“You know, all my life I’ve been hearing about the United States and Cuba. When will the United States do it?” Donald Trump mused to a gaggle of reporters gathered in the Oval Office this week, flaunting his power to lord over other nations. “I do believe I’ll be having the honor of taking Cuba. That’d be good.” Taking Cuba? asked a Fox News reporter. “Taking Cuba in some form, yeah,” Trump declared. “I mean, whether I free it, take it, I think I can do anything I want with it, [if] you want to know the truth.”

An aspiring emperor needs an empire. Trump seems to have settled on the Western Hemisphere as his imperial domain, as laid out in his National Security Strategy. The liquidation of regimes that Trump regards as adversaries began with Venezuela, and now Cuba is in the crosshairs.

Trump’s brazen claim that he can do anything he wants with Cuba is typical of his audacious bluster, but this time it cannot be discounted. He has Cuba over the proverbial barrel… and literally barrels of oil. After cutting off Venezuelan oil shipments, Trump threatened to sanction any other country sending oil to Cuba, imposing a complete oil blockade on the petroleum-dependent island.

While Washington is strangling the Cuban economy, behind the scenes the two countries are engaged in the delicate dance of back-channel diplomacy—an effort which could, conceivably, result in a “deal,” rather than a war. As president of the United States, Trump’s leverage is his ability to inflict pain on other countries— through tariffs, economic sanctions, and high explosives. In international relations, this is called “coercive diplomacy.” On the street, it is called extortion. Having cut off Cuba’s oil supply, Trump no doubt believes he can make Cuban leaders “an offer they can’t refuse.”

But what the Vatican calls a “dialogue-based solution” offers some slim hope that Cuba might avoid Venezuela-style surgical strikes or a massive Iran-style military attack. Depending on how negotiations unfold, Cuba could emerge with duress-induced economic reforms that portend a better future for the Cuban people, who are currently suffering one of the worst humanitarian crises their country has ever endured.

Contours of a Deal

Almost every day for a month President Trump has openly stated that “we are talking” to “high level” Cubans and that he expects to make a deal. “They want to make a deal, and so I’m going to put Marco [Rubio] over there and we’ll see how that works out,” he told CNN on March 5. This weekend he once again told reporters, “I think we will pretty soon either make a deal or do whatever we have to do.”

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Making a “deal” requires sensitive negotiations. For that reason, back-channel talks are usually conducted in the utmost secrecy, to avoid political pressures that could undermine their success—an inherent danger in any effort between Washington and Havana to change relations. Unlike Trump, the Cubans took their obligations of confidentiality seriously, repeatedly denying that they were engaged in a secret negotiation with the United States, despite Trump’s claims and multiple media reports to the contrary.

But in a rare press conference on March 13, President Miguel Díaz-Canel finally admitted that the two sides were quietly talking. “These are processes that are carried out with great discretion; they are long processes that must begin by establishing contact, creating opportunities for dialogue, and fostering a willingness to engage in dialogue,” Díaz-Canel noted. “[A]gendas are built, negotiations begin, conversations take place, and agreements are reached.”

High-level talks have been taking place between Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s senior advisers and Raúl Castro’s 41-year-old grandson, Col. Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro. “Raulito,” as he is known in Cuba, is in charge of his grandfather’s security. Rodríguez Castro’s international business connections, through the military business conglomerate GAESA that his father ran before his unexpected death, appear to have caught the attention of US officials who view him as “representing younger, business-minded Cubans for whom revolutionary communism has failed,” according to Axios, “and who see value in rapprochement with the US.”

When and how Rubio and Raulito began their back-channel communications remains unknown. But at least one meeting with a Rubio deputy took place on the island of St. Kitts during the meeting of the Caribbean Community—CARICOM—on February 25; the discussion focused on economic reforms Cuba would implement in return for the Trump administration’s progressively lifting various sanctions on oil, trade, and travel that are currently suffocating the Cuban economy.

Indeed, rather than toppling Cuba’s Communist government, the Trump administration appears to be far more focused on opening Cuba’s economy to US investment and restoring Washington’s pre-revolution position as the dominant influence over the island nation—“regime compliance rather than regime change,” as The New York Times describes US goals.

To provide Trump with a symbolic victory, the Times reported, the administration has “signaled to Cuban negotiators that the president [Díaz-Canel] must go” as part of any deal. Cuba will have to change its leadership to address US concerns, as Secretary Rubio stated publicly this week. “They’re in a lot of trouble, and the people in charge, they don’t know how to fix it, so they have to get new people in charge.”

Sacrificing Díaz-Canel to such imperious demands is a concession that the Cuban Communist Party leadership is unlikely to make. But to advance the secret negotiations, the Cuban government has already taken steps responsive to other US interests. On May 12, Díaz-Canel announced that Cuba would be freeing 51 prisoners—a human rights gesture intended to create good will. During his press conference the next day, the Cuban president extended an olive branch to the Cuban diaspora, vowing “to welcome them, listen to them, assist them and provide them with a space to participate in economic and social development.” Deputy Foreign Minister Oscar Pérez Fraga has since announced that US and Cuban Americans investors will soon be able to financially engage in the Cuban private sector ventures, own businesses and property on the island, and even partner with state enterprises.

This initiative addresses one of Trump’s oft-voiced demands: for his wealthy Cuban-American friends in Miami to be able to return to the island. Opening the Cuban economy to such foreign investment is a long-overdue and much-needed reform. Cuban American participation would quickly build an influential constituency for lifting the embargo and removing Cuba from the State Department’s Terrorism list, which imposes severe restrictions on international banking and financial transactions. “As the Cuban authorities recognize our rights to be part of the Cuban nation, to participate in the economic transformation and the potential political reforms of the future,” Cuban American entrepreneur Hugo Cancio said in an interview, “we will be the ones that will change Washington.”

Obama 2.0: Carrots vs Sticks

“This is not the first time we’ve had conversations like this,” President Díaz-Canel stated during his March 13 press conference. “During the Obama era we had similar talks, and now we are having them again.” Indeed, after two years of furtive meetings in Canada and Mexico and at the Vatican between White House officials and Raúl Castro’s representatives, Obama and Castro dramatically announced a new rapprochement on December 17, 2014. In an attempt to make this historic accord “irreversible,” President Obama traveled to Havana to exactly ten years ago, on March 20, 2016. “I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas,” Obama announced to much applause during a major speech at Havana’s Grand Theater. “I have come here to extend the hand of friendship to the Cuban people.”

Obama’s goals were not unlike Trump’s: to expand US economic interaction with Cuba and bolster the growth of private-sector development with expectations that Cuba’s economic transformation would eventually lead to political transformation as well. But Obama’s approach was civil and respectful, based on the concept of “positive engagement.” In short order, the opening to Cuba reestablished official diplomatic ties, lifted restrictions on US travelers, restored commercial air service, licensed US corporations to do business, and produced 22 agreements on issues of mutual interest, among them cooperation on counterterrorism, counter-narcotics, environmental protection, public health, and orderly immigration. A national security review of Obama’s engagement policy, conducted during the first months of Trump’s presidency in 2017, determined it was successfully advancing US interests.

Trump abrogated the rapprochement agreement anyway. “I am canceling the last administration’s completely one-sided deal with Cuba,” he declared at the time. “Our policy will seek a much better deal for the Cuban people and for the United States of America.”

