimal economic cost. While Castro’s Cuba devoted significant resources to supporting Leftist political or paramilitary activities from Venezuela to Angola, as well as spying and subversion in the US, its outlays on those activities were dwarfed by those of the Soviet Union. It was the emotional tug of the Third-Worldist message, more than money, that enabled tinpot Leftist dictatorships, even while their domestic economies and political systems languished, to conduct effective international public relations campaigns on the cheap. 

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Is Polymarket a threat to democracy?

By John Masko

The appeal of Third-Worldism made it easy for Cuba’s Dirección de Inteligencia (DI) to recruit intelligence assets in the United States. All Cuban agents had to do was lie in wait at US policy schools, find students whose political sympathies had so alienated them from their country that they were ready to betray it, and wait for those students — once graduated — to achieve high-ranking positions in government. The State Department’s report cites three of many such cases, all of whom — Victor Manuel Rocha, Ana Belén Montes, and Walter and Gwendolyn Myers — operated as spies for Cuba over multiple decades. All are remarkable for their monolithic loyalty to the Cuban regime, their remorselessness, and their purely political motivations. As the authors write of Montes, who was once considered the Defense Intelligence Agency’s top Cuba analyst:

When the Department of Defense’s Inspector General completed a review of [her] case in 2005, it found no credible evidence that Montes accepted any significant financial compensation from the Cubans. Her motives were purely political: The review found that “her ideological disposition fostered a negative view of U.S. foreign policy, and that fixation coupled with a sense of moral righteousness sealed her commitment to a cause from which there was no alternative, at least in her mind.

As it recruited spies, Castroist Cuba forged political alliances with nascent Left-wing activists and organizations in the US. To understand how, we must recall that prior to Cuba’s formal alliance with the Soviet Union, many Americans had sympathized with Cuba’s revolution and greatly admired Castro. In 1959, he had even undertaken a whistlestop tour of the United States. On a stop in Boston, he delivered an address to Harvard students where he was introduced by McGeorge Bundy, then the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. 

Three years later, the very same McGeorge Bundy would be plotting to slip him an exploding cigar as John F. Kennedy’s national security adviser. Castro’s reputation among mainstream Americans had soured dramatically following his public embrace of communism and the Soviet Union, yet he maintained a cult following among students on the American Left. As America’s civil rights movement morphed into the radicalism and riots of the Vietnam era, Castro made sure that Cuba was there to support and nurture that radicalism.

As the State Department report chronicles, Cuba’s main tool for achieving this was an exchange program for Left-wing activists called the Venceremos (“We will prevail”) Brigades. Under this program, young activists (or terrorists) were flown to Havana and given five-star treatment, ideological education, and access to Cuban officials. This inaugurated a lifelong relationship with the Cuban government with Venceremos alumni serving both as intelligence assets and political agents, subverting the United States and hastening the global communist revolution. 

Some of Venceremos’ early graduates included domestic terrorists and Weather Underground founders William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, as well as the founders of the Black Liberation Army (BLA) and Black Panther Party. Through institutions like the Tricontinental Conference, Havana made itself a meeting and breeding ground for organizations and individuals devoted to revolution in the US. Those organizations and individuals returned home and became distinguished university professors, social leaders, and even government officials. And when they ran afoul of US authorities (as did convicted cop-killer and BLA leader Assata Shakur), Cuba could be relied on to succor them as fugitives.

The State Department’s authors deftly demonstrate that these efforts have continued up to the present day. While today’s Cuba may lack the cool factor (and some of the funding) that Castro enjoyed, it continues to make common cause with America’s leading Left-wing organizations — among them, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), the People’s Forum, and Code Pink. Leaders of all these organizations have traveled to Havana and, in turn, expressed their support for the Cuban regime. In America, they represent the regime’s interests, from the NLG’s role as Cuba’s exclusive legal counsel in the US to the People’s Forum’s fiscal sponsorship of the Venceremos Brigades (enabling the Brigades to accept tax-deductible contributions from American taxpayers).

Like the American organizations Cuba recruited under Castro, they are all fundamentally revolutionary — meaning that they are devoted not to incrementally moving American policymaking in a Leftward direction, but to the transformation of the American state. To take the DSA as one example, the organization recently announced a platform advocating for the abolition of the US Senate and the US Supreme Court, moves that would obliterate the checks and balances that prevent America from becoming a Cuba-style command-and-control economy. With DSA-supported candidate Zohran Mamdani winning the mayoralty of New York last year, New York DSA-endorsed Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, and several other DSA endorsees shoo-ins for Congress this November, that platform no longer seems so unrealistic. 

While it’s a stretch to see the fingerprints of Cuba’s dying regime on the DSA’s recent successes, it’s far easier to see a through-line from marginal organizations like the Weather Underground and BLA, through the more radical corners of America’s universities, to today’s far more mainstream socialist radicals who seek to open government grocery stores, dictate housing costs, and inhibit immigration enforcement. Indeed, it’s no exaggeration to characterize America’s recent socialist drift as a long-range triumph of Fidel’s policy of Third-Worldism. 

The State Department’s recent report lays bare the uncomfortable truth that even as the Cuban state collapses in the year 2026, Fidel may be having the last laugh from beyond the grave. As the authors write of the DSA: “Today, it maintains a fierce, almost religious commitment to the cause of the Cuban regime — not because the group is controlled by Cuban agents, per se, but because that commitment is now simply the de facto policy orthodoxy on the American far left.”

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Can Cuba resist the US?

By Ioan Grillo

It seems that Fidel and America’s other Third-Worldist enemies understood something about America. They understood that our political institutions, our free markets, and our personal freedoms are the secret weapons that make Americans wealthy and America attractive. Those were the weapons that won us the Cold War. But they also knew that under economic or social stress, it’s easy for free people to take those blessings for granted. And they knew that by playing on America’s internal insecurities and social fissures, they might convince that free people to undermine its own institutions and values. Those enemies of the United States that have understood this best — Cuba, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, Iran, Hamas — have exercised an influence over American society that has far exceeded their financial investments. 

The report may not have the bearing on current policy that its writers seem to hope. Today’s Cuba is a shell of its former self — barely capable of delivering the post, let alone systematically influencing the politics of its enemies abroad. The history of subversion in the report isn’t necessary to justify an intervention in Cuba today; the daily sufferings of the Cuban people, the island’s decades of transparent anti-Americanism, and its current intelligence and military cooperation with China, Russia, and Iran are justification enough. 

But the report is a sign that the US government is finally beginning to take seriously our enemies’ exploitation of our free institutions to undermine our political order. If our leaders come to clearly understand the history of Cuba’s infiltration of the US, that will benefit not only our approach to today’s Chinese and Russian infiltration, espionage, and disinformation (on which we remain on our back foot), but also our policy toward Cuba’s Third-Worldist heirs, from Venezuela to Hamas. 

