When Jon Lee Anderson travelled to Havana earlier this year, he found a city whose plazas and squares were far more desolate than they were in the past. An estimated one in five Cubans have left the island since 2021. The tourists are all but gone. Electrical blackouts are a constant. Trash goes uncollected. Drivers sometimes wait more than twenty-four hours in line for gas. The government is essentially broke. “I don’t care anymore how it happens,” Anderson’s friend, a longtime Revolution loyalist, says, “but this situation has to end.”
Donald Trump, for his part, has at least some notion of how he’d like to see it end. “I do believe I’ll be having the honor of taking Cuba,” the President said, last week, in the Oval Office. “I think I can do anything I want with it.” In the wake of the U.S. military’s arrest of Nicolás Maduro, in Venezuela, and now the prolonged war in Iran, Trump has spoken routinely of making a move on Havana. And so the political world is now asking the question that is the headline to Anderson’s on-the-ground reporting in this week’s issue: “Is Cuba Next”?
Since the beginning of the year, the United States has imposed what amounts to a blockade on Cuba, thus far preventing it from receiving oil from its allies, including Mexico and Russia. Before the blockade, Anderson writes, “Cuba was on life support; Trump’s action effectively shut the oxygen off.”
Anderson is intimately familiar with Cuba in crisis: he and his family lived there during an exceptionally bleak moment in the nineties, after the island lost its Soviet backing, and he has been one of the finest chroniclers of Cuba’s politics, people, and culture. What he sees now is a government trapped in perhaps irreparable decline. Reports suggest that the U.S. position is that Cuba’s President, Miguel Díaz-Canel, needs to go. But, “even if negotiations with the U.S. yield an agreement to hold elections,” Anderson writes, “Cuba has no organized political opposition that could run against the Communist Party, let alone take over the country.” And he adds, “The best-known dissidents are dead, imprisoned, or in exile, too far removed from recent politics to be taken seriously.”
Amid this power vacuum, the Trump Administration has been negotiating with Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, Raúl Castro’s grandson and personal bodyguard, who, despite a taste for flashy displays of wealth, hardly represents a break with the past. It’s simply not clear what regime change, or whatever else the Administration chooses to call it, would look like in Cuba. “They’re dealing with Trump’s unpredictability on one side and their own imminent collapse on the other,” Joe Garcia, a former Democratic congressman from Florida and longtime Cuba watcher, says. “But countries don’t collapse. They simply continue to go down.”
What Just Happened?
The Trump Administration has started to deploy Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to U.S. airports. A partial government shutdown centered on the Department of Homeland Security (specifically, a political fight about funding for ICE) has caused long security lines and travel chaos.
What might this deployment look like?
“This adds more chaos to a chaotic situation at the nation’s airports. Some T.S.A. workers are now coming up on their third missed paycheck, because of the impasse in D.H.S. funding. ICE officers are being paid; T.S.A. workers are not.
Basically, with the T.S.A., we’re talking about a population of essential federal workers who have had to go to work during two shutdowns. At the lower end of the T.S.A. pay scale, workers are not currently able to make rent or pay their car notes or buy gas. We’re talking about real financial hardship. At some airports, twenty per cent are calling in sick or just not showing up. Deploying armed ICE officers, who are hated by many members of the public because of the killings in Minnesota and other places, will make that situation even more stressful.
ICE isn’t trained to do what T.S.A. does. What are they going to be doing—and are they going to be drawing protesters? Are they going to be dissuading other airport workers, many of whom are immigrants, from coming to work? There’s just a ton of question marks.”
— E. Tammy Kim, who has previously reported on the stripping of employee protections at the T.S.A.