In stark contrast to Obama, who offered the carrots of normalized US-Cuba relations, Trump prefers the big sticks of US power; his methods to secure “a better deal” can only be characterized as collective punishment. Since seizing control of Venezuela’s oil industry in January, he has terminated oil exports from that country to Cuba, while intimidating Mexico, Russia, and other oil exporters into halting their petroleum shipments as well. US strategy has been to strangle Cuba’s energy supply such that the lights literally go off, economic activity shuts down, and people go hungry. “Without energy, there can be no economy, no education, no healthcare, no food production,” says Jorge Piñón, the leading expert on Cuba’s oil needs. “If you don’t have that engine, the rest of the country collapses.” Fulfilling that prophecy, this week the national electrical grid suffered a “complete dislocation,” as Cuban authorities described the grid’s failure, plunging the entire country of 10 million people into darkness for hours.

As if depriving a nation of fuel and electricity were not cruel enough, the Trump administration has also attacked one of Cuba’s last remaining sources of hard currency—its international medical services program. Under Secretary Rubio’s supervision, the State Department has implemented a “Freedom Framework for Self-Sufficient Healthcare in the Americas”—a plan to coerce some 14 countries in the Western Hemisphere to eject the Cuban medical workers in return for US assistance to modernize their national healthcare programs. Over the last several weeks, Honduras, Jamaica, and Guyana have all succumbed to US pressure to terminate the services of hundreds of Cuban doctors and technicians who were providing medical care for their citizens.

By design, the result of Trump’s tightened sanctions has been a catastrophic humanitarian crisis that is worsening by the day. Dire shortages of fuel, electricity, food, refrigeration, transportation and basic health services are taking a devastating toll on the Cuban people. “Doctors here say across the country people are dying because of the fuel crisis,” NBC News reported from Havana this week on the impact on Cuban hospitals. Food insecurity is also spreading, according to a recent report by the International Crisis Group (ICG). “Cuba is confronting the most acute humanitarian crisis and greatest threat to its political status quo in decades,” the ICG stated, because of the US cutoff of oil.

The Return of the Platt Amendment

During his Havana speech, President Obama spoke directly to President Castro in the audience: “I want you to know, I believe my visit here demonstrates you do not need to fear a threat from the United States.” The United States, Obama asserted, “has neither the capacity, nor the intention to impose change on Cuba.”

But a short decade later, Trump’s United States does have both the capacity and intention to impose change on the island. And Trump has made it clear that Cuba’s leadership should fear an escalating threat from Washington. As a credible warning, he has already set the examples of Venezuela, where US special forces killed 32 Cuban security and intelligence personnel, and Iran, where the US and Israel assassinated the Iranian leadership and continue to rain death and destruction on that country. Cuban leaders cannot escape the reality that both Venezuelan and Iranian leaders were engaged in negotiations with Washington when the impatient president of the United States ordered surprise military strikes.

Yet a “dialogue-based solution,” backed by the pope and major countries such as Mexico still offers the best hope for Cuba’s future. To find common ground, Cuba’s leadership may have to make uncomfortable concessions, especially on economic issues, and will have to navigate the dangerous waters of Trump’s arrogance and imperial pretensions if they hope to avoid the ominous danger of not satisfying his demands. “It may be a friendly takeover, it may not be a friendly takeover,” Trump warned in early March. “They’re going to make either a deal, or we’ll do it, just as easy, anyway.”

To be sure, Cubans have faced such threats from the colossus of the North before, and not just after the revolution, when they resisted and survived CIA-led paramilitary invasions, assassination plots, and the trade embargo aimed at overthrowing their revolutionary government. The seeds of this conflict date back to the beginning of the 20th century when President William McKinley, whom Trump admires, went to war with Spain to free Cuba from colonial rule. US troops occupied the island, forcing the Cubans to concede to the Platt Amendment and become a client state. The legislation locked in economic concessions to US investors, granted Washington rights in perpetuity to the Guantánamo naval base, limited Cuba’s relations with third countries, and gave the United States “the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence” and “the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty.” Cuba escaped the fate of Puerto Rico, which the United States claimed as its territorial possession, but it became a de facto colony nevertheless—until 1959 when Cuban nationalism powered Fidel Castro’s dramatic revolution.

With his imperious policy to “do anything I want” with Cuba, Trump is brazenly reenacting this imperialist history. But Cubans spent almost 100 years fighting for their national sovereignty, first against Spanish colonialism and then against US neocolonialism. They will not surrender it easily.

On February 12, Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) introduced legislation to finally lift all provisions of the US trade embargo against Cuba and advance the cause of normalized relations between Washington and Havana. The United States–Cuba Trade Act “would repeal or amend several laws codified over decades that restrict trade, exchange, telecommunications, and travel with Cuba,” according to a statement issued by McGovern’s office. The bill also calls for a bilateral dialogue, mandating that “the President should take all necessary steps to advance negotiations with the Government of Cuba.”

“I think we have to establish an opposition to Trump’s policy,” Representative McGovern asserted in an interview with The Nation. “I think we have to say there’s another way to do this.”

The legislative initiative comes as tensions between Cuba and the United States have turned deadly. On Wednesday, Cuba’s border patrol intercepted an armed group of exiles on a Florida-registered speedboat within one nautical mile of Cuba’s northern coastline. An exchange of gunfire killed four and injured six on board; one Cuban commander was also injured. The boat was loaded with assault weapons, Molotov cocktails, and camouflage uniforms, indicating “an infiltration with terrorist ends,” according to Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior. “In the face of current challenges,” the Cuban government stated, “Cuba reaffirms its commitment to protecting its territorial waters…in order to protect its sovereignty and stability in the region.

Those “current challenges” are the result of the Trump administration’s decision to ratchet up economic pressure on the Cuban people by cutting off shipments of Venezuela petroleum and threatening other oil-producing nations to halt all oil exports to the island. The “total pressure” policy of energy deprivation is suffocating Cuba’s basic economic activities—creating a burgeoning humanitarian crisis for the Cuban populace. Foreign airlines ferrying tourists from Canada and Russia have suspended flights because they cannot refuel their planes once they land; tourist hotels are shuttered, costing thousands of Cuban jobs; the Canadian mining conglomerate, Sherritt, has suspended its operations on the island. Clinics and hospitals are closing. For average Cubans, “every day brings extended power cuts, intermittent water, spoiled food, suspended classes, canceled surgeries, and transportation that stops without warning,” Maria José Espinosa and Emily Mendrala reported in El País. “Families spend entire days searching for fuel, cooking gas, or basic goods.”

Across the international community, leaders are addressing the cruelty of US sanctions. At the Vatican, Pope Leo has expressed his concern for the “pain and anguish” of the Cuban people and urged both Washington and Havana to engage in a “sincere and effective dialogue,” free of coercion, to resolve rising tensions. “The blockade that the United States has imposed on Cuba,” stated Chilean President Gabriel Boric, “violates the human rights of the entire population.” “You cannot strangle a people like this,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has asserted, while offering the good offices of her country to facilitate talks between Washington and Havana and dispatching naval vessels filled with humanitarian assistance.

Just this week, at a meeting of Caribbean nations—CARICOM—attended by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, leaders across the region condemned the humanitarian impact of US economic pressure on Cuba. The prime minister of Jamaica, CARICOM chair Andrew Holness, called for a “constructive dialogue between Cuba and the US aimed at de-escalation, reform and stability. We must address the situation in Cuba with clarity and courage,” Holness said.

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“The situation in Cuba is dire,” McGovern and Massachusetts Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey warned President Trump in a February 25 letter to the White House. “Given that Cuba poses no credible national security threat to the United States, we urge you to lift the oil embargo on Cuba immediately to prevent unnecessary human suffering and reduce the potential for a regional refugee crisis.” As their letter admonished Trump: “Your escalation of the embargo and use of tariffs to starve a nation of critical resources are forms of economic coercion without a defensible rationale.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Nation: Representative McGovern, you have introduced a resolution to lift US sanctions and finally end the Cuba trade embargo. In the MAGA-controlled Congress, the votes aren’t there. What, then, is the purpose of moving this bill forward at this time?

