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Ever since the daring capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January, the White House has signaled its designs on Cuba. U.S. President Donald Trump has said he believes he’ll have the “honor of taking” the island country, and U.S. officials have floated the idea of finding a “Cuban Delcy”—a reference to Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s former deputy who cut a deal with Washington to become his successor.

But Cuba is not Venezuela. And the fallout from the conflict in Iran may change how Trump is thinking about getting mired in another foreign-policy problem. What are the likely scenarios for what happens next? On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with Michael Bustamante, the author of Cuban Memory Wars and chair in Cuban and Cuban American studies at the University of Miami. Readers can watch the full interview on the video box atop this page or download the free FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited excerpt of the conversation.

Ever since the daring capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January, the White House has signaled its designs on Cuba. U.S. President Donald Trump has said he believes he’ll have the “honor of taking” the island country, and U.S. officials have floated the idea of finding a “Cuban Delcy”—a reference to Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s former deputy who cut a deal with Washington to become his successor.

But Cuba is not Venezuela. And the fallout from the conflict in Iran may change how Trump is thinking about getting mired in another foreign-policy problem. What are the likely scenarios for what happens next? On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with Michael Bustamante, the author of Cuban Memory Wars and chair in Cuban and Cuban American studies at the University of Miami. Readers can watch the full interview on the video box atop this page or download the free FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited excerpt of the conversation.

Ravi Agrawal: We’ve had months of rhetoric out of the White House about “taking Cuba.” There are also strict new sanctions on Havana and an effective oil blockade. What is your understanding of the broader White House strategy on Cuba?

Michael Bustamante: It’s a great question to take at the top and a tough one. Some pieces on the very abstract level of what this White House is trying to pursue are clear. It gets a little muddier once you get beneath the surface.

At the basic level, this White House is hoping to see big political and economic change in Cuba. It’s no secret that Cuba is a one-party state. It’s also no secret that Marco Rubio, [the U.S.] secretary of state, as a Cuban American has long had an interest in seeing that country open up economically and politically. And this administration has pivoted, as the first Trump administration did, to using the tools of U.S. economic statecraft—i.e., sanctions—in particularly aggressive and unprecedented ways to try to put pressure on the Cuban economy and government to create conditions for those changes to emerge. That’s sort of the tagline. But once you think about how you get from point A to point B under the current policy, it gets a little muddier.

The Cuban government has already shown a certain willingness to open their economy. They’ve announced reforms that, at least on paper, seem quite significant, that definitely respond to the pressure campaign. It’s on the political issues where Havana remains allergic, to put it mildly, to any kind of change. There’s a deep nationalist thread that goes back decades about wanting to avoid any perception that they’re ceding to the pressure of the United States, even if that’s effectively what’s going on here.

One of the challenges that the Trump administration faces is that this is a government in Havana that’s very used to dealing with pressure (though this pressure is unprecedented). They’re very used to trying to figure out how to buy time. The Trump administration’s read of Havana’s options is not wrong. The Cuban government is up against the wall economically and politically. They don’t have allies to the degree that they used to. No one’s coming to bail them out. But the idea that there’s going to be a reformer or a Delcy Rodríguez-like figure who’s willing to roll over on his or her superiors—that’s not in the DNA of a one-party state. That is a fundamentally........

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