Por Eve Ottenberg
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While halfway around the world Hezbollah and Iran are beating the living daylights out of Israel, here in our own hemisphere, superintended by a bilious potentate, a much different story is unfolding. Donald Trump’s garish kidnapping of the Venezuelan president, followed by his ferocious starvation blockade of Cuba and his announcement March 16 that “I can do anything I want with Cuba,” are white house depravities about which there seems little the world can do. Sadly, the other two mega-powers, China and Russia, leave the U.S. to rampage in its backyard, though currently its maniacal crimes have simmered down. The U.S. is now supposedly in talks with Cuba, but no one in their right mind thinks this means life has improved for the average person on the island.
Cuba suffers from widespread blackouts and an expanding energy crisis. According to RT March 14, Cuban president Miguel Diaz-Canel confirmed the talks with the Trump cuckoo birds, though on the evening of March 16, those psychopaths repeated their demand that Diaz-Canel step down. This high-handed command and the talks follow “weeks of power cuts, fuel shortages and growing public anger after the halt of Venezuelan oil shipments…and as Washington stepped up efforts to block other suppliers. Trump has repeatedly threatened a ‘total oil blockade’ of Cuba and warned that countries selling crude to the island could face tariffs.”
That bluster about tariffs no doubt accounts for Cuba’s oil drought and for el jefe’s prediction last week that Cuba “is gonna fall pretty soon.” What can you call this besides Washington’s fascist doctrine?—undermine or overthrow every leftist government in Latin America from Honduras to Venezuela to Cuba in the hopes that Bukele-style rightists seize power. I’ll tell you what else you can call it: the U.S. obsessive compulsive fixation on communists who have been minding their own business and done absolutely zip to bother Washington besides simply exist, something the white house finds intolerable.
But some people have other ideas. Some people are not commie-hating Neanderthals who fancy themselves disrupting Cuban five-year plans. Those people are not to be found in the Trump regime. They are to be found…in the Vatican. You read that right. According to Responsible Statecraft March 13, “the Holy See is hoping to revive its place as a key mediator between Washington and Havana.” Apparently, the Vatican is “re-emerging as a potential facilitator of a bilateral deal.” Of course, there’d be no need for a bilateral deal if a certain power, let’s call it the Fourth Reich, aka Berlin on the Potomac, had not unilaterally blockaded Cuba to begin with. But, to please the Vatican, Havana released some prisoners and a backchannel has opened for Cuba and the U.S. This “comes as President Trump has been floating a ‘friendly takeover’ – ‘or not’ – of Cuba.”
Other moves are afoot, too. The Fourth Reich Washington has mentioned many sweeteners and incentives to USA Today that will be on the table if the Cuban president obliges white house gangsters by resigning. Who knows if that will happen. The article cites “a recent decision to allow fuel sales to Cuba’s private sector…as well as the delivery of $9 million in humanitarian aid through the Catholic Church…Cuban authorities…[legalized] public private partnerships…and [floated] an increased role for the country’s private sector.”
Also, pow wows occurred between a state department official and Catholic leaders in Cuba. “Cuban authorities deny that talks are occurring” beyond informational exchanges, but Trump insists secretary of state Marco “Regime Change” Rubio “is talking to high-ranking Cuban leaders” among them members of the Castro family. Clearly on the Trump Show the idea is to nudge the Cuban economy away from communism and closer to the free market, because this will be great for ratings. You naturally ask, what ratings? The ones that come from things such as privatizing Cuba’s infrastructure, so airheads like Commerce Secretary Scott Bessent can help his associates make money off it. Privatizing infrastructure is always a lucrative, anti-social-welfare scam, battle-tested on numerous luckless free market economies. So keep your eyes peeled for that, I’d bet anything it’s next on the private sector agenda for Cuba.
Meanwhile, Responsible Statecraft reports that people like Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum “offered to serve as mediators for U.S.-Cuba talks, while others, notably Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, have apparently tried to send oil to the island. But upcoming elections in both Colombia and neighboring Brazil, along with Trump’s penchant for retaliation, have subdued any greater regional efforts to deter further escalation.” RS notes that this fear led Jamaica and Guyana to ditch Cuban doctors, on whom their health care systems had long relied. This is a true loss for both countries, as Cuban medics are the heroes of the Global South. That in and of itself is naturally enough to make them persona non grata to the boss of bosses in the white house.
So threats, lies, blockades, attempted government overthrow – there’s evidently nothing Berlin on the Potomac won’t stoop to in its witch-hunt against communist influence in the Americas. “Cuba has been grappling with an energy crisis since January, when U.S. forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and halted fuel exports from Caracas to Havana,” reports Al Jazeera March 10. “White House officials have suggested that Cuba is facing an economic collapse.” Maybe. Or this could be Trump’s wishful thinking. No doubt things are dire in Cuba, but Cuban communists have been around a long time, and Yankee assaults are nothing new for them.
What’s new is the arrival of a very ambitious, obsessively communist-fixated, self-promoter in the white house, namely Marco “Root Out Commies” Rubio, who loves to claim his family fled Cuba for Florida, eliding the fact that they did not flee Castro, they fled Batista. Rubio never explains that; he just lets his listeners draw the wrong conclusion, to wit, that communism victimized his family. It didn’t. He victimized communism, with his relentless drive to advance his nauseating career on the back of the so-called communist menace in the Caribbean. It’s no secret that Rubio has presidential ambitions, and he clearly regards immiserating 10 million Cubans as a convenient stepping stone into the Oval Office. This is disgusting. As is he. But it’s of a piece with Trump regime strategy: generate headlines by starting war. Except the gangsters in the white house aren’t exactly starting war on Cuba: They’re starving the people of fuel and everything else.
If you think this supposed strategy started with Rubio, I guess you may be onto something. Just like the Venezuelan caper. Not that Trump needed a lot of encouragement for any of these adventures, but they all bear the Marco “Overthrow Leftists” Rubio signature. He made his career preening as some kind of South Florida anti-commie fanatic, and now he’s making good on those claims.
Problem is, this plumage may not fly well outside of South Florida, given that your average American is now more concerned about the price at the pump hitting five dollars a gallon than what the collectivos are doing in Caracas. In fact, come next election, Rubio might actually get blamed for our lousy economy, caused by his state department starting a war nobody wanted with Iran. And if you don’t remember, well, I do: Rubio was the imbecile who said we had to attack Iran because Israel was going to do it first. So he confessed that his state department allowed the fanatics in Jerusalem to drag Washington into a wildly unpopular war on Tehran, a war Iran is now winning and that has already enabled it to kick the U.S. out of the Gulf.
So what’s Cuba to do? It’ll tell you: sit tight, negotiate and keep channels open to China and Russia, neither of which like seeing their Latin American allies get creamed. My guess is if Xi Jinping shipped some vital cargo to Havana, the thugs to the north wouldn’t do much about it. Why? Because what’s Trump gonna do – slap tariffs on China? I don’t think so. Not when Beijing can hit back by restricting more rare earths. Washington’s already got a problem in that department, namely its weapons producers can’t function without the rare earths that Beijing has a near monopoly on. So a couple of Chinese ships to Cuba are probably not worth the headache to Trump. As for cowardly Rubio – well he likes to scream about communists, but I notice he’s pretty quiet about China. Maybe he actually recognizes when he’s out of his league.
Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest novel is Booby Prize. She can be reached at her website.
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