Jim McGovern: I think we have to establish an opposition to Trump’s policy. I think we have to say there’s another way to do this. There has been a very little discussion on Cuba, you know, in recent years in Congress. I think a lot of people on the left have thought it’s a hopeless cause. And, you know, the people on the right just figure it’s a matter of time before the government collapses and they can put in whoever they want.

But I think if we care about the Cuban people then we care about opening political space. In Cuba, opening things up economically is the way to go, and that is why the embargo should be lifted. We have introduced this legislation because we need to start building a movement again—a movement calling for lifting the embargo, you know, and turning the page once and for all on what has been a Cold War policy for over six decades and restarting the effort [under Obama] to normalize relations.

TN: Indeed, in a few weeks it will be the 10th anniversary of President Obama’s history-making trip to Havana, a major symbol of his breakthrough with Raúl Castro to turn that page and normalize bilateral ties.

JM: I was part of a small group that pressured Obama to open things up—and he did. Ten years ago, I went with him to Cuba when he went on that trip, and I thought things were getting better on the island.

TN: In your opinion, what are the lessons from the Obama–Raúl Castro breakthrough a short decade ago?

JM: First, that it worked! I mean, more political and economic space opened up in Cuba. More Americans could travel to Cuba.

But I think the Cubans and people in the United States were too slow in kind of taking full advantage of that opportunity. If there had been more exchanges, more business investments, more, you know, cultural exchange…. I think there should have been a greater sense of urgency. I think it would have been harder for Trump to turn it around when he became president.

I thought when Biden became president for sure he’d go back to the to the Obama policies. Biden was in those meetings that some of us had with Obama on Cuba. Vice President Biden actually called me to tell me that they were going to change the policy. But then he didn’t do anything until the last few days of his presidency. He symbolically went back to the Obama policies. But it was too late.

Biden messed up. I don’t know what they were thinking. I don’t know whether they thought they had more time so let’s not piss off the right-wing Cubans in Florida. We might need them in the next election. It was a political calculation, I think.

TN: That has been the fate of Cuba policy for decades. A policy mortgaged to swing state political calculus.

JM: Cuban policy has been more of a domestic political issue than it has been a foreign policy issue.

TN: What do you think the end game is of this Trump-Rubio “maximum pressure” campaign against Cuba, essentially blockading all oil shipments to Cuba and deliberately creating a humanitarian crisis?

JM: I think they fantasize that the government Cuba will collapse.

TN: What is your sense of Trump’s statements that Rubio is talking to “high-level” Cuban representatives? Do you see any evidence of a dialogue between Washington and Havana?

JM: Well, the Cuban government has said they’re willing to talk about a wide range of issues. The Cuban government has never said that they’re not open to conversation. The question is: What Is Trump asking for? You know, like return the [expropriated] property? Or maybe just to build a Trump Hotel in Havana? Maybe that’s all they want.

TN: There’s been talk of congressional delegation possibly going to Cuba to highlight the humanitarian crisis. Would you go?

JM: I would, I would, I would like to go. I don’t know whether the current speaker of the House or the committees of jurisdiction would allow it…if they would provide funding for such a trip. It takes about a month or so to get authorization. So the process of planning an official trip to Cuba would move slowly.

TN: Can Congress play a role in fostering a Cuba policy is in the national interest of the United States and the best interests of the Cuban people?

JM: We have to talk about it. Democrats, you know, and thoughtful Republicans, need to talk about it. We can’t be afraid to talk about it. If the issue is immigration, the more misery you cause, the more immigrants are going to be coming to the United States. But that’s what the Trump administration is doing. Again, Trump is always dangerous. He’s arrogant, and he believes that if I say, if I tell somebody to jump, their response should be, how high? You know that history is not in his portfolio.

The future of Cuba needs to be determined by the Cubans who live on the island. Not by Trump and Marco Rubio. Not by those in the United States who want to dictate what Cuba’s future looks like.

On Sunday, January 11, Donald Trump awoke with Cuba on his mind. Before most of the country had even had their morning coffee, at 7:23 am he began tweeting threats against the Cuban government. “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA, ZERO” Trump posted on his Truth Social account with trademark emphasis. “I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE,” he continued. “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

To make it official, last week Trump signed an executive order titled “Addressing Threats to the United States by the Government of Cuba.” Declaring a “national emergency” where none exists, the president ordered punishing tariffs against any nation that sends petroleum to Cuba and claimed that the island nation represents “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to the national security of the United States.

Empowered, emboldened, and clearly feeling entitled after the brazen success of “Operation Absolute Resolve” in Caracas, Trump’s focus on Cuba is completely predictable. All along, regime change in Venezuela has appeared to be a stepping stone toward regime change in Cuba. There is no doubt that the president, and his hard-line Cuban American secretary of state, Marco Rubio, view Cuba as the ultimate post–Cold War trophy; the perfect target for a dramatic, symbolic, demonstration of the new “Donroe Doctrine.” “The Cuban regime has survived every president since Eisenhower,” as Trump’s conservative ally Marc Theissen tweeted, catching the president’s attention. “Wouldn’t it be something if that streak ended with Donald Trump?”

Cuba has indeed survived the last 13 presidents, and all the acts of aggression they have unleashed—paramilitary invasions, assassination attempts, an enduring economic blockade among other forms of punitive measures. Like David against Goliath, the island nation has stood up to the colossus of the north for over 67 years. “Cuba is a free, independent, and sovereign nation,” Communist Party leader Miguel Diez Canel defiantly responded to Trump’s threats. “No one dictates what we do.”

But with the brazen attack on Venezuela, the United States is attempting to reassert its imperial hegemony across the hemisphere, and Havana is clearly in its crosshairs. Amid the worst economic crisis Cuba has ever experienced, the regime is now more vulnerable than at any time since the 1959 revolution. And, for all its dramatic history of defiance and survival, Cuba has never faced a US president as dangerous as Donald Trump. Nor, for that matter, has the rest of the world.

The Costs to Cuba

More than any other nation, Cuba has suffered the most losses from the US takedown of the Maduro regime in Caracas. The success of Operation Absolute Resolve has cost Havana its closest global ally, as well as the resources that flowed from that long and close alliance. Most poignantly, however, the US attack has cost the lives of 32 Cuban security personnel and left dozens of others wounded from US bombs and bullets.

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Most, if not all of Cuba’s casualties were security and intelligence agents assigned to protect Venezuela’s head of state; they were mowed down as elite Delta Force troops infiltrated the fortified compound where Maduro and his wife were living. Their deaths mark the first time since the 1983 US invasion of Grenada that Cubans have been killed in direct combat with the US military. As their remains were returned to their homeland, Cuban officials reminded the world that their fallen comrades were “a father, a son, a husband, a brother.” In a rare public statement, Cuban Interior Minister Gen. Lázaro Álvarez Casas stated that Cuba had a “profound pride” in the sacrifice of its soldiers in defense of “a sister nation’s” sovereignty.

The loss of Venezuela’s sovereignty, now effectively in the hostile hands of Donald Trump—“the acting president of Venezuela,” as he has declared himself—is already reverberating through Cuba’s moribund economy. Until January 3, Venezuela supplied Cuba with about 30,000–35,000 barrels per day of oil; approximately a quarter of Cuba’s overall energy needs. Cuba paid for this oil in human services—security guards, medical brigades, technicians—rather than cash that it does not have. Indeed, despite its widespread electrical shortages, Cuba has routinely resold some of its Venezuelan oil imports to China, in a desperate effort to raise capital for the import of other basic needs, including food and medicine.

But now that the Trump administration has commandeered Venezuela’s entire oil industry, Cuba has suffered the loss of its main, if minimal, supply of petroleum—with no clear alternative. Since the US attack, according to the shipping intelligence agency Kpler, not a single oil tanker has left Venezuela heading in Cuba’s direction.

