“Los espejismos no salvan,” by Iramís Rosique, appeared on CTXT on 25 March 2026, while “Trump no es el problema,” also by Rosique, appeared on Diario Red on 8 April 2026. What follows is the English translation of an edited version of both articles merged into one.

“The premise that the Cuban government could have radically overhauled its entire economic structure in just twenty-four months during the ‘Obama thaw’ (2015-2017) to ‘anchor’ business interests and, in the process, anticipate and neutralize the reactionary schism represented by Donald Trump’s arrival at the White House, is an exercise bordering on magical thinking. Trump’s reversal was not a consequence of the island’s bureaucratic slowness, but rather the chronicle of an inevitability foretold by the legal fragility of executive orders—Obama’s—that never touched the core of the siege nor could they. Understanding that the collapse of the thaw was structurally inevitable, at least for Cuba, is an unavoidable step toward ceasing to beat ourselves up over hypothetical pasts and placing the emphasis where it truly belongs: on the uninterrupted hostility toward Cuba that continues to structurally define U.S. policy toward the Caribbean nation.”

—Iramís Rosique

Why Cuba Could Not Avoid the Return of U.S. Aggressiveness

The history of the relations between Cuba and the United States is paved with mirages, but none as dazzling as that of the 2015–2017 period. When Air Force One landed in Havana, the world believed it was witnessing the final act of the last great theater of operations of the Cold War. However, behind the media hype, the diplomatic enthusiasm, the arrival of cruise ships, and the avalanche of licenses granted by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), a legal framework that was far too fragile remained in place.

The “thaw” promoted by Barack Obama was a bold exercise of executive power by decree, but also a house of cards built over the abyss that is the U.S. blockade against Cuba. Years after that diplomatic climax, an uncomfortable question remains: how much of the violent reversal driven by Donald Trump was truly avoidable? The answer requires going beyond superficial recriminations against the pace and the overall effectiveness of Cuba’s reforms and instead dissect the structural limits of Washington’s policy toward Cuba and the unshakable historical mistrust and caution of the Cuban Revolution when it comes to assessing and dealing with the intentions of its historical adversary.

A consensus has taken hold everywhere—even among Cuba’s friends and supporters—that, in a sense, the severe economic crisis Cuba is facing today is more or less a direct result of the island’s government failing to “capitalize” on the opportunity presented by its honeymoon with Obama. Thus, the blame is placed on the proverbial Cuban bureaucratic sluggishness and red tape for failing to secure U.S. business interests in Cuba in time before the political tsunami brought on by Trumpism. According to this logic, if major companies like Google or U.S. hotel chains had taken root in Cuba, the Trump administration would not have been able to bear the political cost of reversing the rapprochement initiated by Obama. Is this true?

To probe this hypothesis and understand what opportunities were truly missed, it is imperative to examine both the internal dynamics of the island and the immovable power structure in Washington. On the one hand, it is undeniable that Cuba’s official policy of moving forward “steadily but not hurriedly” —sin pausa pero sin prisa— had and continues to have its strategic cost. During that two-year period, genuine interest was generated among U.S. companies in sectors ranging from telecommunications and agriculture to cruise lines and airlines. However, many of those negotiations foundered in the stagnant waters of bureaucracy, the fear of falling back into dependence on the United States, or the absence of a flexible legal framework. In the stark reality of U.S. politics, money and corporate interests dictate much of the United States’ stance and practices on the international stage. There was a lack of time—and perhaps audacity—to create “economic hostages”: companies that, seeing their profitable investments in Cuba threatened, would have formed a powerful lobby on Capitol Hill against any attempt to roll back bilateral relations to their pre-Obama status. Nor was the moment seized to provide Cuba’s emerging non-State sector with a legal framework that would allow it to weave a hyper-connected economic network with suppliers in the neighboring North, despite the fact that this was precisely the sector specifically and intentionally favored by Obama’s policy.

