The End of Communist Cuba?
President Donald Trump said a few days ago, “Cuba is next.” By which he meant: next after Venezuela and Iran. He also recently mused,
I do believe I’ll be having the honor of taking Cuba. That’s a big honor. Taking Cuba in some form. I mean, whether I free it, take it. [I] think I can do anything I want with it, [if] you want to know the truth.
The Cuban government, established by the revolution of 1959 and Communist since the early 1960s, seems destined to disappear within a few months and certain to be overturned one way or another by the end of the year.
At the moment, this seems to be true. The Cuban economy has collapsed, and none of its former allies has come to the country’s aid. The government has lost popular support. As in Venezuela and Iran, Trump is prepared to use military force to accomplish his aims. There seems to be nothing at present to stop Trump from terminating the Cuban Communist government.
How did the two countries arrive at this current impasse? What will happen to the Cuban people? What can be done to help them?
And in particular what has been and what is the role of the U.S. left?
Cuba an American Colony
At the end of the nineteenth century, U.S. businesspeople invested heavily in Cuba: sugar, utilities, railroads. At the same time, Cubans began to fight for their independence from the Spanish empire. The United States intervened in the war, supposedly to help the Cuban people, but at the end of the Spanish-American
War the United States took the Philippines and Puerto Rico as colonies. With the Platt Amendment that gave the United States the right to intervene militarily in Cuba, Cuba became a virtual colony. In 1934 Platt ended in exchange for U.S. control of the Guantanamo Naval Base.
Still the U.S. government protected the interests of American companies and their investments in Cuba in utilities, railroads, about half of the island’s sugar production, as well as the hotels, gambling casinos, and brothels run by the Mafia, that made Havana a center of international tourism. Fulgencio Batista played a central role in Cuban politics since he took power in a 1933 coup. The Batista regime abolished all civil rights and workers’ rights, and killed hundreds and perhaps thousands of students and other protestors.
In 1959, Fidel Castro and his guerrilla army carried out a revolution that overthrew Batista and within a couple of years won independence from the political and economic control of the United States. Many Americans admired Castro and looked forward to a new democratic government in Cuba, as I did. But the Cuban-U.S. honeymoon was short-lived.
Cuba’s serious problems with the U.S. government began on May 17, 1959 with the agrarian reform law that seized mostly large, foreign, corporate landholdings, many belonging to U.S. companies. That year, the Eisenhower administration began to contemplate the overthrow of the new revolutionary Cuban government. The United States under John F. Kennedy carried out the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 to overthrow the new Cuban government, but the plan failed disastrously.
On December 2, 1961, Castro declared, “I am a Marxist-Leninist, and I shall be a Marxist-Leninist to the end of my life,” sealing his alliance with the Soviet Union.
Cuba Becomes Communist
Cuba began to assimilate politically and structurally to the Soviet Union and the states of the Communist Bloc, a process completed by 1970. Cuba became a one-party state where the ruling Communist Party now owned and controlled the economy, which had been entirely nationalized from the largest businesses to the smallest farms and shops.
In the new Communist Cuba, there were no legitimate elections where people might choose between parties with different programs. The Communist state-party controlled the official labor unions, and no other unions were permitted to compete with them, nor could the unions strike. Similarly, the Communist state-party controlled all social organizations in the country: women’s groups, student organizations, sports leagues. Democratic civil liberties—freedom of association, the right to assemble and protest, the right to independent newspapers or independent radio and TV broadcasting—were all abolished. The Soviet KGB helped Cuba create an intelligence service and its own secret police. In addition, Cuba’s machista culture created new forms of oppression as homosexuality, a “bourgeois perversion,” was made illegal until 1979 and gay Cubans found themselves harassed, arrested, and condemned to forced labor in concentration camps.
From 1959 until today, virtually every group on the left—from the Communist Party USA, to the Trotskyists, and more recently the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—supported what they called “socialist” Cuba, though some left groups had reservations and critique. When Cubans engaged in large scale social protest against food shortages and the lack of democracy in 1994, 2021, and repeatedly from 2024 to today, virtually no group on the left gave full-throated support to the Cuban people.
And few criticized the Cuban Communist state for its repression. Very seldom did leftists declare that they supported the Cuban people, the poor and working-class Cubans protesting in the streets, against the Communist government. And few were prepared to discuss the developing economic, social, and political crisis.
