Unnamed US officials cited by the US newspaper who claimed the Trump administration did not have a “concrete plan” for Cuba, but that the US military’s recent abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was “left behind as a blueprint and a warning for Cuba.”
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In order to identify a government official in Cuba who might “want to cut a deal,” a US official told the newspaper that meetings had been held with Cuban exiles and civic organizations in Miami and Washington, DC.
Trump has also made a direct threat to Cuba, stating earlier this month, “I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS LATE.”
The White House may be “too optimistic” in believing that threats alone will be enough to overthrow the Cuban government, which is led by President Miguel Diaz-Canel, according to David Smith, an expert on US politics and foreign policy at the University of Sydney’s US Studies Centre.
Trump’s theory that if there was a sufficient threat, the Iranian government might just cave was confirmed by Smith in an interview with CNN.
He claimed that the Iranian regime was very weak and that he was actually encouraging the protesters, but it turns out that it was still strong, oppressive, and unwavering.
According to Smith, outsiders are unsure of the state of the Cuban government, including its level of power and its officials’ decency.
Former US president Ricardo Zuniga, who helped negotiate a brief detente between Havana and Washington from 2014 to 2017, said Cuba’s leadership would be “a much tougher nut to crack” than Venezuela’s. Zuniga was a former official with the US president’s administration.
Zuniga told The Wall Street Journal, “There is no one who would be drawn to work on the US side.”
Since the 1959 revolution, which brought the country’s well-known revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro, to power, many US politicians have dreamed of erasing the Cuban leadership.
During the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1962, the US attempted and failed to overthrow Cuban leadership. Ernesto “Che” Guevara, an American-born Cuban revolutionary, was executed by Bolivian forces in 1967 after the CIA made numerous attempts to assassinate him during his lifetime.
Cuba is only 150 kilometers (93 miles) from South Florida, and many Cubans have left the country in search of the US, citing economic difficulties and political unrest.
A significant portion of US voting is made up of senior Trump figures, including former Cuban dictator Marco Rubio, who has long criticized Cuba’s communist government.
According to Smith, the University of Sydney’s Smith, “There’s always been this sense for anti-Communist hawks in the administration that this place is so small and so close, it’s a real humiliation that this place is allowed to continue as it is.”
Source: Aljazeera
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