The report’s domestic lessons are just as valuable. It reminds us that when we look at political movements or organizations on our own shores — when we ask whether they are merely revisionist movements intending to reform our political process, or revolutionary ones aiming to destroy it — we should listen to our enemies. If those enemies see organizations like the Black Panther Party or the Democratic Socialists of America as allies in their quest to engineer America’s defeat, perhaps we should ask ourselves why.   

On a second reading, the report’s title — “Capital of 21st Century Communism” — takes on a tragicomic air. Cuba certainly was the capital of Seventies and Eighties communism; and a bitter, worthy, and threatening enemy of the United States. But not anymore. In 2026, our greatest enemy is ourselves.

When I visited Cuba last week, the country looked like it had been hit by an immense natural disaster — a hurricane, say, or an earthquake — that had shaken it to the core. But the crisis ravaging the island is man-made: a US blockade on fuel and goods is hammering a nation with an already dysfunctional economy under a dictatorship.

At night, power-cuts unleash a black cloud that envelops vast swaths of the tropical Caribbean island; residents huddle in candle-lit homes away from the dark, threatening streets. By day, you can see mountains of rubbish clogging up corners of Havana: mosquitoes, potentially carrying disease, buzz around the waste, while desperate men and women leaf through old boxes and tins for food. Highways are eerily quiet: sporadic buses go by along with the odd bicycle and even horse-driven carts, while scattered motorists search to buy gasoline at exorbitant prices. Many people look stressed, upset, and visibly hungry as they fight to get through another day.

While government food handouts used to keep Cubans in decent health, despite extremely low salaries, shops now only have a fraction of the rations to give them. The rice, beans and pork they provide are keeping people alive — and so far preventing a full-on famine — but the population is facing malnutrition, with the UN human rights chief Volker Türk saying that the blockade is “directly harming Cubans, especially the most vulnerable”. Even the public hospitals, long one of the Revolution’s key achievements, lack sufficient medicine and power.

On the seafront, I find a fisherman called Joaquín, 50, holding two fish he caught in a red plastic bucket. He also has a job as a TV repairman but says that has ground to a halt in the crisis. “The government is meant to provide us with [television] parts, but they haven’t got any. And there is no electricity most the time so who wants to fix their TV anyway,” he says. “This is rock bottom. I don’t care what happens now. It can’t get any worse.”

Cubans are exceptionally open and warm people. While many at first say they don’t talk politics, it often doesn’t take them long to get into it. I meet many Cubans who have government jobs but are also out hustling on the street, trying to buy and sell goods, to borrow and to scavenge, to get food for their family for that day. But the American blockade is squeezing them ever harder, with more foreign companies leaving the island, from French freight ships to Spanish hoteliers. Cubans try to withdraw their savings, but the banks only let them take out a few dollars worth each day. People form endless queues for small sums of cash. There are many other queues too: for rice rations, for medicine, for papers to get off the island.

Washington’s blockade is cruel and inhumane, and punishes the same poor people it purports to liberate. Yet America isn’t the only problem: Cuba suffers an authoritarian government whose proclaimed socialism is now a mere echo of the past. Billboards display revolutionary slogans and glorify guerrillas in the mountains in the Fifties, but this means little to most Cubans fighting for life’s basic needs in the 21st century. Meanwhile, a small clique of politicians and military officers cling to power for the spoils. Without Cuba’s revolutionary founding father Fidel Castro, who died in 2016, there is no charismatic strongman to lead the country.

How did Cuba reach this point? For decades, the Soviet Union provided the island with canned goods, resources and technology in return for sugar. However, after its fall in 1991, Cuba was hit by a major recession. It found a lifeline in tourism, with Europeans, Latin Americans, and Americans flocking to the island for its vibrant culture, beaches, and revolutionary chic — and in many cases for sex. In 2016, President Barack Obama encouraged this opening by visiting Havana, symbolizing a thaw in relations. But President Donald Trump refroze them in his first term. Then the tourist industry was clobbered by Covid and with the blockade it is now on the verge of collapse, with gigantic hotels almost empty.

“I just pray to make something in the day, to get one customer,” says Arienne, 50, a tour guide with thick black dreadlocks who shows people around the historic sites of Havana, sometimes with the help of a partner driving a classic Fifties Ford motorcar. As we walk down the narrow streets, the sounds of percussion pour out from a deteriorating colonial building and a dozen men and women chant and sway to a tropical rhythm. Even in its pain and hunger, Cuba’s spectacular music plays on.

Cuba has long endured US sanctions. Soon after Castro led his revolutionaries to seize Havana in 1959, Washington began a trade embargo, and Castro turned to embrace Moscow. But the blockade that Trump has erected this year is far more punishing. After US Delta Forces seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas on 3 January (and killed most of his Cuban bodyguards), Venezuela ended its fuel supplies that had kept the lights on across Cuba. Since then, Trump has pressured other countries including Mexico not to send oil tankers to the island and seized boats at sea trying to bring fuel. The blockade is the key cause of the blackouts, since Cuba depends largely on oil for electricity, although the nation’s power grid is also in a terrible state. The fuel shortage has a knock-on effect across all parts of life: people struggle to get to work, trucks can’t collect garbage, meat and shrimp go rotten.

I travel to the satellite town of Alamar, where Russian engineers used to live. Soviet-style concrete blocks line a rocky Caribbean beach. The situation here appears even worse than in central Havana, with several people telling me they haven’t been able to travel to their jobs in the city. My driver is a friendly, light-skinned 55-year-old called Benjamín, who has a compact car that he converted to hold a diesel engine. This makes our driving around affordable as he can find diesel on the street for $4 per liter, while fully refined gasoline goes for $10 per liter. He tells me that some of the fuel he buys has been swiped from supplies allotted for government buses. Curiously, the Trump administration allows some oil to be sold from the United States into Cuba’s private sector, which then circulates on the island.

Trump has not been explicit about what Cuba can do to get the blockade lifted. In April, the Cuban government announced the release of more than 2,000 prisoners from its jails in an apparent bid to appease Washington. On Friday, Cuba’s president Miguel Díaz-Canel also announced new reforms to open up the state-run economy more to the market. But with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cubans in Miami, shaping policy, the White House appears to want nothing short of regime change. It could switch Cuba’s president like it did in Venezuela, or even occupy the island.

The Pentagon has assembled a major force in the Caribbean, including the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier strike group, while the U.S. Justice Department indicted Fidel Castro’s brother (and former president), Raúl Castro, for ordering the shooting down of two American planes in 1996. At the age of 95, Raúl may not survive being whisked away by special forces, but the indictment could give Washington an excuse for invasion — although Trump might wait until he’s out of his Iran mess.

Critics of Trump and Rubio have a valid point that they might be more interested in looting the island’s resources than improving the lives of Cubans. Cuban exiles in Miami also have claims over property rights on the island going right back to 1959, which could be a nightmare to resolve. Some are also out for revenge. If the US were to knock out the government in Havana, it would risk pushing the island into chaos.

