The case for compromise with Cuba

The Cuban fuel blockade has entered its eleventh week. Frequent blackouts disrupt healthcare, education, and access to drinking water as Cuba’s oil-reliant grid is cut off from vital imports from Venezuela and Mexico. Lack of fuel also hampers transportation across the island, interfering with essential food deliveries, trash pickup and even doctors’ commutes.

Cuba’s foreign minister has made it clear that regime change is not up for discussion; nevertheless, U.S. policymakers seem fixated on the idea. After campaigns to overthrow governments in Venezuela and Iran, the United States seems to view Cuba as a natural third target. But neither of the strategies pursued in those other countries is likely to work in Cuba: the island’s government is too well entrenched to decapitate, and more comprehensive military operations would present unacceptable risks. If Venezuela represents a best-case, surgical scenario and Iran represents the worst — protracted military involvement with unattainable objectives — there could be a third scenario for Cuba, driven by strategic realities, in which Cuba and the United States reach a compromise. Negotiating for key concessions would be easier, more practical, and more humane than pursuing wholesale regime change on the island.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel has been willing to engage in preliminary talks, and the United States already holds powerful leverage in the form of ending the blockade and lifting the embargo. Short of restructuring Cuba’s government, the key concessions that the United States is likely to want could be within the regime’s ability to provide. These include eliminating the presence of foreign intelligence facilities on the island, preventing the mass migration of Cubans to the United States, and opening up the island to private investment. By contrast, replacing Cuba’s government wholesale, judging by historic experience and current realities, would be extremely difficult. Numerous U.S. presidents have tried and failed to coerce Cuba into regime change. With a war abroad and a troubled DHS at home, now seems like an especially poor time to revisit that goal or court the humanitarian crisis it could engender.

Negotiating would also be more practical, allowing the United States to avoid extensive, prolonged involvement in Cuba’s affairs or potentially creating an even more unstable regime. U.S. policymakers have already displayed a sense of pragmatism here, allowing first one and then a second Russian tanker to deliver lifelines of oil to Cuba earlier this month. In the broader geopolitical context, and even in the smaller hemispheric one, there is no vital U.S. national interest vis-à-vis regime change in Cuba that could justify military action against the country or the costs of administering its government, Venezuela-style, for any length of time.

Finally, negotiating would be more humane. Cubans have long been “schooled in privation,” but the fuel blockade has made life on the island nearly untenable, attracting widespread criticism to U.S. foreign policy in the process. UN human rights experts have condemned the blockade as “an extreme form of unilateral economic coercion,” as well as “a violation of international law and a grave threat to a democratic and equitable international order.” Negotiating for key concessions instead of insisting on regime change would be a swifter way to end the extreme deprivation in Cuba, creating hope and a path forward for Cuban citizens who have historically borne the brunt of U.S. pressure tactics against their government.

Cuba’s governance failures do not warrant a long, costly entanglement

To be sure, the incumbent Cuban regime has a disastrous record of human rights abuses and corruption, and many Cubans, including an influential U.S. contingent, desperately want change. According to the UN, Cuba leads the world in convictions for arbitrary detention of its citizens. Despite a strong sense of national identity, many Cubans feel that the regime has failed them and have grown increasingly disillusioned with their government’s ability to ensure basic social provisions, including the rights to health and dignified work.

However, Cuba’s governance failures do not warrant a long, costly entanglement. The United States should instead negotiate with the aim of normalising relations with Cuba, revisiting previous U.S. policy that briefly showed great promise and allowing the country to develop at its own pace. During the deshielo cubano, or “Cuban thaw,” from 2015 to 2017, the lifting of restrictions on remittances, trade, travel, telecommunications, and financial services contributed toward a period of peak economic growth of 4.4 percent in 2015. Restrictions were tightened again in 2017, and the combination of harsh sanctions, the Covid-19 pandemic, and internal mismanagement sent Cuba’s economy plunging after 2019. Since 2020, some estimates suggest that up to 25 percent of Cubans have fled the country.

Negotiating and reinstating a similar rapprochement to the deshielo may not coax Cuba’s diaspora back home, but it could diminish Cuba’s reliance on U.S. adversaries and eventually allow for a closer relationship with the United States. It would remove the pretence of the embargo as an excuse for Cuban economic mismanagement and grant more opportunity to citizens through the resumption of trade flows to the island. And it would be much easier and more practical than endeavouring to perform another nation-building exercise, regardless of how close to home.