Toward the Cuban Crisis
From 1970 until the twenty-first century, Cuba remained relatively stable. The U.S. trade embargo, which began in 1962 and was strengthened by the Helms-Burton Act of 1996, was designed to strangle the Cuban government. Soviet trade and aid thus became absolutely critical to the survival and function of the Cuban economy, accounting for up to 70 percent of its trade and subsidizing over 20 percent of its GNP in the 1980s. The Soviets provided nearly all of Cuba’s oil, grain, and machinery, while purchasing its sugar at inflated prices. At the same time, Cuba’s government, modeling its programs on those of the Nordic countries, created excellent health and education systems, with low infant mortality, high life expectancy, and universal literacy. Cuba’s health system’s results were comparable to those of Sweden.
With the fall of Soviet Communism, Russia suffered its own economic and social crisis and was no longer able to subsidize Cuba. Russian trade and aid—which had provided most of the country’s economic resources—virtually vanished. Fidel Castro, still the ruler of the country, named the new economic era that began in 1990 the “Special Period in Time of Peace.” Cuba’s GDP shrunk by 35 percent, agricultural production fell by 47 percent, construction by 75 percent, and manufacturing by 90 percent.
To survive, the Cuban government took several steps that changed the nature of the economy but not its top-down administration. The country had to carry out dramatic cuts in the national budget, though it protected and maintained the education and health budgets. Cuba found itself unable to import enough goods to feed the population, resulting in widespread hunger. The citizens’ caloric intake declined by 27 percent, with people eating about 1,000 fewer calories per day. With a new emphasis on food production, the government created limited free markets for food and some other products. Without fuel, Cubans rode imported Chinese bicycles, and vehicles were pulled by horses, mules, or oxen.
The government now encouraged investment from Western capitalist countries. Canada invested in the nickel industry; Canada and France invested in petroleum; Spain became the principal investor in building hotels for the tourism industry. By the late 1990s, international tourism replaced sugar as the country’s principal source of revenue, growing from 340,000 to over one million tourists per year.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, lack of oil was one of the biggest economic problems of Cuba. Then in 1999, Hugo Chavez, an admirer of Castro and the Cuban Revolution, became the president of Venezuela. In 2000, Chavez began to send about 100,000 barrels of oil per day to Cuba, about half of the country’s requirements, in exchange for Cuban doctors, teachers, sports coaches, and military and security officers. And Mexico continued to provide subsidized petroleum to Cuba. Those two nations made it possible for Cuba to continue to provide energy to homes and industry.
In 2008, Fidel Castro, in failing health, retired and was succeeded by his brother Raul. His succession insured the continuity of the leadership and the perpetuity of the system.
Trump, COVID-19, and the Crisis
When President Barack Obama eased restrictions on Cuba, the tourist sector boomed. In 2017, the best year for Cuban tourism, hard currency revenues reached $2.3 billion. But when Donald Trump was elected president in 2017, he reimposed economic restrictions, resulting in fewer American tourists, and with that Cuba’s tourist business and revenues began to decline.
Raul Castro, gave up the presidency in April 2018 and retired as first secretary of the Communist Party in April 2021. Miguel Díaz-Canel, chosen for his reliability, replaced him in both of those roles. For the first time in many decades, the Castros no longer ruled Cuba.
Then came COVID-19, and Cuba closed its borders to tourists from March to November 2021. Tourism, the country’s leading industry, practically disappeared, and the country entered a major economic crisis with power outages, food shortages, and a huge exodus of people. Over the last four years, one million of Cuba’s 11 million people have left the island nation.
Today, because of Trump, Cuba no longer receives oil from Mexico and Venezuela. Acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez agreed to work with Trump, and the United States largely took over the Venezuelan oil industry. Under enormous pressure from Trump, who has threatened higher tariffs, trade sanctions, and even the invasion of Mexico to crush its cartels, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has stopped shipping oil. Without fuel, Cuba’s powerplants can no longer provide electricity, and the country has often gone dark. The economy has ground to a halt. Without hard currency, Cuba has experienced critical shortages of food, medicine and had to turn to other countries for humanitarian aid. There is real suffering in Cuba today.
It’s difficult to accurately assess Cuba’s economic situation, in part because of the opaque military entity Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. (GAESA) run by the Cuban military, which plays a huge role in the national economy. The Cuban public knows little about GAESA and neither did anyone else until a leak published in El Nuevo Herald. An article in the Columbia Law Journal analyzed the data:
The GAESA conglomerate dominates the country’s most strategic and profitable economic sectors. Through its affiliate Gaviota (Grupo de Turismo Gaviota S.A.), it controls a large share of tourism; through affiliates CIMEX and TRD Caribe, retail and wholesale trade, respectively; and through RAFIN S.A. and the Banco Financiero Internacional (BFI), the Cuban financial system.