While the American blockade is making the lives of Cubans miserable, it’s not actually forcing the regime to collapse or the people to rise up. Protests are limited, often just consisting of people banging pots in the night. There were significant demonstrations in 2021, when Covid clobbered tourism, but police swiftly arrested demonstrators and many were given harsh prison sentences of up to 25 years for alleged crimes such as sedition, assault, and public disorder.

“Why risk going to protest?” says a bus driver, 28, who moves passengers in a rickety old truck on a route through the west of Havana. “If you already have a bunch of problems, you go to prison and then have a bunch more problems. Who is going to feed your family if you are in jail?”

The prospect of an uprising is also dampened by the fact that many of the young and strong fled Cuba in waves of emigration. The biggest surge came during the Covid crisis, with many Cubans taking advantage of permissions to travel to Nicaragua — run by the nominally socialist Sandinistas — and then heading through Mexico to the United States. One to two million people have left the island so far during the 2020s, according to estimates; the population has decreased by at least 10% and some estimate much higher. Many of those who remain are poorer, older, and more vulnerable. 

Miguel Díaz-Canel has called the US blockade “genocidal, criminal and inhumane”, and said that Cubans “will give our lives defending the Revolution”. But judging from the desperation I saw on the streets, it seems unlikely many Cuban people will battle a potential gringo invasion, or that soldiers will fight as fiercely as they did against the thwarted, CIA-organized Bay of Pigs attack in 1961. If US forces want to conquer Havana, they probably could — but the question is what to do after.

I find attitudes to the prospect of a US attack mixed. A couple of people talk angrily about the gringos. “They are sons of whores,” says one guy peddling a bicycle taxi. “Trump is a son of a whore.” (He pronounces Trump more like “Crump”.) “I wouldn’t talk to you if you were from the United States,” says another guy, who is trying to buy dollars with Cuban pesos.

The bus driver speculates that while the bloodshed would be bad, the United States could make Marco Rubio the president of Cuba, which he actually doesn’t object to. The fisherman Joaquín says more blatantly that a US attack would be good. “Let them come in and get rid of this bunch of thieves in power,” he says. When I ask him if he is worried that talk like that could land him in prison, he shrugs. “Things are terrible. They can’t do anything more to me.”

While Cuba was never as violently authoritarian as Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China, it is still a dictatorship. There is an extensive intelligence agency known as the G-2 and many government informants. The military is a sprawling organization that also controls much of the economy through a shady conglomerate known as GAESA. The government allows some private businesses, but they are limited and struggle to make money.

I talk to several people who used to support the Revolution but are now disillusioned with it; some gave up on it after the collapse of the Soviet Union, others following Fidel Castro’s death or during Covid. “Cubans were not really communists,” says my driver Benjamín. “They were Fidelistas. And without him it doesn’t work.”

Benjamín looks back to the Eighties, when Cuba was a more insular country, as the good old days when Cubans had enough food in their bellies. But he says that Cuba has to embrace a full market economy. I ask him if the nation should keep the free healthcare and other achievements of the Revolution. “In an ideal world, we would. But if it has to go then so be it.”

It could at least be argued that the Cuba of the late-20th century, which intellectuals from Jean-Paul Sartre to Gabriel García Márquez visited and celebrated, could have been a viable alternative model to capitalism — and the enchanting island still sits in the hearts of many in the international Left as the home of brave, bearded revolutionaries. But the broken Cuba of today is a world away from that, and foreigners who still promote it as an example of functioning socialism are often projecting a fantasy. As my driver Benjamín says: “If they think this is great they should change places with me. They wouldn’t last a week.”

Arienne, the tour guide, says the ruling party has to go but is less specific about what would replace it. “We need a government that provides dignity,” she says. Walking through Old Havana, we pass a graffiti saying “2+2=5”. I ask her if she knows the reference to George Orwell’s book 1984. She says she doesn’t: she just thought it meant that things are really bad.

For decades, Cuba has had low murder rates by Latin American standards — one of the achievements of Fidel Castro. The government, with the help of informants, made sure civilians didn’t have guns, and that muggers and thieves were quickly locked up. With the current shortages and blackouts, however, people tell me they are getting more worried about robbery, and that gangs are forming among youths in the barrios. “If they got guns here it would be worse than Mexico,” a motorcycle taxi driver tells me.

I go to the zoo in the south of Havana, where I am one of the only visitors. The lions, tigers and chimpanzees look haggard, hungry and aggressive; a jaguar bares its teeth to me. The zoo keeper explains that due to the shortages they are only giving the animals scraps. “I had a scare as I was feeding the tiger and it tried to break through a barrier and get me,” he says. Some hyenas have even begun killing each other. “They saw a weaker one and ate it,” the keeper says. “It’s a question of survival.”

I fear the fight for survival that could be unleashed in Cuba if the situation gets more severe. While some Cubans say it’s already at rock bottom, the cruel reality is that things can always get worse.

***

Note: Some names have been changed.

The administration’s reasoning is not merely that momentum is on its side, but that Maduro’s Venezuela — particularly its oil — had long served as one of very few lifelines available to a Cuban economy teetering on the edge of collapse. Now that Venezuela under Delcy Rodríguez has cut off that supply, an energy crisis is adding to an already bleak economic picture on the island. 

By 1 January, two days before Maduro’s removal from Venezuela, Cuba had lost over 10% of its population over the previous five years. Over the same period, the country’s GDP declined by 11%. Around the country, Cubans are today frequently in the dark, owing not only to energy shortages but a disintegrating power grid. Cuba continues to sort through the rubble of Hurricane Melissa, which last October damaged almost 100,000 homes and much of eastern Cuba’s farmland, while the country also faces an epidemic of dengue fever. 

To topple the government of Cuba — one which has held its population to early-20th century living standards, repressed all political dissent, and been a thorn in the side of US policy for six decades — has long been an impossible dream for American presidents. Only two years after Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s revolution, in 1959, President Kennedy failed multiple times to dislodge the new regime, whether by covert invasion force or assassination. 

Eventually, the US settled on an indefinite extension of the 1960 trade embargo, a policy designed to ensure that if a longtime friend and ally of Washington was suddenly going to embrace a political ideology antithetical to American values and interests, it would have no support from American commerce in doing so. The policy, which has persisted to this day, succeeded in washing America’s hands of communist Cuba. It failed entirely, however, to pressure Cuba to pursue a different course. 

The embargo’s failure would become synonymous with the axiom that one cannot starve revolutionaries out of their ideologies merely by disengaging with them. As both Cuba and the hermit kingdom of North Korea have shown, communist leaders can use their control over the flow of information to blame their citizens’ poverty on the very nations they have alienated, thus instilling an “us against the world” mentality that dulls the gnaw of poverty, keeps counterrevolution at bay, and preserves leaders’ power.