“Experts estimate that Cuba’s current oil demand is slightly over 100,000 barrels per day,” explains Ricardo Torres, one of Cuba’s leading economists, now living abroad, in an essay titled “Only Cubans Can Build a New Cuba” in Time magazine. “If a quarter to a third of that depends on Venezuela, a major interruption could push the country toward a subsistence zone, especially because Cuba cannot readily replace that volume through cash purchases.” “The situation is very dangerous, to put it bluntly,” Torres said in an interview with The Nation. “Cuba is vulnerable.”

Like sharks in the water, the hard-line Cuban-American exile community and their Florida politicians smell blood and are pressing the White House to apply the Donroe Doctrine against Cuba. “Make no mistake, after our work in Venezuela, Cuba is next!” Cuban-American Representative Carlos Gimenez declared last week. “It’s going to be the end of the Díaz-Canel regime, the Castro regime, it’s going to happen,” Florida Senator Rick Scott who is close to Secretary Rubio, proclaimed. “We’re in the process of it happening now.”

Marco Rubio, of course, needs no convincing; besides aspiring to be president, claiming the scalp of the Cuban revolution has been Rubio’s top priority for his entire political career. Doubling as secretary of state and national security adviser to the president, he holds the main levers of foreign policy power—and has Trump’s ear. “I think it’s Secretary Rubio’s once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to try to finally bring about the end of Cuba’s Communist government,” Tim Rieser, who worked tirelessly as a foreign policy aide to former Senator Patrick Leahy to normalize US-Cuba relations, told The Nation. Matthew Kroenig, a former Senate aide to Rubio and political adviser when he ran for president, shares that assessment. “Cuba may be next,” he stated on FP Live, the podcast of Foreign Policy. “I do think there’s a focus on bringing the Venezuela model to Havana.”

The Venezuela Model: Remote Control Imperialism

How would the “Venezuela model” be applied to Cuba? It would be hard (but certainly not impossible) for the Delta Force to swoop into Havana and kidnap the entire Politburo of the Cuban Communist Party. Nor does the country have vast natural resources, like Venezuelan oil, that the US can simply appropriate to seize control of Cuba’s economic future. And on what basis would they do so?

If Trump has proven anything, it is that he can shamelessly fabricate justifications for his capricious imperial impulses. Exactly one year ago, on the first day of his return to the White House, Trump falsely designated Cuba as a “sponsor” of international terrorism, without a shred of evidence to support that claim. Putting Cuba on the official State Department list of “State Sponsors of Terrorism”—in the current company of North Korea, Iran, and Syria—has enabled the administration to impose debilitating financial sanctions on the island. But it also offers a ready-made public relations justification for escalating regime change operations against Cuba’s Communist Party–led government.

Moreover, the United States has a long, pre-revolution, history of treating Cuba as a protectorate rather than a sovereign state. In the aftermath of Cuba’s war of independence at the turn of the 20th century, Cubans were forced to trade one colonial power—Spain—for an emerging neocolonial power much closer. US marines occupied the country, and under military duress, Cuban authorities were coerced to sign the “Platt Amendment” treaty giving the United States “the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence [and] the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty.” For decades, US domination of virtually every aspect of Cuban society fostered the widespread resentment and nationalist fervor that would eventually make the Castro-led revolution possible.

So far in Caracas, the “Venezuela model” has been a mixture of quick-strike military action, naval quarantines, and open threats and demands for capitulation—a form of remote-control intervention that Trump and Rubio are using to manipulate what is left of the Maduro regime to do Washington’s bidding from afar. This long-distance “coercion diplomacy” reflects the painful, costly lessons learned from the US experience in Iraq—the Pottery Barn rule of “If you break it you own it.” As a real estate mogul, Trump wants to own properties—or at least be able to brand them with his name and pretend that he owns them. But as the leader of an “America First” MAGA movement, he doesn’t want to destroy them and then pay a premium price of wasted US lives and resources to rebuild them—particularly if bombast, blockades, and a few targeted bombs can obtain his goals.

Trump has repeatedly inferred that Cuba will collapse on its own, particularly now that the US is cutting its main supply of petroleum. “Cuba is going to fall of its own volition,” he told reporters who asked him if Cuba was next. “Cuba is ready to fall,” he has stated more than once.

But even Trump’s team of regime-changers seem to understand that the “failed state” scenario in Cuba, and what the CIA has called “regime-threatening instability,” constitute the real national security threats to the United States. During Cuba’s previous dire economic crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the CIA drafted a secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that could easily have been written today. “The impact on the population already has been devastating,” the NIE reported in August 1993, citing the scarcity of basic goods and the electricity blackouts of 10 to 16 hours a day across the country. “Food shortages and distribution problems have caused malnutrition and disease, and the difficulties of subsisting will intensify.” The advent of “serious instability in Cuba [would] have an immediate impact on the United States,” the intelligence community concluded, citing a massive influx of uncontrolled migration, the agitation of the Miami exile community, and increased “pressures for US or international military intervention”—all critical likelihoods in the current situation.

There are clear hints that the Trump administrations would like to avoid this worst nightmare scenario. “We don’t have an interest in a destabilized Cuba,” Secretary Rubio told the oil executives Trump assembled at the White House on January 9. Trump’s January 29 executive order threatening tariff penalties on any country shipping oil to Cuba has what policy makers call “an offramp” that suggests dialogue—and a deal—might be possible. According to the new executive order: “Should the Government of Cuba or another foreign country affected by this order take significant steps to address the national emergency declared in this order and align sufficiently with the United States on national security and foreign policy matters, I may modify this order.”

Most importantly, Trump himself announced on February 1 that “we’re talking to the people from Cuba, the highest people in Cuba, to see what happens.” As the president told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, “I think we’re going to make a deal with Cuba.”

A US-Cuba Deal?

Since the 1959 revolution, US-Cuban relations have been dominated by infamous acts of aggression—the Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose, the CIA assassination plots, the trade embargo. But the history is similarly replete with lesser-known episodes of back-channel dialogue to resolve crises, address mutual interests, and even attempt to normalize relations. As William LeoGrande and I wrote in our book, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana, “the history of dialogue between Cuba and the United States since 1959 demonstrates that it is not only possible to replace sterile hostility with reconciliation but preferable for the national and international interests of both nations.” That fact is especially relevant today.

In the past, sensitive talks between Washington and Havana have counted on support from international interlocutors. The successful Obama–Raul Castro negotiations, for example, were assisted by Canada, Mexico, and the Vatican. Over the last few months, the Vatican played a substantive role in an ongoing dialogue between Trump and Maduro—before the Delta Force special-ops team conducted its “snatch and grab” extraction in Caracas. And Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who talks to Trump directly, has recently offered her good offices as an intermediary between Havana and Washington. Trump has demanded that Cuba “make a deal,” so somehow, somewhere he is presenting his coercive terms for an agreement.

Trump’s imperial demands for that deal will be onerous for Cuba’s leadership: Capitulate to US control or we will bomb your headquarters, quarantine your ports, cut off all your oil, and starve your people. But given that democracy does not seem to be a Trumpian priority, and that the administration would like to avoid the dangers of “regime-threatening instability,” Cuba’s leaders may be able to find space for negotiation around Washington’s central objective: removing Communist Party and military control over Cuba’s nonfunctioning economy and lifting restrictions on private-sector development and foreign investment.

During the very first secret talks between Washington and Havana after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Che Guevara told Kennedy White House aide Richard Goodwin that Cuba “could discuss no formula that would mean giving up the type of society to which they were dedicated.” But Cuba was willing to discuss virtually every other US concern, including indemnification for expropriated property and its foreign policies in Latin America.

