Trump’s Cuba Calculus |
Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Cuban officials gird for possible U.S. intervention, the EU-Mercosur trade deal moves a step closer to ratification, and Brazil bags two Golden Globes.
Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Latin America Brief.
The highlights this week: Cuban officials gird for possible U.S. intervention, the EU-Mercosur trade deal moves a step closer to ratification, and Brazil bags two Golden Globes.
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As Latin America grapples with the fallout from the U.S. ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro earlier this month, the government with the most immediate worries about its own stability is Cuba. That’s due to ties between Caracas and Havana as well as signaling from top U.S. officials.
“If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in the hours after the Jan. 3 U.S. attack on Venezuela. Rubio, who is Cuban American, has voiced hope for regime change in Cuba throughout his entire political career. “Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall,” U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters on Jan. 4.
In the following days, Trump said that the United States—which is directing policy in Venezuela via pressure from a naval buildup and tanker seizures—would not allow any Venezuelan oil to go to Cuba.
The ban removes a key pillar of financial support for Cuba’s government during an already-dire economic crisis. The country’s GDP has shrunk 11 percent since 2020 amid a long-standing U.S. trade embargo and local mismanagement. Venezuela supplied Cuba with an estimated third of its oil demand.
On Jan. 11, Trump wrote on social media that Cuba should “make a deal” before it was too late. While he did not specify potential consequences, Maduro’s removal has revealed the scope of military actions that Trump appears willing to take against U.S. adversaries.
Altogether, the new economic pressure and verbal threats from Washington may suggest that Cuba could soon become a target of a U.S. military operation. But there are also multiple factors working against that possibility, at least in the short term.
First, the Cuban government’s control over political life on the........