It also manages remittance businesses, logistics, and storage—including the Port of Mariel—while participating in construction, transportation, and foreign trade. In practice, it administers the country’s main foreign-currency flows, making it the most influential economic actor in Cuba.
GAESA’s gross profits on sales represent close to 37 percent of Cuba’s GDP, which means that more than one-third of the country’s total value added is generated within the military conglomerate.
GAESA, which functions practically as a state within the state, is run by Cuba’s top military leaders who are all Communists, and the public has never had any control over or even a voice in its affairs.
What Will Happen to Cuba?
If the current crisis continues or worsens, it could lead to more social protests or to increased crime and violence. Such a scenario would not be to the benefit of either the current Cuban rulers, the United States, or anyone else.
Given Cuba’s collapse, the Trump administration and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, son of Cuban immigrants, will see no need to militarily conquer the island. The prospect of the Cuban Communist state-party organizing a military resistance to U.S. conquest is unlikely given the economic collapse and recent anti-government protests. So, the future of Cuba revolves around what sort of negotiations and can and will be made.
Donald Trump has frequently said that the U.S. capture of Maduro and his replacement by the more amenable Delcy Rodríguez was a model operation. He erroneously thought he might do something similar when he launched his war on Iran. But such a scenario might well be possible in Cuba.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has talked about something similar:
Cuba needs to change. It needs to change. And it doesn’t have to change all at once. It doesn’t have to change from one day to the next. Everyone is mature and realistic here. And they need to make dramatic reforms. And if they want to make those dramatic reforms that open the space for both economic and eventually political freedom for the people of Cuba, obviously the United States would love to see that.
Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, grandson of former Cuban President Raúl Castro, appears to be Rubio’s current interlocutor in discussions about the island’s future. Known as Raulito, Little Raul, he has been seen lately in the company of Cuban President Díaz-Canel and is rumored to have been talking with Rubio. Raul Rodríguez Castro has both a military education and degrees in finance and accounting from the University of Havana. He rose through the army to the rank of colonel and became the head of the service that protects Cuba’s leaders. He does not have an important position in either the party or the government, though his father, General Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, was the head of GAESA. The younger Castro, with his name, background, and connections, might be exactly the person that Rubio would want to head Cuba’s government during a transition to a capitalist state aligned with the United States.
Within the year, Cuba will likely have a new ruling group, perhaps evolving out of the current Communist leadership and perhaps including Cuban Americans from Miami. The transition to capitalism at the highest level would be relatively easy given that foreign capitalists already control much of the commanding heights of Cuban industry: the Spanish in hotels and tourism and the Canadians and French in minerals and petroleum. As in Soviet transition, the Communists in Cuba, such as those who run GAESA, could end up taking over state enterprises for themselves.
The Cuban economy will revive only slowly given its current state, and the country will for some time be dependent on foreign aid. Cubans will likely return to their country, but at what rate remains to be seen.
The United States, and the new Cuban government it creates, will at first dominate the political sphere. The Trump administration no doubt prefers to see Cuba run by a conservative, capitalist party. But history suggests that the Communist Party might survive and a democratic socialist labor party develop. Workers will fight to create independent labor unions with the right to strike and to negotiate contracts.
The Role of the Left Today
Neither American capitalism nor the U.S. government can offer Cubans what they need. An American capitalist system that exploits workers at home cannot liberate workers in Cuba. And the U.S. government, with its racist attitudes and its reactionary social policies, cannot lift up the Cuban people.
What about the U.S. left? The U.S. left never got the Cuban issue right. Understandably thrilled by the revolution and captivated by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, most leftists gave up their critical faculties and quickly became uncritical supporters of the Cuban Communist state. For more than 60 years, the left supported a state where the people had no democratic rights and workers had no right to unions of their own choosing.
It is time for the left to start anew by supporting the Cuban people and the Cuban working class in whatever new order develops. The left can start by opposing U.S. domination of Cuba, defending the Cuban peoples’ right to self-determination, and backing Cuban workers’ demands for economic security, democracy, civil rights, and labor rights. The left should side with a democratic Cuba and those within it who fight for democratic socialism.
Dan La Botz was a founding member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). He is the author of Rank-and-File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union (1991). He is also a co-editor of New Politics and editor of Mexican Labor News and Analysis.
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