And Cuba still appears willing to address those concerns—if a formula for diplomatic talks can be found where Trump does not simply command the Cuban government to “bend the knee” and swear allegiance to the mad King of the Continent. “Cuba does not have to make any political concessions, and that will never be on the table for negotiations,” Díaz-Canel told thousands of Cubans gathered in front of the US Embassy to protest US intervention in Venezuela last week. “We will always be open to dialogue and improving relations between our two countries, but only on equal terms and based on mutual respect.”

In the megalomaniacal mind of Donald Trump, the concepts of equality and “mutual respect” don’t exist. But other Latin American nations have been able to finesse the insults emanating from Washington and negotiate, so far, a co-existence with the Colossus of the North. A diplomatic dialogue between Washington and Havana remains possible—and preferable—to advance the best interests of both countries.

January 3, 2026, marks a history-changing turning point in US–Latin American relations. It is not only the day when the United States used its military might to advance its goal of regime change in Venezuela; it is the historic moment when a US president openly and proudly declared his imperialist aspirations for domination of the entire region. “Under our new national security strategy American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again,” President Trump declared only hours after a US Special Forces unit completed a rendition mission against Nicolás Maduro in Caracas. Only time, and history, will tell if he is correct.

For now, let’s give the US president credit for his supremacist transparency. While previous US leaders have at least paid lip service to advancing the reputable international values of freedom and democracy, Trump has made it crystal clear that the attack on Venezuela was not intended to liberate its citizens from Maduro’s thuggish regime but rather to liberate its vast oil reserves for US profit and plunder. In celebrating the success of “Operation Absolute Resolve”—the codename for the military extraction of Maduro—there has been little talk from the White House about the restoration of Venezuelan democracy nor respect for human rights; only the restoration of US control over Venezuelan petroleum reserves, which the US president claims were “stolen” from American oil corporations. In word and deed, Trump has indicated that he sees himself as overlord of Venezuela as his personal vassal state for the foreseeable future. When asked by reporters this week who will now be “running” Venezuela, Trump responded simply and succinctly: “Me.”

President Trump has made no secret that he aspires to be a modern-day emperor; and to be an emperor obviously requires an empire. The successful attack on Venezuela seems to have empowered and emboldened him to actively pursue that bellicose, grandiose, and lawless ambition. “Let us state it plainly,” as Ben Rhodes, a former national security adviser to President Obama, accurately observes: The United States now has “an autocratic leader seeking power and aggrandizement through the conquest of territory and resources.”

The Donroe Doctrine

It has been almost a full century since the United States openly claimed the might, and the right, to control Latin America for its imperialist pursuits. But the Trump administration seems determined to drag the region back to the era of “gunboat diplomacy,” when US presidents routinely dispatched the Marines to oust uncooperative leaders, secure land and resources for the benefit of US corporations, and seize economic and military control of various Central and South American nations. The US has “superseded” the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which designated the Americas as the US sphere of influence, as Trump announced at his Mar-a-Lago press conference celebrating the assault on Venezuela; “they now call it the ‘Donroe Doctrine,’” he told reporters.

This doctrine, as The Economist defined it in a major cover story titled “The Donroe Delusion,” is essentially “Mr. Trump’s belief that he can do whatever he likes in the Western Hemisphere, from commandeering Venezuela’s oil to grabbing Greenland.” Intoxicated by the success of his “Operation Absolute Resolve” in Venezuela, Trump has reiterated his absolute resolve to “own” Greenland. In a direct threat to the NATO alliance, he is now threatening that the US can do it “the easy way” or “the hard way.”

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Delusional or not, the lethal mixture of Trump’s imperialist agenda to “own” sovereign lands combined with his insatiable narcissistic need to demonstrate his omnipotent power to do so makes him the most dangerous US president the world community has ever faced. With his fixation on audacious displays of raw aggression, Trump has transformed the United States into a superpower predator on the prowl, seeking conquest far and wide. The way he and his national security team have reveled in their merciless and murderous operations—from obliterating dozens of defenseless small boats and their crews in the Caribbean to dropping bombs on Caracas—meets Webster’s Dictionary’s definition of sadistic: “deriving pleasure from inflicting pain, suffering, or humiliation on others, often associated with extreme cruelty.”

Even more disconcerting is the lack of any real constraints on his ability to escalate such abuses of power in the future. As world leaders have pointed out, the assault on Venezuela constitutes a blatant assault on the international legal order. But Trump has not only disregarded the post–World War II framework of international norms; he is determined to destroy it. Venezuela has become his opportunity to obliterate the legal mandates of the UN and OAS charters—to which the United States is a signatory—to respect the sovereignty of states. “I don’t need international law,” Trump openly declared in an interview with The New York Times this past week. Are there any limits on his exercise of global power? he was asked. “Yeah, there is one thing,” Trump replied. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

The Threat to the Region

Through historical experience, Latin Americans know about the “morality” of US intervention. And as a region disparaged as the “backyard” of the United States, Latin America has suffered at the hands of the domineering “Colossus of the North” for centuries. Based on this history, leaders across the continent have every reason to be extremely concerned. “Today it is Venezuela; tomorrow it could be any other country,” as Chilean President Gabriel Boric stated in his denunciation of the US takeover of Caracas. “If they can do it there, why not elsewhere in the future?”

Indeed, every day this past week has brought a new threat of US intervention in the region. Cuba seems to be the next target on Washington’s list of conquests. The US takeover of Venezuela’s oil industry and naval quarantine of tankers has effectively terminated shipments of oil to the island, which threatens to collapse its teetering economy. At 7:27 am this past Sunday, Trump tweeted his first ominous threat against Havana: “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA, ZERO [from Venezuela],” he declared with emphasis. “I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”

And despite Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s demands that the United States respect the sovereignty of her country, Trump has escalated threats to launch military raids on Mexico. “We are going to start now hitting land with regard to the cartels,” Trump stated in an interview with Sean Hannity last week, echoing the threats he had made against Venezuela. “The cartels are running Mexico.” Similar warnings have been issued against Colombia and its president, Gustavo Petro, whom Trump has accused of sending drugs into the United States—the same falsehood he leveled against Maduro. “It sounds good to me,” Trump responded when asked if he planned to attack Bogotá as he had attacked Caracas.

Let us state it plainly: The United States is now governed by an authoritarian, imperially minded, self-aggrandizing narcissist who wants to transform the nations of Latin America into submissives—for no real reason other than to demonstrate that he has the dominant power to do so. “Well, we are in danger,” as President Petro has summarized this dire situation. “Because the threat is real. It was made by Trump.”

As 2026 gets underway, President Trump has already fulfilled one of his leading New Year’s resolutions: overthrowing the Venezuelan regime of Nicolás Maduro by force. In the early hours of January 3, the US military launched a coordinated bombardment of key targets in Caracas, while a special Delta Force team—no doubt acting on CIA-gathered intelligence—located and seized Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, who were holed up in a fortified compound. They were helicoptered to the USS Iwo Jima battleship deployed in the Caribbean and then flown to New York, where Maduro and his wife face a brand-new indictment for engaging in a “narco-terrorism conspiracy,” conveniently issued January 3, 2026.

That charge, as The New York Times has pointed out, “is particularly ludicrous.” Venezuela does not produce cocaine and is not a major hub for drugs bound for the United States. The “Cartel de los Soles,” of which Maduro is the alleged kingpin, is not an actual organization, but rather a moniker invented by Venezuelan journalists to refer to the diffuse networks of smugglers and their enablers moving drugs through Venezuela on their way to Europe.

Moreover, Trump cares not a whit about bringing drug traffickers to justice. Just a month ago, he pardoned the former president of Honduras who had been convicted of smuggling more than 400 tons of cocaine to the United States over two decades.

