The Latin American Report # 525

A friend with deep and specific knowledge about the dynamics of Cuba-China relations told me today that the Asian giant is increasingly speaking more bluntly: either the Island opens all possible floodgates to the market, or the steady flow of yuan and dollars it needs to breathe again will never materialize. The country isn’t even on life support—without assistance, it will suffocate, a victim of persistent oxygen deprivation.

It’s baffling how, amid the overwhelmingly comprehensive crisis we’re enduring and under Washington’s intense, targeted economic pressure, Cuba’s political leadership still resists decisively reforming the economic structure—a demand even Vietnamese authorities have made publicly, albeit tepidly. Since the last time I addressed my country’s socioeconomic situation, it has done nothing but sink deeper and deeper, chasing a bottom as elusive as the sky prices are trying to reach.

The world is vastly different from the 20th century, when Cuba was backed by Soviet socialism and could even experiment with advancing communist subversion in Latin America. While this utopia survives intellectually, in practice, that subversion no longer exists. The (armed) political strategy that inspired revolutionary struggles in the second half of the 20th century is no longer the driving force of the contemporary left, which—in its various forms—has either integrated into the liberal democratic order (with all the limitations and inconsistencies that entails) or been relegated to a peripheral or symbolic political expression.

For example, today’s subversive tensions between the U.S. and other actors like Russia or China don’t embody an intrinsic ideological divide (as during the Cold War) but reflect a clash of geopolitical, diplomatic, economic, and military interests—which, to some extent, are manageable under the paradigm of great-power competition. A paradigm that, obviously, doesn’t fit Cuba.

Finally, China is nominally communist, but its commercial approach is purely capitalist—not to mention Russia’s case. It’s not ideological alignment that will push China to help Cuba with the force and urgency required, but a sober calculation of the risks of that investment. In this sense, and assuming that the comprehensive U.S. sanctions regime will only tighten—never loosen—in the immediate future, Cuba’s only remaining options, aside from governing well (i.e., ensuring politics embody sound statecraft), are to attract those most inclined "in principle" to help—but who will only deliver assistance to the extent it doesn’t disrupt their fiscal balance.

• BREAKING: Syria is no more a SST country for Washington, but Cuba surely yes. Insane, don't you think?

This is all for today; thanks for your reading.