All of that is true. However, blaming Havana’s slowness alone is naive and overlooks the severe structural limitations of the thaw. The normalization process spearheaded by Obama relied almost entirely on presidential prerogatives and executive orders. The Democratic president never managed—nor came close to managing—to get the then-Republican-controlled Congress to lift the pillars of the embargo, such as the Torricelli Act and the Helms-Burton Act; nor does it seem that doing so was his priority. Obama’s thaw was built on sand; the next occupant of the White House could wipe it out with the stroke of a pen, and that is exactly what happened. We must not forget that, with the passage of the Helms-Burton Act in 1996, Congress stripped the executive branch of the prerogative to lift the embargo, which was thus codified into law.

In fact, the Obama administration itself did not waver in its pursuit of commercial and financial transactions to and from Cuba that violated sanctions policy and deviated even by a millimeter from the way Washington insisted on conducting the “opening of Cuba.” For example, in 2015, OFAC imposed a $271,000 fine on the U.S. marine insurance company Navigators, and in February 2016, it sanctioned the French company CGG Services S.A. with over $600,000[1].

To all this must be added the perspective of the Cuban leadership, for whom the rapprochement was not exactly an olive branch being extended, but rather an exercise in subversion based on soft power. Washington’s strategic objective had not changed, only its methods, and Obama himself admitted this without hesitation: the goal was to empower the private sector to foster a middle class capable of subverting the Cuban system from within[2], while “steering” Cuba’s integration into the international community through a policy of selective and discretionary licenses. The Cuban leadership’s historical mistrust, rooted in decades of U.S. hostility, justified—from a national security perspective—the island’s extreme and sometimes paralyzing institutional caution.

Finally, Trump arrived—someone who, in the past and on more than a few occasions, had even shown interest in the possibility of investing in Cuba. However, his arrival demonstrated that the reversal would not depend so much on what Cuba did or did not do, but rather on the relentless influence that domestic political considerations have on the attitude and calculations of U.S. leaders toward Cuba. The violent reversal was not a punishment for Cuba’s lack of openness, but rather the result of the “pact” that the new occupant of the White House was forced to strike with elements of the Cuban-American lobby, for the U.S. policy toward Cuba was too cheap a bargaining chip to stop exploiting it. Let us not forget who flanked Mr. Trump during that speech at the Manuel Artime Theater in Little Havana in 2017—Marco Rubio and Mario Díaz-Balart—when he announced that “effective immediately” he was “canceling the [Obama] administration completely one-sided deal with Cuba.”[3] The audience gathered in the hall erupted in applause.

This speaks to the eternal dilemma of the anti-Cuban policy of the Cuban-American “historical exile” in South Florida. For that political base, any concession to the island is anathema: the only possible and acceptable policy for them is one of resentment and a desire for revenge, of permanent hostility, of extreme aggressiveness, and of reconquering Cuba. Even if Cuba had privatized half or even more of its economy in 2016, that sector of the Cuban community in Miami would not have ceased to exploit every opportunity to ensure that the White House continued to pursue a policy of maximum pressure against the island, because their dispute with Cuba does not concern commercial or property regimes, and is no longer even strictly ideological.

Blaming Havana for not moving fast enough to throw itself into the arms of the U.S. market during that brief two-year period is, at best, a naive analysis and, at worst, an excuse to exonerate the immutable structure of the blockade. The premise that the Cuban government could radically overhaul its entire economic structure in just twenty-four months to “anchor” business interests and, in the process, anticipate and neutralize the reactionary schism represented by Donald Trump’s arrival at the White House, is an exercise bordering on magical thinking. Trump’s reversal was not a consequence of the island’s bureaucratic slowness, but rather the chronicle of an inevitability foretold by the legal fragility of executive orders—Obama’s—that never touched the core of the siege nor could they. Understanding that the collapse of the thaw was structurally inevitable, at least for Cuba, is an unavoidable step toward ceasing to beat ourselves up over hypothetical pasts and placing the emphasis where it truly belongs: on the uninterrupted hostility toward Cuba that continues to structurally define U.S. policy toward the Caribbean nation.