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Trump’s true goals, now openly announced, are to seize Venezuela’s vast oil reserves—he falsely claims they were “stolen” from the United States—and to advance the so-called “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine whereby the United States asserts its predominance over the subordinate nations of Latin America. “They now call it ‘the Donroe Doctrine,’” Trump noted at an extraordinary press conference from Mar-a-Lago, as he described how the United States will now exercise authority over Venezuela’s future and run its oil industry. “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere,” he proudly stated, “will never be questioned again, never again.”

The Mar-a-Lago press conference was almost as shocking as “Operation Absolute Resolve”—the codename for the US military effort to seize Maduro and depose his government. Trump and his national security team—Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Dan Caine—provided the most unabashed glorification of the bald exercise of US power in recent history. “Welcome to 2026,” Hegseth crowed. “Under President Trump, America is back,” he declared, hailing “the sheer guts and grit, gallantry and glory of the American warrior.” Hegseth seemed to revel in the bloodshed; the Caracas death count has gone largely unreported. The seizure of Maduro, he asserted, showed that “America can project our will anywhere, anytime.” Trump was no less enthusiastic. “It was dark. It was deadly,” he said, describing “one of the most stunning, effective and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history.”

Trump proclaimed not only US imperial powers but also his imperialist aims. “We’re going to be running it,” Trump declared. “It’s largely going to be—for a period of time—the people who are standing right behind me,” meaning his own national security team. “We’re going to be running it.” And if Venezuelans did not cooperate, it would be “really bad for them,” he promised, adding, “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground”—apparently a threat of full-scale occupation.

Venezuelan oil was top of mind for Trump. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure and start making money for the country,” Trump promised. The US built the oil industry in Venezuela, Trump claimed; its nationalization was “theft of our property,” he asserted, as if Venezuela’s natural resources belonged to the United States all along. Washington’s imperialist land grab in Latin America could hardly be more explicit.

Trump also made it clear that the “Donroe Doctrine” extends beyond Venezuela to other nations in the region. He falsely claimed that Colombian President Gustavo Petro was “making cocaine” and sending it to the United States “so he does have to watch his ass.” Cuba, Trump and Rubio both suggested, was also threatened. “Cuba is something we will end up talking about,” Trump noted, before turning over the microphone to Rubio. “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government,” the secretary of state opined, “I’d be concerned at least a little bit.”

Given the capricious nature of Trump’s unprovoked military attack and attempt to take over Venezuela, leading Latin American nations are now extremely concerned. President Petro has already denounced Washington’s regime-change operations as an “assault on the sovereignty of the region.” He ordered Colombian troops deployed to the border with Venezuela and requested that the United Nations urgently convene to address the crisis. Chilean President Gabriel Boric has already issued not one but two denunciations “energetically condemning the actions of the United States.” “Today it is Venezuela, tomorrow it could be some other country,” Boric noted. “The threat of external, unilateral control over [Venezuela’s] natural resources,” he added, “constitutes a grave violation of the principle of territorial integrity, and puts at risk the security, sovereignty and the stability of the countries in the region.”

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum also condemned Washington’s actions, citing article II of the UN Charter prohibiting such violations of sovereignty. Mexico, which has also been threatened by Trump, opposes foreign interference and supports only peaceful solutions, she stated, and security cooperation with Washington would remain one of “collaboration and coordination, but not subordination.”

Brazilian President Luiz Lula da Silva denounced US intervention as “crossing an unacceptable line.” The attack on Venezuela has created “an extremely dangerous precedent for the entire international community,” Lula submitted. “To attack countries in flagrant violation of international law is the first step toward a world of violence, chaos and instability, where the law of the strongest prevails over multilateralism.”

Indeed, Trump’s empire-building posture of might-makes-right is a direct assault on the entire world order of international law and respect for the sovereign rights of all states. Beyond violating the War Powers Act at home, the attack on Venezuela has undermined numerous international accords abroad, among them the OAS and UN Charters. Trump’s unilateral exercise of power against a small regional nation legitimizes the expansionist ambitions of other major powers who claim their own spheres of influence and control—Russia in the former Soviet states and its “near abroad,” and China in Taiwan and the South China Sea.

In the era of imperialism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the great powers divided the globe into spheres of influence. Their experiment with balance-of-power politics failed. Great-power rivalries and resistance from the colonized destabilized the system, producing two world wars that killed more than 80 million people. Resurrecting that failed system, as Trump seems intent on doing, starting in the Americas, is folly. “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought,” commented Albert Einstein on the urgency of not repeating the mistakes of the past, “but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

This past Monday morning, Chileans awoke to a new reality. Some 35 years after the return to civilian rule following the infamous Pinochet dictatorship, Chile will soon be governed by a rabid right-wing, pro-Pinochet apologist—President-elect José Antonio Kast. For the 58 percent of the Chilean public sold on Kast’s Trumpian anti-immigration and pro-security populism, that was great news. But for the 42 percent of Chileans who voted for progressive candidate Jeannette Jara, Chile’s swing to the far right is devastating, and a bitter political pill to swallow. As the outcome became apparent on December 14, a meme circulated on Chilean social media: “Paso a paso nos vamos… a la mierda.” “Step by step we are going… into the shit.”

Already the transition of power has begun. Kast met this week with Chile’s outgoing President Gabriel Boric, adopting a civil tone and vowing respect for those who opposed him. But given his family background—Kast’s father was a member of the Nazi party in Germany, and his brother served as a minister in the Pinochet regime—and his repeated promise to exercise the “mano dura” (the iron fist) once he becomes president, there is a deep foreboding among Chileans still traumatized by the atrocities of the military dictatorship—and still committed to redressing them. “The election feels like a referendum on unfinished history,” one Jara supporter told me.

Indeed, for Chile’s significant human rights community, the election of an avowed Pinochet admirer can only be interpreted as political validation of the former dictator’s reign of terror. When Kast is inaugurated in March, his ultra-hard-line government portends a dire challenge to ongoing efforts to remember and repudiate Chile’s violent, authoritarian past.
 

Purveyors of Denialism

Since 1990, when Chile’s pro-democracy movement succeeded in pushing the entrenched dictator from power, successive governments, along with Chilean civil society and human rights organizations, have attempted to process the evils of Chile’s past. The Chilean judiciary has prosecuted hundreds of human rights violators from the military era; some 139 former high-ranking military officers remain incarcerated for their human rights crimes and additional cases are pending. The government has built human rights museums, transformed secret police torture camps into educational centers, and established “memory sites” as monuments to the atrocities committed by the Pinochet regime and in recognition of its thousands of victims.

As part of Chile’s nunca mas—never again—campaign, just two short years ago President Boric hosted leaders from around the world to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the US-backed September 11, 1973, military coup. His message: remembering the past and renewing a commitment to a stronger democratic future with respect for human rights and political differences. “Problems with democracy can always be solved,” Boric told an audience of several thousand who had gathered on the grounds of La Moneda palace, “and a coup d’état is never justifiable—nor is endangering the human rights of those who think differently.”

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Boric also used the occasion of the 50th anniversary to launch a new government initiative called the “Plan Nacional de Busqueda” (PNB)—the search for the disappeared. More than 1,100 Chileans (and one US citizen named Boris Weisfeiler) remain missing at the hands of Pinochet’s repressors; the State was responsible for disappearing them and the State should be responsible for finding them, Boric asserted as he inaugurated the special investigation. In a recent speech on human rights largely devoted to defending the PNB and the need to continue its investigative efforts, Boric denounced “the insolence and profound error of those who maintain that this matter can be swept under the rug.” The work of the PNB was not only to account for the desaparecidos and bring closure for their families, he emphasized, but to educate the public on the realities of Chile’s dark history “so that this does not happen again.”