But even despots cannot ignore the needs of their people forever. After the Soviet Union’s fall in 1990 deprived Havana of a longtime source of international aid, Cuba’s GDP fell by a third. Its economy limped along for two decades. Desperate Cubans regularly left the island on unseaworthy crafts to seek asylum in America, in a manner reminiscent of the South Vietnamese “Boat People” of the Seventies. By 2010, Castro’s brother and successor Raúl was declaring that “we reform, or we sink”. 

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By Rana Mitter

In the early 2010s, Cuba conducted a surface-level political and economic reform sufficient to convince US President Barack Obama to normalize diplomatic relations with the island in 2014, for the first time since the Kennedy presidency, in exchange for Cuba allowing American investment in the island. But over the years that followed, most of those investments went nowhere, waylaid by a command-and-control economy that government insiders still controlled. There was therefore little American political resistance when President Trump cut off diplomatic relations again in 2017. In 2021, Cuba experienced its widest-reaching anti-government protests since the 1959 revolution. 

Today, Cuba — as a nation, a polity, and an economy — is at its lowest ebb since the collapse of the Soviet Union. With Fidel dead and Raúl retired, the family that held the Cuban communist project together is now gone. President Trump is right to see an opportunity. But to take advantage of that opportunity, he will need to bear in mind that Cuba is nothing like Venezuela. 

For one thing, Cuba is a bureaucratic government with power diffused among a large group of party elites. President Díaz-Canel was hand-picked by Cuba’s Communist Party apparatus, and elected by a congress controlled by it. While Venezuela also has a congress, Maduro was a strongman elected by popular (sometimes rigged) elections. Because Maduro was the main locus of political power, a “decapitation” strategy of removing him from the country stood a chance of drastically changing Venezuelan government policy even as the rest of the government structure remained intact. In the few weeks since Maduro’s arrest, this does indeed seem to be happening. But in Cuba, there is no Maduro figure to remove. Power resides in Cuba’s Communist Party and its congress. 

Another difference is ideology. Cuba is a one-party state. Venezuela, at least officially, is not. Venezuelan Chavists follow a populist socialist program with considerable ideological flexibility, whereas Cuba is notorious for its legalistic interpretation of Marxist-Leninist communism. While both nations have always had their share of graft, Chavist Venezuela’s lodestar is self-enrichment for the politically connected, whereas Cuba’s is Marxism-Leninism, even when it impoverishes everyone. 

And then there’s the question of historical memory. Whereas Venezuela was a functional democratic country within the memory of most Venezuelans, Cuba has been a communist dictatorship for as long as most Cubans have been alive. And even those few born during the reign of Cuba’s pre-revolutionary dictator Fulgencio Batista will find few lessons from that grim era.

Based on these contrasts, the Trump administration should instead base its Cuba policy on six decades of US experience with the country — as well as a century of experience with other communist regimes. These encounters might suggest that neither decapitation nor further economic sanctions are, in themselves, viable pathways to change in Cuba. An effective strategy, if it involves a stick in one hand, must be balanced by a carrot in the other.

The most powerful carrot in our arsenal is the prosperity that comes from friendship with the United States. American strategy must make it painfully clear to Cuban leaders and citizens alike what they are missing by not being full members of the international community and the Western Hemisphere specifically. Today’s American leaders can learn a great deal here from the statesmen of the late Cold War, particularly men like Secretary of State George Shultz, who used Western economic dynamism to persuade the Soviet Union’s leaders essentially to legislate themselves out of existence.

Creating a functional democratic government in Cuba is going to require hand-holding. Cuba has been steeped only in communist political philosophies for the lifetimes of most Cubans. To learn anything else will take a great deal of external commitment. Cuba — like many other communist adversaries — also has a history of feigning reforms to attract concessions: as President Obama learned to his cost in 2014. To stick with the late Cold War theme, then, “Trust but Verify” will need to be the watchword of any US strategy toward Cuba, just as it was for Ronald Reagan and the Soviet Union.

Yet if the administration’s current strategy as widely reported, covertly convincing a critical mass of public officials to turn on the government is unlikely to work. If the Cuban Communist Party knows one thing, it is how to sniff out and imprison counterrevolutionaries. And even were this strategy to succeed, pandemonium would be the likeliest result in a nation that has known nothing but one-party rule for the better part of a century. Far better would be a policy that unequivocally shows an exhausted people the perks of friendship with the United States, and persuades them to leave communism behind. No coups required; a whimper, not a bang. 

Trump’s first priority, then, should be to open the information environment in Cuba. An advantage here is Elon Musk’s Starlink, which could connect the whole island cheaply (or even, knowing Musk’s tendencies toward political philanthropy, for free). Reliable internet needs electricity, and Cubans are struggling with broken-down power grids. Happily, American firms have the dollars to help them rebuild. All Cuba’s government would need to do to receive these fabulous benefits would be to end online censorship. Were Cuba to do so and then go back on its word, meanwhile, those benefits could be taken away just as easily. 

Once information is flowing more freely, the Trump administration should set to work on two initiatives at once — one economic, one political. First, Trump should work with US businesses to put together a massive package of potential investment for Cuba. In doing so, it should pretend to be living in a parallel universe with no trade embargo. It is difficult to overstate just how much American imports could contribute to the Cuban economy were the embargo to be lifted, even in part. One might compare Cuba to the Dominican Republic, a US ally with a similar population but which earns seven times as much export income as Cuba.

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How might trade with the US uplift Cuba? Take the example of cigars. Cuba remains, in the estimation of most aficionados, the undisputed quality king. At the moment, though, Cuba’s total international cigar sales are around $1 billion. The country’s total exports, in all categories, are barely above $2 billion. The US market for premium cigars alone is $4 billion. Were American cigar smokers to choose Cuban cigars even half the time, US demand for Cuban cigars alone would equal the total exports of the entire island of Cuba. And that’s just cigars. Cuba also has some of the world’s best land for the cultivation of sugar and fruit, and some of the world’s largest deposits of nickel — a metal vital for producing electronics from phones to electric vehicles.

Once Trump puts together a suitably impressive list of hypothetical commitments, he can begin selling them to the Cuban government and its people. He could offer those investments individually, alongside matching abatements of the embargo, in exchange for specific political changes in Cuba. These could start with concessions in economic policy — allowing private businesses to compete with state-owned monopolies, for instance, or else setting exchange rates, tax policies, and legal frameworks to encourage foreign investment. As the economic rewards get bigger, meanwhile, Trump might exchange them for ever-greater political reforms ending, finally, with the abolition of Cuba’s one-party state, the freeing of political prisoners, and free movement between Cuba and the US. 

Cuba is a once proud and vibrant country that has been hollowed by 65 years of Marxist-Leninist dictatorship. Rebuilding will take time, and such an ambitious program might seem optimistic given the long decades of failure. Yet here it’s useful, perhaps, to return to Venezuela, which the US currently controls. Maduro’s regime was Cuba’s closest ally, and Havana is watching what happens in Venezuela very carefully. If Trump can prove that by bringing a longtime enemy into alignment with Washington, and is able to better the lives of Venezuela’s people, Cubans are likely to be far more receptive to similar ideas for their own country. 