Trump is not the problem

When Germany was defeated in 1945, a horror was revealed to the world that had until then gone unnoticed by most of the public. The Nazi regime had not only plunged humanity into the bloodiest war in history, but had also unleashed a systematic and technologically advanced exercise of seemingly irrational cruelty: extermination camps, forced labor, gas chambers, experimentation without ethical restrictions of any kind in which human beings served as guinea pigs, sadistic excesses…

The way the West processed that horror and soothed its own conscience was to construct a narrative of historical fascism as an accident, as a collective hijacking perpetrated by a group of psychopaths and murderers at the helm of a hypnotized nation. The burden of responsibility was thus placed on individual agents and their personality disorders: the problem had been Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and other terrible individuals who had seized control of the State apparatus.

There is no shortage of narratives that place their emphasis entirely on the personal flaws, traumas, or complexes that each of the Nazi leaders is said to have possessed, and in which these traits are presented as the sole or most profound “explanation” for the supposed suspension of judgment that was Nazism.

Last March, Jürgen Habermas, the last representative of the classical period of the Frankfurt School, died. I mention this because it was precisely Habermas’s predecessors who first opposed that psychologizing interpretation of fascism. Critical theory reveals to us that the Holocaust was by no means a parenthesis of irrationality on the path of modern civilization, but rather one of the possible outcomes of the development of that very modernity. Not an accident, but yet another result of industrial capitalism and its instrumental—cost-benefit, purely calculative—relationship with the world.

It is not without irony that, barely weeks after Habermas’s death, many of the same media outlets and voices that deeply lamented his loss and highlighted the importance of his thought—and that of the Frankfurt School—are now analyzing the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran from a perspective that would have made Adorno, Horkheimer, and company smile bitterly.

It would seem that once again the problem stems from the psyche and actions of a single individual. Just as during the most intense moments of the Zionist genocidal offensive in Gaza the emphasis was placed on the figure of Netanyahu—yet another evil politician who was “going too far”—thereby downplaying the inherently colonial and dehumanizing nature of the Zionist apparatus— now the alarm regarding what is happening in the Persian Gulf, and its current and future economic, military, and humanitarian consequences, seems to point exclusively to the alleged fact that the White House is inhabited by a “lunatic.”

There is no doubt that Donald Trump can behave like a lunatic: his posts on Truth Social in which he threatens to wipe Iran off the map or curses like a teenager because the Iranians refuse to relent in their efforts to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed are a case in point. However, one must not confuse the character with the person, nor the person with the dominant trend. Both the psychiatrization and the moralization of politics—and of politicians—are ways of exonerating the specific ideologies and economic interests that politics—and politicians—embody and represent.

It’s no wonder, then, that there is today a certain nostalgia for the Democratic Party—especially after Trump issued what might have seemed like a threat of a nuclear attack last 7 April —for “serious” old-school politics that is “dependable” and, more or less, predictable. Trump behaves like a narcissist competing on a reality show. But we should remember how the very “moderate” and “dependable” Biden administration did not offer us any greater protection from the possibility of a third world war or a nuclear conflagration when NATO was closing in on Russia, via Ukraine. Nor did that administration, with its more “respectable” appearance and style, waver for a moment in its support for the extermination of tens of thousands of Palestinians at the hands of the Zionist State. In fact, it is a great irony that it was precisely Trump who managed to achieve something like a “ceasefire” in Gaza.

