This article was originally published by the author on his Substack, “Cuba Monitor.” It has been lightly edited for NACLA.
When Cuban-American billionaire and managing owner of Inter Miami CF Jorge Mas Santos visited the White House last week, the meeting was less focused on the team’s MLS Cup victory and more on the evergreen influence of Miami’s business elite over Washington’s Cuba policy.
Mas, the chairman of a powerful family business empire and longtime political player in South Florida, has spent decades advocating for tightening U.S. sanctions on Cuba until the island’s political system changes. He inherited the position from his father, Jorge Mas Canosa, who formed the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) with the help of the Reagan administration as part of Washington’s effort to counter leftist governments in Latin America and the Caribbean.
This is not the first time that Mas and Trump have shared a stage. In 2000, Trump spoke in front of Mas’ Cuban American National Foundation during his failed presidential bid for the Reform Party. “So what [Mas] is saying” he eagerly teased “is that when Cuba is free, I get the first hotel? Is that true? Sounds like a good deal to me.”
Lobbying for Regime Change—and Business
Mas’ influence stretches across the political aisle, but it has been particularly visible during the presidencies of Donald Trump, whose administration reversed many of the limited openings toward Cuba introduced by President Barack Obama. Like many figures in Miami’s exile business community, Mas has envisioned a post-revolutionary Cuba as a destination for American capital.
Through CANF and its lobbying arms, Mas has funneled millions of dollars into Congress to ensure political support for maintaining the embargo on Cuba and tightening sanctions. His family built its fortune through the engineering and telecommunications giant MasTec, and Mas himself has become a major investor in sports and real estate as managing owner of Inter Miami CF.
The political alliance between Trump and Miami’s hardliner business class has often been framed as ideological, with a shared commitment to confronting a Cuban government they have long despised. The economic dimension of that relationship, though, is much harder to ignore.
Trump has been interested in owning property in Cuba for decades.
Trump has been interested in owning property in Cuba for decades. In 1999, he paid a consulting firm $68,000 to search for business opportunities on his behalf. The consultant then instructed his employees on how to make it look that the firm’s trip had been connected to Caritas Cuba, a Catholic Charity used presently by Marco Rubio’s State Department to deliver aid products without allowing the Cuban government to distribute them. In 2008, he applied to register his trademark in Cuba to build a Trump Tower in Havana and a golf course in Varadero. Between late 2012 and early 2013, Trump Organization executives traveled to Havana to scout potential business sites and investments.
The president’s history of pursuing commercial real estate deals in Cuba adds an atypical dimension to the long-standing U.S. regime change strategy in Cuba. Never has a U.S. president so brazenly expressed personal business in a country whose political system U.S. policy aims to dismantle.
Sanctions and Economic Collapse
Since the 1960s, politicians in Washington and South Florida have justified sanctions on Cuba as a moral stance against authoritarianism. This hardline stance has ensured that the island’s economy remains largely inaccessible to U.S. companies until a U.S.-friendly political transition occurs. Trump, however, is unusually candid about the purpose of the sanctions.
“The embargo against Cuba must stand,” Trump remarked during his speech before CANF in 2000. “Because if it doesn’t stand, the country will become wealthy again and it will have the same regime that it has had for many years.”
In other words, the purpose of sanctions was not simply to punish the Cuban government, but to prevent the entire country from achieving economic stability under its existing political system.
Trump is unusually candid about the purpose of the sanctions.
Trump has occasionally been just as explicit about how Washington attempts to achieve that pressure. In an interview with Politico on March 5, he claimed credit for encouraging Cuba’s economic collapse by cutting off one of its most important lifelines: subsidized oil shipments from Venezuela.
“Well, it’s because of my intervention,” Trump said. “Obviously, otherwise they wouldn’t have this problem. We cut off all oil, all money… everything coming in from Venezuela, which was the sole source.”
Trump’s admission reflects the long-standing strategic approach in U.S. policy toward Cuba. A declassified 1960 State Department memo detailed that the U.S. should seek to deny “ money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” The expectation in Washington has long been that enough pressure, enough pain, and enough suffering will eventually produce political change.
Trump’s Candor
Trump’s candor about sanctions and economic pressure extends beyond Cuba, reflecting the true goals of his far-reaching regime change operations. When discussing Venezuela, his language focuses less on political reform than on resource flows to benefit U.S. corporate interests.
In front of Mas and Inter Miami CF at the White House, Trump described the situation in Venezuela in explicitly economic terms. “Venezuela is going great,” he said. “It’s been stabilized. We have a wonderful person as your President-elect, Delcy Rodríguez, and she and her staff have been doing a fantastic job working with us. We’re taking out hundreds of millions of barrels of oil and it’s going to Houston and various other places where it’s being refined.”
The remark was striking not only for its praise of a political transition that ceded power to Nicolas Maduro’s former second-in-command, but for how it framed the criteria for a successful outcome: the movement of Venezuelan oil into U.S. refineries and the profits into U.S.-controlled bank accounts.
Trump’s comments reveal a broader pattern in his approach to regime change. Rather than directing the public’s attention toward political reform, the official White House line often centers solely on the economic opportunities that political pressure can unlock for U.S. corporate interests.
Oil is not the only resource that the Trump administration has taken full advantage of since kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Last week, Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum brokered a deal for the Venezuelan state-owned mining company to provide between 650 and 1,000 kilograms of gold to U.S. commodities trader Trafigura. Trump’s model of regime change demonstrates that he is less concerned with transforming political systems than he is with ensuring that U.S. corporations attain favorable deals from a handpicked leader under duress. After the capture of Nicolás Maduro, Washington moved quickly to lift the sanctions that it had itself imposed on the Venezuelan industry. The United States has retained 40 percent of the Venezuelan oil sales after allowing for it to be sold freely throughout the world. The Trump Doctrine of regime change means seizing control over resources without fundamentally altering political structures. If this pattern holds, Cuba may not need a political transformation for Trump to realize his long-standing ambitions there. It may only require the kind of top-level deal that preserves the system while opening the island’s economy to wealthy U.S. corporations and its real estate, finally, to Donald Trump’s self-interested exploits.
Blake Burdge is a graduate student in international relations at Northeastern University specializing in diplomacy. He is the founder of Cuba Monitor, an independent platform focused on U.S.-Cuba policy.