An abridged and modified version of the following article originally appeared in Spanish on Diario Red on February 7, 2026.
“Cuba has reiterated ad nauseam that it will not discuss any of the issues that make Miami salivate: neither the removal of the revolutionary leadership from power—the current one or any other that may succeed it—nor general amnesty, nor reforms to the Constitution, which, incidentally, enshrines the irrevocable nature of socialism in Cuba, nor a ‘democratic transition.’ Therefore, as long as people like Marco Rubio stand in the way, any possible negotiations between the United States and Cuba will sooner or later reach a dead end.”
— Iramís Rosique
In recent weeks, the international media has turned its wandering attention to the possibility of negotiations between the Cuban government and the Trump administration, or has gone as far as stating that such negotiations have already begun somewhat somewhere, as has been reported without anyone so far being able to provide any corroborating evidence. As Carlos Fernández de Cossío, Cuba’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, has already clarified, it is still too early to say that the United States and Cuba—beyond their routine bilateral contacts on purely technical issues—have sat down to talk at any negotiating table for major conversations.
On Thursday, February 5, at a press conference, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel stated that Cuba was open to dialogue with the United States on any issue. Although some media outlets have sought to interpret these words as a sign of weakness or panic, or as some sort of “unusual” move or overture, Díaz-Canel’s statements do not deviate one iota from the Revolutionary Government’s historic official position regarding the relations between Cuba and the United States. In any case, whether or not negotiations have begun, through official channels or not, the truth is that any such discussion between the United States and Cuba faces enormous obstacles that are worth pausing to consider, however briefly.
Cuban society and its diaspora have already experienced the benefits of a relatively and short-lived normalized relationship between the two countries. Obama did not lift the blockade—only the US Congress can do so—that remains the main obstacle to any further normalization of bilateral relations and to Cuba’s orderly integration into the global market, but he did relax economic and, at least rhetorically, political hostility toward the island to such an extent that those brief years saw noticeable prosperity in the daily lives of Cubans.
In 2017, all that came crashing down. When Donald Trump was investigated by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the heat of the “Russiagate,” Marco Rubio emerged as a crucial Trump ally within the committee. Rubio’s conduct during the investigation, and the announcement in Little Havana a few weeks later—by a beaming Trump and Rubio—of the immediate dismantling of Obama’s “thaw” policy, suggest that policy toward Cuba was a bargaining chip in a crude exercise in political survival on Trump’s behalf. Since then, relations between Trump and Rubio have only grown closer, while relations between Cuba and the United States have only deteriorated.
This is one of the obstacles I referred to earlier, which for decades has prevented any lasting form of understanding between the two countries. Rubio is not just Rubio: he is a whole political tradition. He has built his career within and under the protection of the so-called “historic exile,” founded by former henchmen of the Batista tyranny and the oligarchs who fled Cuba after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959. For this political force, around which all opposition to the Cuban Revolution has been articulated for more than half a century, the only solution to the “Cuban problem” is the exertion of the most thorough revenge, through the total and definitive ousting of the revolutionary leadership from the reins of State power—first of “Castro,” then “the Castro brothers,” and today the “Castro regime” or even a disparaging label as absurd as “the dictator Diaz-Canel,” someone who will leave office in 2029 after ten years as an elected official, exactly the same number of years France’s Emmanuel Macron would have served when he leaves office—and the eradication from Cuban society and memory of all traces of the Revolution. (Does the crumbling The Washington Post, for instance, the latest one to call Díaz-Canel a “dictator,” have the slightest clue that by law no public office at any level can be held in Cuba for more than two consecutive 5-year terms?!)
During the Cold War—“cold” for whom?—the national interests of the United States may have been perfectly aligned with those of the Cuban lobby. In the end, Cuba was a USSR ally and it provided active and open support to armed liberation movements in Latin America, Africa, and around the world. Today, the picture is different. Unfortunately, Washington’s policy toward Cuba continues to be hijacked by the politics embodied in the so-called “historic exile” in Miami—historic only in its own stubbornness and criminal resentment—which only Obama managed to circumvent for a brief period. For that Cuban-American lobby, with its historical capital in Miami but which today has expanded far beyond, there can be no possible agreement with Cuba without the latter first passing under Miami’s Caudine Forks.
In the past, businessman Donald J. Trump showed interest in the possibility of “doing business” with Cuba, while in his most recent and ambiguous statements on the Caribbean island he has shown more interest in negotiating the deportation of a substantial number of Cubans than in forceful regime change proper. Whether it is business opportunities or negotiations to have Cuba accept Cuban deportees, either of Trump’s interests could, at least in theory, translate into a workable coexistence agreement. However, for this to materialize, both items on the agenda would have to overcome the most furious opposition from the Cuban-American lobby. It will not happen.