As the Cuban researcher Josué Veloz Serrade[4] recently said in an interview regarding the renewed aggressiveness toward Cuba, we cannot forget that imperialism has its own needs, its own logic, its own interests, and its own tasks. A discrepancy in methods is not the same as a discrepancy in goals. In any case, Trump and Netanyahu are the kind of politicians who take on the dirty work, often at the cost of being pilloried by public scorn, but not without the silent collusion and gratitude of the political and economic elites—who control the media and public narratives—a self-serving silence that, in fact, translates into impunity. It is easy, then, to discard the scapegoat of the moment and leave intact the system and the interests that made them possible.

The real tragedy is not that Atlantic imperialism has a Trump at its disposal or needs one, but that the world lacks both the tools and the resolve to stop him. What we are seeing emerge is not the rule of an unhinged narcissist with too much power, but an imperialism that no longer feels the need to maintain appearances in order to exercise its dominance—which is even more troubling. Trump may come and go—and he will—but by the time he does, the line of what is acceptable will have shifted a little further toward the unpunished barbarism of the most powerful. We have already witnessed this in Gaza, that three-year experiment in desensitization to human suffering that consisted of watching live a genocide unfold.

If it has been happening for three years with regard to Gaza, what might not happen tomorrow with regard to Cuba? In the case of Cuba, there will be no need to desensitize the world, for what prevails from the outset is rather indifference, if not blatant cynicism: whether out of ignorance, impotence, cowardice, or a petty desire to prove that, after all, the Cuban model was neither viable nor—worse still—democratic; a desire in which, paradoxical as it may seem, the Latin American and European ‘democratic left’ and Marco Rubio find common ground. Cuba’s resilience has always been a thorn in the side of that brand of leftism driven by electoral illusions and fleeting disillusionment: after all, what this world has in abundance are elections (and illusions) to bet on again and lose again. What Cuba is not forgiven for are not its alleged or proven mistakes and objective limitations, but its insistence on demonstrating that as long as it is possible, it is possible, and worth fighting for it.

Thus, capital is clearing its path ever more thoroughly and at an ever-increasing pace. In a world that has been devoid of alternatives and revolutions for more than three decades, Western capitalist elites may come to believe—and this is indeed what seems to be happening—that they no longer need to maintain appearances in order to sustain and expand their dominance. Especially now that, in addition to no longer having to worry about the Soviet threat—and, at least ideologically, not even the Chinese threat—it has unprecedented, asymmetrical access to technologies of surveillance, social control, manipulation, and death. It is not Trump—as dangerous as he is fleeting, as boastful as he is mediocre—it is the Empire and the seemingly indestructible power it has amassed.

Hence the great importance of the battle the Iranians are waging today—whether or not we like their political system, their attempt to stand up to, and if possible tie the hands of, those who were already convinced of their absolute invincibility and impunity should not be diminished for a single second. Iran is fighting for the future of the possibility of a world that is not merely an extension of U.S. interests. It is attempting to reestablish at least a boundary, precisely when any boundary seems to have vanished.

Notes

[1] “Las incongruencias de las políticas de Obama hacia Cuba,” Público, 9 October 2016, https://www.publico.es/internacional/incongruencias-politicas-obama-cuba.html.

[2] “Directiva Presidencial de Política — Normalización entre los Estados Unidos y Cuba,” 14 October 2016, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/10/14/directiva-presidencial-de-pol%C3%ADticas-normalizacion-entre-estados-unidos-cuba.

[3] “Discurso del Presidente  Trump sobre la política de Estados Unidos para (sic) Cuba,” https://2017-2021-translations.state.gov/2017/06/16/discurso-del-presidente-trump-sobre-la-politica-de-estados-unidos-para-cuba/.

[4] Inna Afinogenova, “Situación de guerra Cuba (frente al multilateralismo hipócrita),” 2026, 35:18,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjB_TiLsgK0.

Featured image: President Barack Obama and his family watch a baseball game with Cuban President Raúl Castro in Havana on 22 March 2016. Photo: Jonathan Ernst / Reuters. Courtesy of Time Magazine.

Translated from the Spanish original by Rolando Prats.

Iramís Rosique