Por Eve Ottenberg
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Events in Cuba have flown under the radar lately, but big changes are afoot. Noted by PBS June 19 but only belatedly by anybody else, Cuba’s new free-market reforms include 176 measures “to further decentralize Cuba’s state-run economy…[with] more space for private businesses, imports and exports without state intermediation, free hiring of personnel, authorization for private banks and investment by Cubans abroad.” There will even be fast-food chains on the island. If this echoes to you the so-called opening up of Eastern Europe after the Soviet collapse, you’re onto something – namely the corporate blueprint for privatizing a state-run, aka communist, economy. This was not inevitable for Cuba before Donald “Nail the Commies” Trump quite repulsively blockaded the island, but once he did, it arguably became so.
Cuba’s state monopoly on foreign trade and centralized production are now kaput, PBS reports. However, in a happy sign of governmental sanity, “Cuban authorities cautioned that…measures will not be viable if the U.S. does not lift the energy and financial embargo on the island.” So, Mr. Trump: no end to sanctions and the blockade, no free-market “opening up” of Cuba. The blockade will be the key test. Sanctions have been around, doing their insidious damage, forever. But the blockade is Trump’s signature barbarity, and if these reforms don’t inspire enough magnanimity in the Washington despot to end this brutality, this siege, then all bets are off.
You’d think Trump would seize this opportunity to try to freeze the Russians and Chinese out of the Caribbean, and he may: Moscow was the only power in the world that broke the energy blockade. It boldly sent the Anatoly Kolodkin tanker with 730,000 barrels of crude oil that arrived in late March in Matanzas and then later dispatched the Sea Horse, with 200,000 barrels of gas and oil. Russians have long memories. They have not forgotten the horrific Nazi blockade of Leningrad and clearly, with that in mind, were not scared by Washington. They’ve seen worse. And there was nothing the white house could do about this.
The Kremlin didn’t care, because you can bet its denizens are currently mad as hornets about revelations of over 40 Pentagon biolabs in Ukraine with, likely, Slav targets for their pathogens, as revealed by Tulsi Gabbard when she recently resigned. Rumors of these bio-weapons facilities have percolated through the internet for years, and indeed, some years back, yours truly even watched a video clip of Victoria Nuland confessing to Congress that yes, the U.S. researched pathogens in military biolabs on the Ukraine border with Russia. Was this video an AI fake – all the way back, just a year or two after the start of Moscow’s 2022 invasion? Who knows. Since it appeared, it’s evidently been scrubbed from the internet. So maybe its provenance was sketchy. Or maybe that public admission was just too damn explosive. One thing’s for sure, that clip wasn’t just watched in the U.S. – it was watched in the Kremlin, too. This was before the 2024 Ukrainian intelligence (ahem, CIA-inspired?) assassination of Russian Lieutenant General Igor Kirilov, in charge of investigating these Pentagon biolabs in Ukraine. Maybe Kirilov was just too effective.
Gabbard revealed that the U.S. army worked with “anthrax, avian flu, Ebola, plague and tuberculosis” in these Ukrainian labs, RT reported June 13. According to Tass, around the same time, the Pentagon spent “over $11 million to establish biological laboratories in Ukraine,” and the U.S. firm “Black and Veatch was the main contractor for the project.” And western elites like to dismiss Kremlin leadership as, ho, ho! paranoid. They probably thought the Soviets were paranoid during the Leningrad siege, which murdered and starved to death roughly 1.5 million people or the defense of Stalingrad, which saw the deaths of 1.1 million Russians. I doubt the Kremlin cares who calls it paranoid; it’s sachems know a monstrosity when they see one and they saw it in Trump’s blockade of Cuba. It’s a pity they haven’t turned the same attention to the criminal Israeli blockade of Gaza – but that likely has to do with the 1.5 million-strong Russian diaspora in Israel. Moscow takes care of its own.
China also broke Trump’s Cuban blockade, sending 60,000 tons of rice and over 5000 sets of 2-kilowatt photovoltaic power generation equipment, as part of the collaboration in which it built 55 solar parks for Cuba in 2025, with 37 more projected over the next two years. But still, these substantial acts of solidarity are not enough, so tight is the stranglehold on Cuba from the bully to the north. Per Drop Site News June 23, even Vietnam now assists Cuba “with its recently unprecedented economic overhaul by sharing lessons, strategies and operational frameworks from its 40 years of…(Renewal) reforms, the Vietnam Plus reports.” Drop Site goes on to call what’s happening Cuba’s “deepest economic liberalization since 1959…and using Vietnam’s transition to a market-oriented socialist economy as a model.” Vietnam’s “flexible, market-adaptable State-Owned Enterprises” are critical here.
For socialists and communists everywhere, this bed of thorns raises the question, will Cuba still be socialist when the metamorphosis ends? Exactly how much damage to working people on this island did Donald Trump manage to do – beyond, of course, obvious crimes like killing infants in the NICU by blockading vital energy to run hospitals and so forth. Because clearly, Cuba’s president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, is making these changes under duress. They affect, according to Drop Site June 12: enterprise and markets; decentralization and the state; trade and investment; agriculture and food; fiscal, monetary and social; energy and transport; tourism, commerce and labor. And these reforms have no mere mild effects. For instance, foreign direct investment will be incentivized, land use and wages will be “reformed,” and there will be a “move from subsidizing products to subsidizing people.”
While it’s easy to carp that these concessions amount to capitulation to the tyranny of the late-stage finance capitalism headquartered in New York City, frankly, I don’t see a lot of wiggle room for Diaz-Canel. He’s clearly making the best of a terrible situation. Trump apparently doesn’t care that his blockade is killing Cubans, because when it comes to Latin America, he is a dictator, egged on by years of nauseating propaganda from outlets like The New York Times about people like Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and by its caricatures of Cuban communist repression; while behind Trump looms a merciless, blood-stained phalanx of finance, real estate, stock market, banking and hedge fund predators. To say nothing of U.S. military might and its agonizing proximity to a tiny island that numerous pentagon bigwigs over the decades have threatened to turn into a parking lot.
Russia has size, resources and nukes. So does China, plus a massive population. Iran has missiles like you wouldn’t believe and an unstoppable esprit de corps. But what do little countries like Vietnam and Cuba have? Not much beyond their ingenuity and their wits. Cuab’s president has no choice but to use those. And as anyone who’s ever survived solely by their wits can tell you, it’s usually touch and go.
Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest novel is “Death Calls It a Day.” She can be reached at her website.
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