But Kast and the members of his extreme-right Republicano party are Chile’s leading carpet sweepers; the Plan Nacional de Busqueda, which operates under the human rights unit of the Ministry of Justice, is likely to be the first victim of the new president’s efforts to close the door on further investigations of Chile’s repressive past. As the leading purveyors of what the Chileans call “negacionismo”—denialism—the Republicanos and the other conservative parties have repeatedly minimized and dismissed evidence of the Pinochet regime’s human rights atrocities.

In the middle of the campaign last September, for example, when news broke that PNB investigators had found one of the disappeared alive in Argentina, pro-Kast legislators sought to discredit all the disappeared, and those seeking to find them. The unique case of former militant Bernarda Vera became a political weapon on the right to imply that there were many other desaparecidos who were not dead and that their families were fraudulently receiving government reparations for human rights victims. The diligent investigative work of the PNB itself came under severe right-wing political attack, leaving its future in doubt. “Kast will shut it down,” one veteran human rights investigator predicted with certainty.

Other leading institutions of Chile’s commitment to memory and accountability for the Pinochet regime’s atrocities are also threatened. Although Kast will not have a conservative majority in the Chilean legislature, his electoral mandate to cut public spending will certainly include defunding major “memory sites” that are part of Chile’s renowned historical landscape devoted to human rights. Chile’s legislature has already passed appropriations for 2026, but thereafter the future of Santiago’s iconic Museum of Memory and Human Rights, which counts half a million visitors a year, will be in jeopardy. So too is the future of the former death camp, Villa Grimaldi, run by Pinochet’s feared secret police, DINA—now a landmark memory site in Santiago.

Other former DINA torture centers that have been transformed into educational museums are also likely to end up on the Kast administration’s human rights chopping block, as are the publicly funded monuments to the disappeared and executed political prisoners at the National Cemetery. “If Kast becomes president, we are all in a panic,” one leading human rights official told The Nation before the elections.
 

Pardoning Pinochet

Kast’s ascendency comes on his third electoral attempt; four years ago, he was defeated by a 12 percent margin by Boric, who rode a wave of public discontent with Chile’s staggering inequality to become, at age 35, the youngest president in Chilean history. But Boric’s agenda of redressing his country’s socioeconomic disparities has been overwhelmed by a dramatic shift in national preoccupation to rising violent crime linked to immigration, mostly from Venezuela. “The issue is security, security, security,” a taxi driver told me during a recent research trip to Chile.

In many ways, Kast’s brand of “security populism” mirrored Donald Trump’s own winning electoral strategy a year ago. Like Trump, Kast promised to build a border wall, along with digging trenches, to keep migrants from crossing into Chile from Peru and Bolivia. He has threatened to deport hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants. “If you don’t go on your own, we’ll detain you, we’ll expel you, and you’ll leave with only the clothes on your back,” Kast declared in one campaign video. “Chile First” became a familiar campaign slogan. Kast supporters wore the Chilean version of MAGA hats and T-shirts—Make Chile Great Again. “Under his leadership, we are confident Chile will advance shared priorities to include strengthening public security, ending illegal immigration and revitalizing our commercial relationship,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated in a congratulatory message to Kast.

In his campaign against Boric four years ago, Kast broke a taboo of post-dictatorship Chilean politics and openly endorsed the Pinochet regime. Pinochet “would vote for me if he were alive,” Kast famously declared. Perhaps more ominously, he made a political point of visiting Pinochet’s convicted henchmen in the special prison, Punta Peuco, that was built to house convicted human rights violators—and promised to pardon them for their atrocities.

Although Kast has been more circumspect about expressing his admiration for the Pinochet era during his victorious 2025 campaign, his commitment to pardon those convicted of human rights atrocities remains controversial. During the debates with Jara, Kast was questioned about the pardons for seemingly unpardonable crimes; due to their old age, he responded, the torturers and executioners deserved to be released. “We learned that the same candidate who speaks of using the iron fist against delinquents…now wants to use pardons to liberate some of the worst criminals of our history,” noted one of Chile’s leading journalists and commentators, Daniel Matamala. “If there is something that distinguishes the delinquents of Punto Peuco, it is the sadism and cowardice with which they committed their crimes.”

But just like Trump pardoned the January 6 insurrectionists to rewrite the history of his criminal efforts to instigate a coup, a Kast pardon of Pinochet’s duly convicted officers will signal a mendacious attempt to whitewash the terrorist history of the military dictatorship—and, in effect, provide a posthumous pardon to Pinochet for his crimes against humanity.

That is the ultimate danger of Kast’s hostility toward ongoing efforts to pursue legal and historical accountability for the victims, and the survivors, of the military era—a danger that conscientious Chileans, including those who led the struggle to restore democracy to their country, will no doubt resist. “Without memory, without truth, without justice, there is no certainty that there will not be a repeat of the past,” President Boric warned in his final International Human Rights Day speech on December 10, just four days before Chile’s fateful election. “And without guarantees that it will not be repeated, the future will not be peaceful.”

On General Augusto Pinochet’s 60th birthday, November 25, 1975, four delegations of Southern Cone secret police officers arrived in Santiago, Chile, at the invitation of the Chilean intelligence service, DINA. Their mission: “to establish something similar to INTERPOL,” according to the confidential meeting agenda, “but dedicated to Subversion.” During their clandestine three-day meeting held at Chile’s War College, the military officials from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay agreed to form “a system of collaboration” to identify, locate, track, capture and “liquidate” leftist opponents of their regimes. As the conference concluded on November 28, a member of the Uruguayan delegation toasted the host country and proposed that the new organization be named after Chile’s majestic national bird—the Andean Condor.

There was “unanimous approval,” records a secret summary of the meeting. The transnational “sistema Condor” was born—an infamous symbol of abuses of power of the past that authoritarianism can bring in the future.

A half century ago, the inauguration of Condor launched a rampage of state-sponsored terrorism across the Western Hemisphere and beyond. “Operation Condor,” as the CIA identified it in Top Secret reports, became a multinational agency of “cross-border repression,” as investigative journalist John Dinges has written in his comprehensive history, The Condor Years, “[whose] teams went far beyond the frontiers of the member countries to launch assassination missions and other criminal operations in the United States, Mexico and Europe.”

During Condor’s active period of operation between 1976 and 1980, Dinges and other investigators documented at least 654 victims of transnational kidnappings, torture and disappearance. Most of those human rights crimes were committed in the Southern Cone region. But a sub-directorate of Condor codenamed “Teseo”—for the heroic warrior king of Greek mythology—established an international death squad unit based in Buenos Aires that launched 21 operations in Europe and elsewhere to assassinate opponents of the Southern Cone military regimes.

A Chilean Creation

The creation of Condor must be credited to the Pinochet regime—specifically to DINA chief Juan Manuel Contreras. He was, as one Condor insider told the CIA, “the man who originated the entire Condor concept and has been the catalyst for bringing it into being.” Contreras personally invited his counterparts from Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay to attend the inaugural meeting in Santiago in November 1975; Chile also hosted the second meeting convened in Santiago on May 31, 1976, when the Condor sub-directorate for international assassination, “Teseo,” was created. To select targets to “liquidate,” according to a secret CIA intelligence report, Contreras would “coordinate details and target lists with Chilean President Augusto Pinochet Ugarte.”

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“Chile has many (unidentified) targets in Europe,” noted another CIA report. CIA sources also indicated that “some leaders of Amnesty International might be selected for the target list.”

Santiago, Chile, also served as the headquarters for the central data and archives office of Condor. Brazil, which joined Condor in 1976, supplied an encrypted communications network known as Condortel. (Peru and Ecuador also joined Condor in 1978.) The operational command and control division of Condor—known as “Condoreje”—would be headquartered in Buenos Aires. The special death squad “Teseo” unit, made up of specially trained operatives from Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, also used a base in Buenos Aires.