Cuba has reiterated ad nauseam that it will not discuss any of the issues that make Miami salivate: neither the removal of the revolutionary leadership from power—the current one or any other that may succeed it—nor the release of all prisoners, nor reforms to the Constitution, which enshrines the irrevocable nature of socialism in Cuba, nor a “democratic transition.” Therefore, as long as people like Rubio stand in the way, any possible negotiations between the United States and Cuba will sooner or later reach a dead end. Could Trumpism surprise us and even risk ending on bad terms with the Reactionary International by reaching some kind of agreement acceptable to Cuba? It seems as unlikely as it is unpredictable. When it comes to Trump’s mindset, his reasons for moving in one direction or another will always be purely transactional or not as furiously ideological—if the deepest hatred and most raw resentment could be described as ideology—as in Rubio’s case.
Among the obstacles to a possible long-term agreement between Cuba and the United States, another issue to consider is the role played by the signifier “Cuba” in the cultural war being waged by the new hemispheric Far Right. Although Cuba’s fate has little impact on US domestic politics, it remains important for Trumpism’s Ibero-American allies. On the one hand, keeping Cuba tied to the figure of a “failed State” is an electoral and overall propaganda asset for the Right: the crucifixion of the island as proof of socialism’s evils; of all brands of socialism, for that matter. For the “progressive” or “moderate” Left, such alleged total failure of the Cuban experiment is often associated with the lack of “democracy”, which in one way or another allows them to coat their own agendas with a more “respectable” veneer. Thus, the highly regarded young Chilean President Gabriel Boric, who as soon as he took office saw fit—even though no one and nothing demanded it—to attack Cuba in terms that were anything but “moderate.”
Added to all this is the exponential explosion in the number of migrants that the Cuban crisis—in which Trump’s policies have played a decisive role—has driven out of the island toward the United States, Spain, and Latin America. This migration wave, combined with a communication strategy aimed at polarizing Cuban communities—which was also launched during the first MAGA administration—has turned part of the Cuban diaspora into highly effective while still invariably vociferous and hyperbolic right-wing activists, whose voice and narrative—as is also the case with Venezuela and the insufferable lackey and sepoy María Corina Machado—are overrepresented in comparison with those of other important and even majority segments of the Cuban people, both inside and outside the island. This is firstly because these newly minted right-wing crusaders are scattered throughout the hemisphere and beyond, and secondly, because they enjoy the favor and all the space they need in the Western media, all of which are rabidly hostile and, with total impunity, unabashedly dishonest in their “informative” coverage of Cuba: neither El País nor Le Monde nor the much more despicable (because much more hypocritical) Libération nor the servile The Guardian would ever publish in their opinion pages, for example, this article or any other opinion piece similar in argument and/or intent.
So the possibility that Cuba might manage after all to emerge from the worst of its current crisis, let alone at last achieve some economic success is intolerable to right-wingers and fascists of all stripes, chiefly among them Cuba’s very own, on this side of the world. As is any prospect of reconciliation among Cubans that is not preceded by the crushing humiliation of all communists and revolutionaries on the island. For those of us Cubans who live on the island, they need us to be dying before they can finish us off once and for all; for those outside, they need them to be in a state of permanent hysteria and bloodlust.
On the other hand, in addition to the convenient scarecrow into which Cuba’s seemingly eternal crisis has been turned, the destruction of the Cuban Revolution would also be a desirable goal for those on the Far Right. As long as socialist Cuba exists, the limits of what is possible and radical remain too far for the mainstream Left to even approach. We Cuban revolutionaries are the last soldiers of the Cold War, in comparison to whom all progressivism, social democracy, and “democratic socialism” remain acceptable to the overall framework of the system. And, yet the New Right already labels as communists and even dictators the likes of Morena, Pedro Sánchez, Peronism, all progressivism, and all social democracy and «democratic socialism», whether the latter is genuinely “deluded” or cunningly complicit. Erasing the Cuban experience and definitively closing the chapter on “real” socialism in the hemisphere would usher in the next stage of the culture war, in which the new “intolerable” ones would be those who still have a place in the liberal democratic pact.
This is something that some left-wing forces do not seem to understand or even be interested in questioning. Perhaps they believe that as long as they play by the rules of the “democratic” game, they will not be targeted. Others have forgotten that they have already been targeted despite having scrupulously observed those same rules, first turning their backs on Chavismo and then abandoning Cuba, without understanding that the Cuban question is by no means solely Cuban or a mere “internal affair” in which one should not interfere because it concerns only Cubans, thus placing Cuban patriots, revolutionaries, socialists, and communists on an equal footing with other Cubans who are not only none of those things but also who deny, in deed and in word, the very possibility for such qualities to be embodied. As long as imperialism exists, “internal affairs” is a convenient euphemism … for imperialism. In this context, solidarity with Cuba should be conceived and practiced as an existential problem for all leftists in this hemisphere and around the globe.
In the meantime, it is advisable to continue monitoring the situation with the pessimism of the intellect that these considerations feed. The optimism of the will must be nourished instead by the conviction that, in the face of abuse, firmness is always the best of assets. Revolutionary Cuba lacks many things, but it still has firmness to spare. Enough to equally oppose increasingly emboldened and aggressive open enemies and to distribute among increasingly timid and useless ambiguous friends.
Featured image: Then Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., walks with Donald Trump after the US President announced policy changes toward Cuba in Miami’s Little Havana on June 16, 2017. Photo: Joe Raedle / Getty Images.
Translated from the original in Spanish (and as such unpublished) by Rolando Prats.