President Trump is an extraordinarily effective salesman, and this is fundamentally a strategy of salesmanship. The greatest obstacle to its success might be the President’s own capriciousness. Rebuilding Venezuela is a years-long project, and at times it seems that Trump has already lost interest in it. Cuba will take far longer, and will require a new level of patience for his administration. But if Trump can retain focus on the long haul of rebuilding Venezuela and Cuba, however, he will have done more to advance American leadership in its near-abroad than any president in decades. And conversely, he will not be able to achieve his goal of reasserting the Monroe Doctrine and reestablishing US dominance over the Western Hemisphere with a blood enemy in Cuba.

And yet, these are clearly not ordinary times, and this was no ordinary convoy. The flotilla that arrived in Cuba was the largest in years. It includes the guided-missile frigate Admiral Gorshkov, one of the Russian Navy’s most modern ships, armed with hypersonic missiles, and the nuclear-powered cruise missile submarine Kazan, one of the most advanced Russian submarines in service today — and the first-ever submarine of this kind to be deployed to a foreign port. On their way to Cuba, moreover, the four Russian vessels conducted “high-precision missile weapons” training in the Atlantic Ocean, which involved firing missiles at mock enemy targets from a distance of more than 370 miles. The Russian ships are expected to remain in the region throughout the summer for a series of planned military exercises in the Caribbean, and to possibly stop in Venezuela.

As “routine” as this deployment may be, the symbolism of a Russian nuclear-powered — and nuclear-capable — submarine gliding above water just 90 miles from Florida wasn’t lost on anyone. American authorities have previously described these submarines as being “capable of presenting “a persistent proximate threat to the US homeland”. “The warships are a reminder to Washington that it is unpleasant when an adversary meddles in your near abroad,” Benjamin Gedan, director of the Latin America programme at the Washington, DC-based Wilson Center think tank, told AP, referring to Western involvement in Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Though this is not yet a second Cuban missile crisis — officials from Cuba, Russia and the United States have been at pains to clarify that no nuclear weapons are deployed on either the Kazan or the Admiral Gorshkov — it’s hard not to see this as a Russian response to the recent intensification of the US-Nato proxy war against Russia. Over the past few weeks, the US and several other Nato countries have, for the first time, formally authorised Ukraine to use Western-supplied long-range weapons — and even Western F-16s — to attack Russian territory, which Ukraine promptly proceeded to do. Meanwhile, Ukraine conducted, almost certainly with Western approval, long-range drone strikes on two Russian radar stations that are part of the country’s early-warning radar system designed to detect incoming intercontinental nuclear missiles. Various Nato countries, most notably France, have also begun openly talking of sending troops to Ukraine.

In response to the West allowing Ukraine to use their weapons against targets on the Russian territory, Putin warned that Russia was considering doing the same — that is, providing long-range weapons to allied countries to strike Western targets. He responded: “If someone thinks it is possible to supply such weapons to a war zone to attack our territory and create problems for us, why don’t we have the right to supply weapons of the same class to regions of the world where there will be strikes on sensitive facilities of those countries?” Russia has also begun, for the first time since the invasion, a series of nuclear drills involving tactical nuclear weapons, including exercises in Belarus, which last year agreed to host Russian tactical nuclear weapons, with explicit statements that this is a response to “provocative statements and threats of certain Western officials regarding the Russian Federation”.

Speaking at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, which took place last week, Putin clarified that he currently sees no threat to Russia’s sovereignty that would warrant the use of nuclear weapons. However, he reiterated that Russia would retaliate if someone threatened the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Russian state — which, from Russia’s perspective, includes Crimea and the Donbas. He also used the opportunity to remind the world that many of Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons contained 70-75 kilotons of explosive power — around five times the size of the US nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945.

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You would think that such statements, coupled with Russia’s exercises involving tactical nuclear weapons, would at the very least give pause to Western leaders, not only in Europe, but in the US as well — especially in light of Russia’s beefed-up presence right off the American coast. Yet, it has become commonplace in Western circles to dismiss Russia’s nuclear threats as mere ruses. “Time to call Putin’s bluff,” declared former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger in an article in CNN last month. Meanwhile, retired general Philip Breedlove, former ambassador Michael McFaul, Stanford professor Francis Fukuyama and dozens of former US officials wrote in a letter to the White House that Russia’s threats were “demonstrably empty” — and that the US should simply ignore them.

Just the other day, Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, shrugged off Putin’s warning, saying “this is nothing new”. The argument is that since Russia has not responded to US provocations in the past, Nato can keep crossing Russia’s “red lines” without consequences. But this forgets something important. There are very good reasons why Putin has so far avoided using nuclear weapons and, in general, responding to Western escalation in kind: after all, if Putin had chosen to respond more aggressively to Western provocations, he would have offered Nato the justification to directly enter into the conflict, with potentially unimaginable consequences. Instead, Putin opted for a low-intensity war of attrition in which Russia clearly had the upper hand, given its advantage in manpower and its ability to produce more artillery and ammunitions than Ukraine and the West combined — the reason Russia is winning the war.

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However, this does not mean that Putin is bluffing this time. To the contrary, evolutions in the rhetoric, capabilities and posture underpinning Russian nuclear threats — the greater emphasis on tactical nuclear weapons in military planning and an apparent lowering of the barriers to their use — “indicate that Moscow is slowly but surely working to undermine strategic stability and increase the credibility of its threats”, as Giles David Arceneaux, a fellow at the United States Air Force Academy, recently wrote. The risk of nuclear escalation is low but “very real”, he added. Indeed, insofar as Russia’s relative restraint in the face of Western escalation continues to be interpreted by Nato as a sign that it can continue to escalate with impunity, it seems reasonable to assume that at some point Russia may be compelled take action to restore deterrence credibility.

So, why are Western leaders so confidently discounting the possibility of nuclear escalation? One possible explanation is that the current Western leadership is simply lacking the intellectual, strategic and moral sophistication that characterised policymakers during the Cold War. Back then, it was understood that any scenario that entails a non-zero chance of the other side using nuclear weapons should be avoided at all costs — and that, therefore, when it comes to nuclear weapons, you don’t bluff and you don’t assume that the other side is bluffing.

Today’s Western leadership, defined by a volatile and fickle blend of ignorance, hubris, moral nihilism and desperation, seems to have forgotten these basic tenets. And coupled with the Western elites’ obsession with holding on to a hegemonic order that no longer exists, this has resulted in such a detachment from reality that some are still making the argument that the West must “unambiguously endorse Ukraine’s war objectives”, including “total territorial reconstitution back to the nation’s 1991 borders” — a scenario that would almost certainly result in Russia’s recourse to tactical nuclear weapons. It’s almost as if such analysts are deliberately trying to provoke Putin into doing this — perhaps believing it will turn Russia into a pariah state and result in a geopolitical win for the West.

