Crisis in Cuba: a ‘golden opportunity’ for Washington?

In the face of intense pressure from the US, Cuba’s communist regime has proved remarkably resilient, said Ani Chkhikvadze in the Washington Examiner: it has survived the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the pressure currently being exerted by the Trump administration may prove more than it can bear.

‘Politically isolated’

In recent years, Havana has relied heavily on subsidised oil from Venezuela, and that lifeline was cut last month, after the US seized Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, said the outlet. With Washington now threatening to impose tariffs on any other nation that supplies oil to Cuba, Havana’s stocks are fast running out. Airlines can no longer refuel in Cuba; petrol is rationed; tourist resorts have had to shut; rubbish is piling up because lorries lack the fuel to collect it; and power cuts are “omnipresent”.

Given Latin America’s recent swing to the right, Havana has never looked so “politically isolated” or so short of public sympathy, said Juan Pablo Spinetto on Bloomberg. There have been no mass protests in São Paulo, Buenos Aires or Mexico City against “a renewed display of American colonialism”. Washington holds all the cards, and could make things yet harder for Havana by, for instance, restricting remittances. It should tread carefully, though. The US doesn’t want to create a humanitarian crisis in Cuba. It doesn’t want a new wave of refugees to start heading for the coast of Florida. And it should not underestimate the capacity of Cuba’s regime to “embrace self-destruction rather than yield” to its enemy.

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Trump wants to ‘work a deal’

This is a “golden opportunity” to push for change in Cuba, said Lizette Alvarez in The Washington Post. The communist leadership knows it’s out of options, and Donald Trump – who, unlike his Cuban-American secretary of state, Marco Rubio, is no “hardliner” on this issue – says he wants to “work a deal”. He seems, in other words, open to the kind of “go-slow regime change” the US is working on in Caracas.

The US could lift the embargo on Cuba and offer aid in exchange for deadline-driven reforms: prisoner releases; the removal of barriers to private investment and free expression; and, eventually, the holding of open elections. Cuba is not oil-rich like Venezuela. But it has tourism potential and offers another, more tantalising prize for Trump: the chance to take credit for transforming an island that has “bedevilled the US since the Cold War into a free society”.