A Modest Proposal

The Coming American "Liberation" of Cuba, Florida Cubans, US Empire, and Diaspora Politics

The Cuban regime’s days are numbered. I know it, you know it, and the leadership in Havana know it. The USA wants to clean up its hemisphere as it prepares to contain (and possibly attempt to strangle) China. The Donroe Doctrine clearly defines the Western Hemisphere as the USA’s zone of interest. To underline this point, the Americans raided Venezuela, kidnapped its President and his hausfrau, and have bent the government to its will, forcing it to do its bidding.

The “regime change with a light touch” in Caracas effectively removed a potential Chinese and/or Russian base of military/intel operations from the chessboard. Whether one likes it or not, the move made sense. The ease with which it was accomplished boosted the Trump Regime’s self-confidence, so much so that voices within it and in its periphery immediately demanded that Denmark hand Greenland over to it for safe keeping. It also coloured expectations on how its planned war against Iran would unfold. The desired regime change in Iran has not gone according to plan, to put it lightly, but we will save that discussion for another day. Instead, let’s turn to some much lower hanging fruit: Cuba.

Cuba is anachronism in that the government’s roots lie in being a Soviet client regime, yet it continues to exist in a post-Soviet era. Unlike its fellow communist regime in North Korea, Cuba was utterly reliant on the USSR during the Cold War and lacked the ability to play it off against the Chinese due to historical, and especially geographical, reasons. The North Koreans managed to somehow weather the collapse of the Soviet bloc and go on to develop their own nuclear arsenal. The best that can be said for Cuba is that it has managed to sputter on despite the US sanctions regime under which it lives, entirely thanks to foreign tourist dollars and a police state that has taken a heavy-handed approach to any domestic dissent.

The Sword of Damocles has been an eternal presence hanging above the heads of the Cuban Regime…maybe not eternally, but at least since the Fidel Castro decided to permit his island-state to serve for the USSR what Ukraine has sought to do for NATO: as a forward operating base to be used against its rival. The first few years of Castro’s rule saw the CIA try to remove him from power, whether through the half-hearted Bay of Pigs fiasco, through to the Looney Tunes-like plots against his life. None of these conspiracies succeeded, instead serving only to cement the regime in place.