Such considerations have probably informed Russia’s reluctance to pursue such action. But in the face of constant Western escalation, how long will Putin be able to resist the growing calls for a strong response coming from the more hawkish factions of Russia’s foreign policy circles? A senior member of an influential Russian think tank, for example, recently suggested that Moscow consider a “demonstrative” nuclear explosion to cow the West into refusing to allow Ukraine to use its arms against targets inside Russia. “To confirm the seriousness of Russia’s intentions and to convince our opponents of Moscow’s readiness to escalate, it is worth considering a demonstrative (i.e., non-combat) nuclear explosion,” its director Dmitry Suslov wrote in the business magazine Profil.

No doubt Western leaders will publicly claim that this is yet another bluff. But what if they’re wrong? Have we really reached the point where a mushroom cloud is needed to puncture our complacency?

Having grown up in a country which has already undergone the same painful process, I can say that the transition to capitalism will not come pain or risk-free. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, there was immense pressure to transition the state-owned East German economy to a capitalist model and to do it quickly. But the price was extremely heavy, and many former GDR citizens paid with their jobs, their livelihoods and sense of identity; what should have been entirely joyous moments of liberation and reunification left a sour taste that for many lingers still.

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Similar to the peaceful revolution that occurred in my homeland before the Communist regime fell, Cuba too has seen widespread protests. The latest wave began on 11 July in San Antonio de los Baños, south-west of Havana, and have since spread across dozens of cities. Cuban exile communities and their campaign groups have claimed that these gatherings were anti-communist in nature and called for an overthrow of the regime, but this only shows one side of a complex picture.

There can be no doubt that Cubans are angry and frustrated. Economically, their country is suffering from an existential crisis to which there is no obvious solution, exacerbated by the pandemic which caused its tourism industry to grind to a near-halt. Around 75% fewer international arrivals were registered last year, and recovery in 2021 has been sluggish.

Unlike other countries, Cuba has not been able to borrow money or receive any form of international aid to deal with the pandemic. Pressure from successive US governments has ensured that the island is still excluded from organisations such as the IMF, which has agreed to help the neighbouring Dominican Republic with an aid package of US$650 Million. Unaided and isolated, the Cuban authorities watched on helplessly as the national economy contracted by a painful 11% last year.

People who work in the private sector were particularly affected by the Covid-induced downturn. Since reforms in 2011 allowed an expansion of the non-state economy, around one million Cubans left state employment, some 15% of the workforce. As self-employed workers in jobs that were often tied to the tourism industry, they suffered a disproportionate hit and fell through the cracks of government support systems, a problem witnessed in many other countries too. The salaries of those employed in the majority state-owned sectors were also reduced but they are safe and include at least rudimentary health and social care packages.

It is therefore reasonable to conclude that the July protests were driven and fuelled by those Cubans who had moved into the private sector and would like to see it expand, and in particular open up to the US (including American tourists).

But this protest movement is not necessarily representative of the Cuban population as a whole. There were also widespread counter-demonstrations, which ranged from outright pro-government marches to processions celebrating the old symbols of the Cuban revolution, including images of Che Guevara or the flag of Fidel Castro’s “26th of July Movement”.

It is part of a struggle for the soul of the nation that has been ongoing for decades, a question that can be as important as mere economic questions. Castro and his revolutionaries received widespread popular support during and after the revolution of the 1950s largely because they successfully portrayed their actions as a struggle for independence, not socialism. Cuba Libre is more than a drink to the nation – the famous toast to national independence predates the Castros and socialism by over 50 years and it will likely outlast them too.

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However, even if Fidel Castro painted an image of the revolution as a struggle for independence, he could not fulfil this ambition once he was in power. A US trade embargo was introduced in 1960 and continues to this day, making it the longest lasting in modern history. The embargo bans all American enterprises and even foreign ones active in the US from trading with Cuba, isolating the island from commercial interaction with the West. While the aim may have been to isolate Cuba, it drove the state into the arms of communist allies, particularly the Soviet Union, which in turn demanded political loyalty.

The island nation cannot produce everything it needs by itself and so became reliant on communist support for anything from paper to bicycles — and when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba suddenly found itself entirely cut off. Its exports dropped by 61% and imports fell by 72% — staggering figures given that this included basic supplies such as medicines and food. The Cuban economy lost around $28.6 billion between 1989 and 1992, marking the beginning of the so-called “Special Period”, a term for the crisis used by the government to suggest transience.

When I travelled to the island in 2005, toilet paper was still rationed to three sheets at a time in public places. The family I stayed with in Havana had none at all, and resorted to installing a bidet instead. There were long queues in front of shops whenever deliveries of staple goods such as eggs or cooking oil arrived. The situation is so bad that, year on year, the UN passes a resolution to stop the blockade due to its humanitarian consequences. Year on year it is vetoed by the US.

Yet while life is undoubtedly dire, it does not mean that all Cubans want an unbridled opening to the West, as the exiles would have it. On my own travels, I was amazed to find the streets deserted when Fidel Castro broadcast a speech. When I tried to ask my own hosts why they were glued to the TV for hours when the aging revolutionary made an appearance, I was unceremoniously shushed. They later explained that it was a family tradition. I must have raised a questioning eyebrow, which was met with a shrug and the explanation that they “had always done it”.

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I visited Cuba in the first place because I was born in a socialist country myself, and having seen its transition to capitalism in a haphazard and abrupt manner, which brought as much unemployment and economic devastation as it brought freedom and private enterprise, I was curious to see a state that was taking its time. Back then, some parts of the economy were being privatised; now constitutional reforms are taking speed under the first non-Castro head of state, Miguel Díaz-Canel.

If the East German model of selling a nationalised economy into the private sector is anything to go by, Cubans ought to be cautious. The GDR, too, began the process in a structured manner by setting up an agency, the Treuhandanstalt, whose task it was to transition around 8,500 state-owned companies into the private sector. Hopelessly out of its depth with the mission to de-nationalise the economy, the Treuhand let the step-by-step privatisation deteriorate into a bargain-basement sell-out, which cost 2.5 million employees their jobs — over half of the workforce of the companies it was responsible for.

The result was that in Germany the former East was already off to a very bad start in 1990. Having lost not only their living, but also part of their identity and sense of self-worth, millions of former GDR citizens did not look forward to reunification, democratisation and freedom but became resentful and disaffected. To this day, East Germans are far more likely to vote for the fringe parties of Alternative fur Deutschland on the Right and Die Linke on the Left than their West German counterparts.

More damning still, this trend towards political extremism is most prominent among younger voters who were only born after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the former East German state of Saxony-Anhalt, one in five young people voted for the AfD in local elections earlier in the year, the highest rate of all age groups. This is not a problem of political culture but has deep roots in the botched process of transitioning the East German economy.

