Cuba unlikely to overthrow its government

OPINION:

My late friend Jose Sorzano used to describe what it was like to talk to someone at a Cuban grocery store. The response to anyone seeking food was either “No hay” (“There is not any”) or “No te toca” (“It is not your turn”).

Jose was born in Cuba and came to the U.S. as a child. He was exceptionally smart, so he went to college. Eventually, he served as Jeane Kirkpatrick’s deputy when she was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

He held out little hope for the exceptionally corrupt Cuban economy while it was in communist hands. As he described it, Cuba made Chicago look like a corruption-free zone.

On June 18, the Cuban National Assembly approved a package of 176 reforms aimed at turning around Cuba’s economy. In fact, as Prime Minister Manuel Marrero said, the accumulation of wealth in private hands would no longer be forbidden. He said, “If there is no wealth, there is nothing to distribute.”

It does not sound as if Cuba will change much, if at all.

GAESA is a military conglomerate that controls much of Cuba’s economy, as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps controls Iran’s. By sanctioning GAESA and barring oil shipments from Venezuela, President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have brought the Cuban economy to the brink of collapse.

Will the latest reforms save it? It is highly doubtful because the Cuban communist regime will encumber them with absurdities.

The reforms are supposed to reduce the areas of the economy where private enterprises are banned, enable them to attract foreign investment, and allow them to export and import more freely. They are also supposed to reduce the number of state-owned businesses and allow employers to own more than one company and hire more than 100 employees.

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Services, such as state-owned nursing homes, are intended to go private, as are soup kitchens. Direct subsidies to the needy will purportedly replace ration books.

Who will put up the money for people to buy state-owned businesses?

Cuba lacks the rule of law, foreign currency and the institutional capacity to make the proposed reforms practicable. It also, despite the global reputation of Cuban doctors, lacks a credible healthcare system. It has also not released political prisoners, which would be a good first step in bringing Cuba toward democratic government.

Cuba has never recovered from the 1962 missile crisis or the Soviets’ pullout. Soviet aid to Cuba ended in 1991 with the Soviet Union’s collapse. Cuba has, for years, benefited from Venezuelan oil imports at vastly reduced prices. That is no longer the case, thanks to Messrs. Trump and Rubio.

Cuba’s failure to recover is primarily because of U.S. sanctions that President Obama sought to end in July 2015 with the restoration of full diplomatic relations. In January 2025, Mr. Trump signed an executive order reversing the Biden administration’s eleventh-hour attempt to revive Obama-era policies, thereby reinstating the strict sanctions from his first term.

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The Cuban people are inventive, but can they overcome the corruption and the theft of benefits imposed by these so-called reforms? It is highly doubtful.

Mr. Trump is unlikely to relieve the Cuban regime of its burdens, which is precisely the right thing. We need to keep up the pressure and let the Castro regime fall on its sword. It will do so eventually.

“Eventually,” however, is a long time to wait. The president should — as this column recommended early in his second presidential term with regard to Iran — sign a secret presidential directive ordering the CIA to overthrow the Cuban regime. We need dozens, perhaps hundreds, of spies around Cuba.

It is time either to get them off their duffs or to find people who can do what needs to be done.

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Cuba has acquired about 300 drones from Russia and Iran. These have the range to reach targets deep in the United States and can carry a 100-pound or so explosive payload.

We do not need another Cuban missile crisis, but the president should make clear that any drone launch from Cuba will be met militarily in a way that would destroy the regime.

• Jed Babbin is a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and a contributing editor for The American Spectator.

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