The revolution is dead in Cuba; don’t make it a martyr

Cuba’s revolution is not dying. It is already dead. The question is what buries it. Donald Trump and America gain from a local burial, not by carrying a shovel and forcing a funeral.

There is a particular kind of grief that attaches itself to failed utopias. It is not the sharp grief of sudden loss but the slow, damp grief of watching something once believed in decompose in real time. For decades, the international left pointed to Cuba as proof that Marxism could work — that a small island nation, “liberated” from American “imperialism” and the corruptions of capital, could build a society of genuine dignity.

The hospitals were free. Literacy rates were enviable. Doctors were dispatched to the poorest corners of the world like secular missionaries. Cuba, the argument ran, was what socialism looked like when it was permitted to breathe.

It was a magnificent lie, and it has now run out of oxygen entirely.

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The truth, visible to anyone who cared to look honestly, was that Cuba was never a functioning socialist economy. It was a dependent economy dressed in revolutionary costume. From the moment the Soviet Union recognised the strategic value of a communist thorn lodged ninety miles from Florida, Cuba was subsidised into apparent viability.

Soviet oil, Soviet grain, Soviet roubles, Soviet weapons — these were the hidden scaffolding behind every statistic the left cited with such pride. The literacy campaigns, the universal healthcare, the infant mortality rates that shamed the American South: all of it rested not on the productive genius of central planning but on a patron’s cheque. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba entered the “Special Period” — a bureaucratic euphemism for mass hunger, rolling blackouts, and the collapse of everything the revolution had promised. The miracle evaporated almost immediately upon the removal of the subsidy that had funded it.

Venezuela briefly reprised the Soviet role. Hugo Chávez, flush with petrodollars and intoxicated by the romance of the Cuban revolution, shipped oil to Havana on terms that amounted to charity. In exchange, Cuba sent doctors and security advisers — a transaction that propped Nicolás Maduro’s own authoritarian project as much as it sustained the Castros. But Venezuelan oil revenues have cratered. Maduro’s state is itself a ruin. The benefactor can no longer afford its client. Cuba is now, for the first time in six decades, genuinely alone.

The statistics of its collapse are not merely grim; they are geologically so. The Cuban economy contracted by more than ten per cent in 2020 and has not recovered. Inflation has rendered the national currency functionally meaningless, with the informal exchange rate diverging catastrophically from the official one. Power cuts last 12 hours or more in many provinces.

Food shortages are not episodic but structural — the Cuban government’s own agricultural ministry has acknowledged that the country produces less than forty per cent of the food it requires. Fuel shortages have paralysed transport.

Hospitals that the international left once cited as proof of the revolution’s humanity now lack basic medicines, syringes, and anaesthetics. In 2022 and 2023, emigration reached levels not seen since the Mariel boatlift of 1980—hundreds of thousands departing, many through the dangerous overland route through Central America and into the United States. Put differently, for Cuba, it is all over.

What remains in Havana is a gerontocracy administering a catastrophe. Miguel Díaz-Canel, the apparatchik who succeeded Raúl Castro, governs a country whose ideological vocabulary is still Marxist-Leninist but whose daily reality is a kind of exhausted feudalism. The Communist Party retains its monopoly on political power while presiding over an economy that has rendered that power almost meaningless. You cannot redistribute what does not exist.

The Trump Card

It is against this backdrop that the question of American policy becomes both urgent and treacherous. Donald Trump, whose instinct for dramatic gestures is well documented, may be tempted by the idea of a decisive military intervention — a swift application of force designed to topple the regime and claim the credit for liberating the Cuban people.

The logic is superficially attractive. The regime is weak. The army is underpaid and demoralised. Popular discontent, visible in the unprecedented street protests of July 2021, has not dissipated. A short, sharp shock might seem to offer a clean resolution to a problem that has vexed American presidents since Eisenhower.

It would be a profound miscalculation. The history of external military intervention in politically exhausted but nationally proud societies counsels extreme caution. From Vietnam to Iraq, the pattern is consistent: an initial phase of rapid military success followed by a protracted, grinding insurgency that consumes resources, credibility, and lives at a rate no initial calculation anticipates.

Cuba, for all its misery, retains a nationalist current that runs deeper than its Marxism. The revolution, whatever its economic failures, fused itself to Cuban identity with considerable skill. A foreign military presence on Cuban soil — particularly an American one, given the weight of history — would activate precisely the kind of anti-imperialist solidarity that the regime has always relied upon but has recently been unable to generate. The very act of invasion would resuscitate a dying ideology.

Trump and America need a creative option. Pressure short of military intervention carries structural advantages that direct force cannot replicate. First, it preserves the legitimacy of eventual political change: a transition negotiated or generated from within Cuban society will command a durability that one imposed from without cannot achieve, since external imposition creates path dependencies that systematically disadvantage institution-building.

Second, sustained economic and diplomatic pressure compounds over time in ways that military intervention forecloses; the Cuban state’s capacity to resist has already been degraded to a degree that makes patience a strategic asset rather than a concession.

Third, the regional diplomatic costs of unilateral American military action in the Caribbean basin would be considerable. Latin American states that have otherwise acquiesced in American hemispheric leadership would be forced into opposition, undermining the broader coalition architecture that American interests require in an era of Chinese strategic penetration of the region.

Fourth, the moral and reputational capital accrued by allowing Cubans themselves to determine their political future provides the United States with a form of soft power that military victory would permanently extinguish; the narrative of liberation is far more valuable when it is not written at gunpoint.

The wiser course, and the one more consistent with durable American interests, is the doctrine of strategic patience dressed in Trumpian clothes. Let Cuba rot. Not out of cruelty, but out of calculation. The regime in Havana will survive for some years yet — authoritarian states are remarkably resilient in their terminal phases, capable of inflicting enormous suffering on their own populations in order to perpetuate themselves.

But a Cuba without Russian influence or Chinese investment is a Cuba that will never again constitute a meaningful threat to American interests. It cannot project power. It cannot export revolution. It can barely keep the lights on.

This is, in its way, a version of the Monroe Doctrine suited to the present moment — not the muscular interventionism of the early 20th century, but a quieter, colder form of hemispheric management.

Cuba’s people deserve better than what the revolution delivered, and better than what an American invasion would impose. What they need — and what would serve American interests most durably — is change that is genuinely theirs: economic liberalisation that reconnects the island to the productive energies of its own citizens, and political reform that allows those citizens to choose their own governors. America benefits most not from a Cuba it conquers, but from a Cuba it no longer needs to think about.

(The writer is a senior journalist with expertise in defence. Views expressed are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of Firstpost.)