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For Cuba, this process is far more risky. The East German economy had not only been the most stable among the Eastern Bloc nations but could also bank on the financial support of the powerful West German economy, which it was joining. As an isolated island nation with a feeble economy, Cuba has not got such options. If it wants financial aid, it will have to pay for it with its independence and adapt fully to the American system.

I doubt that Cuba’s soul-searching can go on for much longer. It is unlikely that the US embargo will be lifted for anything less than a complete opening up of the island’s economy to capitalism. The Cuban government will come under increasing external pressure to speed up economic reforms, as well as from a disgruntled population who long to have goods on shelves.

Miguel Díaz-Canel is the first Cuban leader to have been born after the revolution, and he is not ideologically wed to its ideals in the way that the Castro brothers were. Whether under him or one of his successors, the temptations and pressure to break the country’s isolation and wed it to the Western economy will prevail in the end. But Cuban leaders would do well to look to the missed chances and often disastrous outcomes in East Germany, Russia and elsewhere — because their country may be next.

And so, I decided to become a communist. Initially it was more of an oppositional identity than an active political affiliation, a way of thumbing my nose at the stuffy Right-wing adults who seemed ubiquitous in  rural Somerset, where I grew up.

My youthful radicalism didn’t involve standing on picket lines chanting slogans, but I did have an answer to every question. As Arthur Koestler wrote in The God That Failed, with an ideology like communism, “the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke”.

Put another way, I no longer needed to think hard about anything complicated. ‘Dialectical Materialism’ provided all the answers.

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Inevitably, given these leanings, I travelled to Cuba in 2006 to learn more about the political culture. I spent a month there, travelling around, hanging out with locals, eating and drinking with them. I even got to see Fidel Castro speak one morning.

It was an eye-opening experience. Material poverty was a feature of everyday life, but the intellectual landscape was equally bleak and the system was repressive and punitive. There was only one newspaper. Official permission had to be given if you wanted to move to a different part of the country or travel overseas — and it was often denied to those who criticised the system. Independent trade unions were banned and the state acted brutally against those deemed politically suspect: according to Fidel Castro, there were around 15,000 political prisoners in Cuba in the 1970s.

Not that such grimness put off the regime’s foreign admirers. Gabriel García Márquez, a personal friend of Castro and a supporter of Cuba’s communist government, demonstrated the hypocrisy of those who praise despotic regimes from a distance when he told the New York Times that he personally could never live under the Cuban system:

“I would miss too many things. I couldn’t live with the lack of information. I am a voracious reader of newspapers and magazines from around the world.”

I hated this attitude and still do. It stinks. Under this schema, Cubans were not people but props that allowed others — who usually lived in great comfort — to retain their mental model of the world. It was revulsion at this hypocrisy, which I saw everywhere in western leftist circles, that prompted me to question my own worldview.

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Later on, after I had thrown out the Marxist books about Cuba I owned, I began to discover a rich tradition of exiled Cuban writers. The most fearless of these was Reinaldo Arenas, author of Before Night Falls, an autobiography of his time inside Castro’s prison system.

Arenas eventually escaped from Cuba. But when he did, he began to encounter a type of person he came to refer to as a “Communist Deluxe”. These were western academics who would relativise away Cuban suffering as either an acceptable price to pay for the triumph of socialism, or a consequence of United States aggression. Arenas recounts one such encounter in his autobiography:

“I remember that at a Harvard University banquet a German professor said to me: ‘In a way I can understand that you may have suffered in Cuba, but I am a great admirer of Fidel Castro and I am very happy with what he has done in Cuba.’

While saying this, the man had a huge, full plate of food in front of him, and I told him: ‘I think it’s fine for you to admire Fidel Castro, but in that case, you should not continue eating that food on your plate; no one in Cuba can eat food like that, with the exception of Cuban officials.’

I took his plate and threw it against the wall.”

I gained very little from my brief phase as a teenage communist. But I did glean insight into the psychology of changing one’s mind. A denial phase is common in cases where a person loses their faith. Paradoxically, the more doubts I had about socialism, the more vociferously I would defend the Cuban Revolution.

As I began to doubt, my initial reaction was to double down. Arguing with political opponents who understood the reality of the Cuban system better than I did, I would aggressively trot out the phrases I had heard other communists using: Cuba had great education and health care, Cuba was under attack by the United States, there were different versions of democracy.

I held onto my pride, but I was losing my ideological footing. The rhetorical arguments of my opponents were registering somewhere in my brain. Underneath the bluster, seeds of doubt were germinating. And I had many Cuban friends telling me the reality of what was happening in their country. It would have been grotesque to lecture them about the system they had grown up in.

Was mine another of those journeys from Left to Right that have become a tedious dinner table cliché?

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Perhaps. But it wasn’t much of an ‘awakening’. That would imply a Damascene conversion of some sort — the exchanging of one set of ideological certainties for another. My own change of heart represented instead a loss of faith — a weary acknowledgement that no single political doctrine was ever going to answer all the questions I had about the world. I imagine that most politically conscious people go through something like this. It is a necessary pre-requisite to political maturity.

It feels especially depressing, then, that today it is certainty — the conviction that I am right and you are wrong— that is popular among political activists of all parties. To want to think about things, with a curiosity about what works and what doesn’t, has become synonymous with weakness, vacillation and a lack of authenticity.

It would be wrong to view the recent past — the supposedly ‘non-ideological’ age that preceded this one — as an abode of good sense and reason. I’ve already mentioned some of the disasters that turned me away from the mainstream as a teenager — Iraq, Blairite spin, a supposedly Left-leaning government constantly kowtowing to the tabloids.

Yet all of that said, it does feel like we’ve collectively immatured with age in the decade since the financial crisis. Perhaps it’s time for a mass political awakening. If so, I hope it resembles my own in one sense at least: I hope we’ll see a loosening of those ideological bonds which delude us into thinking we already have all the answers.

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Buoyed by the rise of Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Sunkara argues that socialism is on the march again because the prevailing economic conditions demand it. “What I am certain about is that we live in a world marked by extreme inequality, by unnecessary pain and suffering, and that a better one can be constructed,” Sunkara writes.

And he is perhaps right to be optimistic. More than four in ten Americans now believe that socialism would be good for the United States, while a 2016 YouGov poll found that British people were more likely to view socialism favourably than capitalism.

The book argues that mainstream social democracy, in trying to tame capitalism, has failed and that more radical measures are required. Citing the example of Sweden, Sunkara argues that the victories won by reformist social democracy have nearly always been pyrrhic and short term; social democracy’s achievements have eventually been swept away by capitalist structural power.

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The Socialist Manifesto is not really a manifesto at all, but rather a critique of the existing order and a potted history of the socialist movement. In this it is like many contemporary Left-wing books. However, unlike those books, this one is well-written, often intelligent as well as accessible to a wider audience that socialists ought to be speaking to.

