Cuba Is Ailing, but the Regime Remains Sturdy

Is the Cuban government on the verge of collapse? Has the moment that Washington has waited for, hoped for, and worked toward for 65 years finally arrived? Some U.S. officials seem to think so. But so eager are they to see the dream of regime change finally come true that they underestimate the Cuban regime’s resilience, skewing U.S. policy to the detriment of the Cuban people that they purport to support.

At a recent conference in Madrid, Brian Nichols—the assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs—gave a glimpse into how the Biden administration views Cuba’s current crisis. “Cuba is at a key moment,” he said, referring to recent protests over shortages of food and electricity in Santiago, the symbolic birthplace of Cuban revolutions. “And the solution is democracy.”

In a similar vein, U.S. President Joe Biden previously called Cuba a “failed state” following an unprecedented spate of nationwide protests that began on July 11, 2021. In normal usage, a failed state is one that has lost the capacity to govern its national territory. Haiti is a failed state; Cuba is certainly not. Nevertheless, the possibility that the protests marked the onset of a “people’s power” revolution caused Biden to freeze plans for relaxing some of former President Donald Trump’s draconian economic sanctions.

“After July 11, we hit the pause button,” said Juan Gonzalez, Biden’s National Security Council advisor for Latin America, in an interview with NBC.

Cuba was not a failed state in 2021, nor is it now—but its economy is failing under the combined weight of U.S. sanctions, misguided government policies, and the aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump’s policy of “maximum pressure” was designed to starve the economy of foreign exchange currency by curtailing travel, limiting remittances, impeding energy supplies, and coercing other countries into canceling medical services contracts with Cuba.

Just as these sanctions were taking effect, COVID-19 closed the tourist industry, the centerpiece of the Cuban economy, resulting in a loss of as much as $3 billion annually. When Trump blocked the wire service transfers of remittances and the pandemic prevented Cuban Americans from hand-carrying cash to help their families, annual remittances fell from more than $3 billion to just $1.9 billion in 2021. All in all, foreign exchange earnings dropped by some 40 percent.

With the economy under this severe stress, the government decided to undertake a long awaited currency and exchange rate reform that was poorly implemented, touching off runaway inflation that has eroded the real purchasing power of the Cuban peso by as much as 90 percent in certain informal markets.

As a result, Cubans are suffering critical shortages of basic necessities—food, fuel, and medicine. Electrical blackouts lasting half a day are common. Life has become so hard that more than 5 percent of the population has emigrated over the past two years, exacerbating the migration problem on the U.S. southern border.

On top of the economic crisis, Cuba’s leaders face unprecedented political challenges. Fidel Castro, whose prestige and charisma held the regime together through past hardships, is gone. His brother Raúl and the rest of the “historic generation” that brought about the revolution have stepped back from the helm, and their successors lack the credibility of the founders. The internet, and especially social media, have awakened Cuban civil society, confronting leaders with demands from below that they have no experience managing. Rising inequality, produced by the very market reforms that the government introduced to stimulate the economy, is exacerbating popular frustration.

The depth of people’s desperation and discontent is why some U.S. officials think the denouement of the Cuba regime may finally be at hand. U.S. analysts made that same mistake in the early 1990s, when the Cuban economy suffered a similar meltdown after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1993, a CIA National Intelligence Estimate predicted “a better than even chance” of regime collapse “within the next few years.”

In fact, official Washington has been predicting the Cuban regime’s imminent demise ever since 1959, when the Eisenhower administration expected to overthrow Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government before leaving office. When U.S. Ambassador to Cuba Philip Bonsal proposed offering Castro an olive branch to counter the rising influence of the Soviet Union, Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Thomas Mann replied, “Our best bet is to wait for a successor regime.” Subsequent U.S. administrations thought the Cuban regime would be toppled by exile paramilitary attacks, a comprehensive economic embargo, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and, finally, Castro’s death.

These predictions have been consistently wrong because they focused on the Cuban government’s vulnerabilities, neglecting its sources of resilience. First, despite widespread and deep popular discontent, there is no organized opposition able to mobilize and channel that discontent into a movement for political change. The one major attempt, in November 2021, to organize a nationwide “Civic March for Change” demanding political reform was a total failure. Today, most leading dissident activists are either in jail or in exile. The protests on July 11, 2021, and the recent ones in Santiago de Cuba were spontaneous outbursts of frustration over the hardships of everyday life, not the result of an organized opposition movement with staying power.

Second, although the Cuban political elite is clearly divided over economic policy, there is no evidence of any split over the fundamental structure of the political system. That is a critical difference from Eastern Europe in 1989. Ironically, U.S. hostility has strengthened elite unity, since Cuba’s leaders know that if they don’t hang together, they will surely hang separately.

Finally, there is no sign of disloyalty within the armed forces. On the contrary, the military enjoys exceptionally strong influence within the upper echelons of the Communist Party, and it manages key sectors of the economy. Its interests are well protected by the status quo.

With a cohesive elite, a loyal military, and no effective organized opposition, there is no plausible path to sudden regime transition in Cuba in the foreseeable future. Change will only come through evolution, not cataclysmic collapse. And regimes under siege are rarely disposed to embark on significant reforms. Former U.S. President Barack Obama recognized the futility of pursuing regime collapse, and he instead sought to engage with Cuba to shape its evolutionary change in a positive direction. But a normalization agreement reached a decade ago was quickly rolled back by the Trump administration.

Biden and his foreign-policy team are holding on to a Cuba policy inherited from Trump, built on the premise that there is no point engaging with a dead man walking. But the real zombie is U.S. policy, an “outdated approach that, for decades, has failed to advance our interests,” as Obama put it.

Even though the current U.S. approach has no prospect of producing regime change, it is impoverishing the Cuban people who Biden claims to support, deepening the humanitarian crisis on the island and accelerating uncontrolled migration—none of which serves the interests of the United States, let alone the Cuban people.