Yet the book has its weaknesses. To start with, what does it mean to be a socialist in 2019? Even socialists themselves do not know. Instead they prefer vagaries and platitudes. “To be a socialist today is to believe that more, not less, democracy will help solve social ills – and to believe that ordinary people can shape the systems that shape their lives,” Sunkara writes.

This is fine as far as it goes, but what does it actually entail?

Sunkara implies that socialism means centralised economic planning. He proceeds to make a tentative case for planning on the basis that Asda/Walmart use something similar, which apparently shows that it can work.

Sunkara also equates socialism with workers’ democratic control. However there is a contradiction here that Sunkara spends no time fleshing out. Central planning is inimical to the lofty aim of workplace democracy and the prospect, as Sunkara puts it, of “more, not less democracy”. You cannot have a central plan unless organisations and workers adhere to it. Thus you cannot advocate central planning on the one hand and workplace democracy on the other. As soon as workers rebel against the state’s central plan their democratic rights are stripped from them. This is precisely what has happened during tentative experiments in workers’ democracy in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere.

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Moreover, if we are to build a more democratic society, a goal I’m sure many have sympathy with, it is surely important to thoroughly purge the socialist movement of those who are nostalgic for the failed Stalinist experiments of the past. Sunkara lionises Corbyn and Corbynism in his book but makes no mention of the fact that many of Corbyn’s closest allies and advisors are unreconstructed nostalgists for the USSR. He similarly dismisses all criticism of antisemitism in the Corbyn movement as a smear and an attempt to “undermine his [Corbyn’s] leadership”.

Sunkara resents the fact that socialism is associated with gulags and terror by its opponents. What does he expect when so many of its adherents remain apologists for such things? Sunkara himself slips into this type of apologism at times. He ludicrously writes that Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of the Cheka who presided over the arbitrary killings of tens of thousands in the USSR during the Red Terror, “anguished over every execution order he signed”.

Sunkara similarly gushes over the Cuban revolution and its “achievements”. He writes nothing of the 15,000 political prisoners Fidel Castro held at one point, nor the thousands of summary executions, the labour camps for homosexuals, nor the fact that Cuban doctors, who serve “millions abroad” as Sunkara puts it, are indentured and have their passports taken away from them.

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Another elephant in the room is Venezuela. Less than a decade ago socialists were enthusiastically citing socialism in Venezuela as evidence that “another world is possible”. Today the country has been wiped from their collective memory like an out of favour Bolshevik being scrubbed from an official Soviet photograph. The resulting economic disaster has produced the largest refugee crisis in Latin American history. Yet Sunkara – who professes to care a great deal about humanity – deems the oppressed of that country unworthy of a single mention in a 243-page book about socialism.

Sunkara rightly takes aim in the book at the narcissism of identity politics, which equates victimhood with wisdom. In a neat irony, it was philosopher Bertrand Russell who coined the most fitting term for contemporary identity politics – “the fallacy of the superior virtue of the oppressed” – and who also wrote one of the earliest and best critiques of the Russian Revolution, which Sunkara misleadingly calls a “genuine popular revolution led by industrial workers”.

Moreover, Sunkara is right to reassert the importance of class: equality is not an ethnically diverse and gender-equal corporate boardroom where executives are paid a hundred times more than those who languish on the shop floor. Rosy corporate uplift about ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ are worthless if workers of all colours, genders and sexualities are afraid to take a toilet break.

But Marxian socialism easily slips into totalitarianism because changing the economic structure of society does not fundamentally change how people behave. Marx was wrong when he wrote in The Communist Manifesto that the “history of all hitherto existing society is a history of class conflict”. The drive for status, power and ego have provoked just as many wars as class interest. Even if one were able to abolish class categories altogether other inequalities would soon arise. When everyone has a house, the struggle begins over who has a house on the coast with a panoramic sea view.

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Moreover, while citizens create vastly unequal lives for themselves in free societies, it is not merely because they possess differing amounts of wealth (though that obviously helps). Some work harder and are more ambitious than others.

Conflict and unfairness come in many guises, which is why the state never does “wither away” – as Marx claimed it would – under communism. Instead it grows ever larger while jettisoning the separation of powers which protect citizens in liberal societies from arbitrary force.

The drive to “democratise every aspect of life” – a phrase beloved by democratic socialists – is also less desirable than it sounds. A mob should not decide the flavour of opinions a person can read in a newspaper. The majority should not decide what people get up to in their private lives behind closed doors. And nor, arguably, should it decide who a person may enter into economic relations with. The free marketeer deludes himself when he says that workers freely sell their labour under no compulsion. However the socialist makes an equally ludicrous claim when he says that all wage labour is “an unacceptable form of exploitation”.

Social democracy understands this, which is why it limits itself to harnessing capitalism for the greater good rather than seeking to remake the world.

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Sunkara approvingly cites Rosa Luxemburg, who likened social democratic reformism to the futility of Sisyphus attempting to roll his boulder up a mountain – only for it to roll back down again. Yet there can be no escape from this existential dilemma, as the philosopher Albert Camus recognised.

Some social democratic victories may prove short-lived. Yet this is not evidence of the futility of the project, but rather is an inherent feature of a free society: you win some battles and you lose some battles, and on the argument goes. The idea of an “end goal of socialism”, as Sunkara phrases it, is a dangerous illusion. It assumes there can be a final escape from conflict and uncertainty into a sort of beehive society where all tensions and ambiguities have been abolished. Yet a society with only a single viewpoint is implicitly totalitarian, even if the sought-after ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is that of a majority oppressing a minority.

The desire on the part of increasing numbers of young people to re-run the socialist experiment has several likely causes. One is, as Sunkara notes, economic insecurity. “Some thrive by depriving others of freedom, billions needlessly suffer amid plenty, and we move ever closer to ecological catastrophe,” he writes.

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Another is lack of historical memory: many of those who today sport Che Guevara T-shirts were not even born when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

Yet the re-emergence of socialism is also probably steeped in religious longing. “Christians knew that Christ would come again in his glory to judge the living and the dead. [Socialists] knew that every moment drew them closer to salvation on earth,” writes Sunkara about the early socialist movement.

Many people, it seems, cannot live without the belief that history – and by extension their own life – has some wider purpose or meaning. Oscar Wilde once complained that socialism took up too many evenings. Yet for many contemporary followers of socialism this appears to be part of the allure. Just as traditional religion provides a sense of solace and belonging for some, socialism gives others a reason to get up in the morning.

I have no problem with such delusions – provided I am left out of them. Yet when I read books such as this one, with their pious exhortations to change the world, I am reminded of the futility of such hopes. You may not be interested in the cause, but it is interested in you. This is why the return of socialism – or communism if we are to give it its proper name – does not fill me with joy as it does for Sunkara and others like him

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality, by Bhaskar Sunkara, is published by Verso