“Each representative will put forth his choice of target in the form of a proposal,” stated the September 1976 “Teseo” accord. “The final selection of a target will be by vote and on the basis of a simple majority.” Under the section “Execution of the Target” the text of the agreement continued: “This is the responsibility of the operational team which will (A) Intercept the target, (B) carry out the operation, and (C) escape.”

For such murder missions, operational costs were estimated “at $3,500 per person for ten days, with an additional $1,000 the first time out for clothing allowance.”

The US Role

We know the banal details of these covert terrorist operations because Condor officials secretly shared them with the CIA; and over 40 years later, the CIA’s top secret intelligence cables were finally, albeit partially, declassified. The Agency appears to have learned about Condor’s existence in March of 1976; but its intelligence gathering efforts escalated following the second Condor meeting in Santiago after it learned of the “Teseo” plan.

The United States has often been accused of fostering Operation Condor, but those accusations are inaccurate. To be sure, officials such as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had no problem with “dirty wars” against the left in Latin America. The US helped bring those repressive military regimes to power, supported secret police forces in the Southern Cone, and encouraged intelligence sharing among them. Kissinger turned a deaf ear to State Department concerns about repressive human rights violations.

But US officials did have a big problem with international assassination operations, particularly on the streets of allied nations in Europe—precisely because Washington was so closely associated with the military juntas behind Operation Condor. “Internationally, the Latin generals look like our guys,” Kissinger was advised on August 3, 1976, in a secret briefing paper on the existence of Operation Condor. “We are especially identified with Chile. It cannot do us any good.”

CIA officials agreed; they viewed these Condor assassination plots as a ticking time bomb for the Agency. At the time, the CIA was in the middle of its own massive murder scandal—generated by the publication of the special Senate Church Committee report on “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders” exposing the Agency’s own covert history of operations targeting foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, and Chilean general Rene Schneider. “The plans of these countries to undertake offensive action outside of their own jurisdictions poses new problems for the Agency,” the chief of the CIA’s Latin American division, Ray Warren, warned in late July 1976. “Every precaution must be taken to ensure that the Agency is not wrongfully accused of being party to this type of activity.”

Indeed, the CIA was so concerned about what Warren called the “adverse political ramifications for the Agency should Condor engage in assassinations” that it took proactive steps to preempt Condor operations in Europe. A declassified US Senate study, based on Top Secret-Sensitive CIA reports, stated that “the CIA warned the governments of the countries in which the assassinations were likely to occur—France and Portugal—which in turn warned the possible targets.”

CIA officials also conferred with State Department officers on how to dissuade the Condor nations from their assassination operations. In mid-August, 1976, Warren informed his superiors that the CIA had agreed to “an EXDIS [Exclusive Distribution] message from the Department of State to the US Ambassadors in Buenos Aires, Santiago and Montevideo instructing them to approach the highest levels of their host governments and express the serious concern of the US Government to the alleged assassination plans envisioned within ‘Operation Condor.’” Several courageous State Department officers, among them Hewson Ryan, William Luers, and Assistant Secretary for Latin America Harry Shlaudeman, successfully lobbied Secretary of State Kissinger to approve the diplomatic démarche, but the US ambassadors in Santiago and Montevideo both opposed delivering it. On September 16, 1976, Kissinger overruled Shlaudeman’s recommendation that he order them to proceed, and “instructed that no further action be taken on this matter.” On September 20, Shlaudeman sent a memo to Luers telling him to “instruct the [US] ambassadors to take no further action noting that there have been no [intelligence] reports in some weeks indicating an intention to activate the Condor scheme.”

But the CIA had failed to detect that an assassination scheme had indeed been activated. The very next morning a car bomb exploded in the Embassy Row district of Washington, DC, killing the leading international opponent of the Pinochet regime, former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier, and his 25-year-old associate, Ronni Moffitt. To safeguard the secrecy of this audacious plot, General Pinochet—the CIA concluded he “personally ordered” the assassination of Letelier—and Colonel Contreras avoided the Teseo structure but utilized Condor’s collaboration. “I was informed that there was an intelligence service group that was running the ‘Condor Network,’” according to the confession of DINA assassin, Michael Townley, “and that it included Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, and that the Paraguayans were going to give us official passports and obtain official visas to enter the USA.” Condor made its contribution to one of the most egregious acts of international terrorism ever committed in the capital city of the United States.

Justice and Accountability

It is a “historic irony,” as John Dinges notes, “that these international crimes of the dictatorships spawned investigations, including one resulting in Pinochet’s arrest in London, that would eventually bring hundreds of the military perpetrators to justice.”

Indeed, the crimes of Condor came back to haunt those who committed them. The very first human rights trial in Chile after the return to civilian rule led to the conviction of Colonel Contreras and his deputy Pedro Espinoza as masterminds of the Letelier-Moffitt assassination. Pinochet himself was arrested in London pursuant to an Interpol warrant from Spain under the European Anti-Terrorism Convention.Francesca Lessa, author of The Condor Trials, has identified 50 legal proceedings that have led to prison sentences for over 100 former military officials for Condor-sponsored human rights crimes.

Those convictions, and the accumulated evidence that made them possible, stand in stark contrast to current political efforts in former Condor states to deny these atrocities ever occurred. “Negacionismo”—denialism—and even nostalgia for the era of dictatorship have contributed to an extremist political direction in former Condor states such as Chile and Argentina. And like Condor’s own murderous operations, the political winds of authoritarianism are blowing beyond the Southern Cone, through Europe and even the United States.

But 50 years after Condor’s inauguration, the factual evidence of coordinated Southern Cone human rights atrocities can never be truthfully denied, whitewashed or justified. The ongoing legal effort to hold Condor criminals accountable for their bloody abuses of power is, at its universal essence, an effort to fortify democracy over dictatorship and assure that an international commitment to “never again” prevails. There are no guarantees. As the allure of authoritarianism spreads at home and abroad, Condor’s dramatic, documented history remains a deadly reminder of what could, in fact, happen again.

Any day now, a US Navy strike force, led by the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, will join an armada of war ships already positioned off the coast of Venezuela. Described in the naval media as “the most capable, adaptable, and lethal combat platform in the world,” the USS Gerald R. Ford bristles with state-of-the-art attack aircraft on its massive deck: Super Hornet fighters, Growler electronic warfare jets, and Seahawk helicopters among them. And the battleship carries some 5,000 seamen and Marines, adding to the phalanx of 10,000 military personnel already deployed on bases in Puerto Rico and on at least ten other war ships now aiming their artillery, cruise missiles and bomb-dropping drones at Caracas.

This show of force is unprecedented in the 21st century. Not since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis has the United States assembled such a lethal array of firepower in the Caribbean. Trump administration officials have begun leaking attack plans to media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and the Miami Herald, which have reported that initial raids would target Venezuelan military installations and that US airstrikes “could begin within days, even hours.” An unprovoked US military assault on one of Latin America’s largest nations appears likely in the near future.

Shock and Awe in the Caribbean

Since the Venezuelan armed forces have not attacked or even threatened to attack the United States, the Trump administration has been forced to concoct a public justification for its actions—the widely reported but spurious claim that Washington is combatting “narco-terrorists.” The post-9/11 war on terrorism established a precedent for waging war against so-called “non-state actors;” defining low level speedboat pilots and alleged drug smugglers as “terrorists” is intended to provide a dubious legal cover for killing them. 

But Al-Qaeda actually launched murderous attacks on the United States and Congress authorized a military response. Arguing that unidentified people in boats that might be carrying drugs that might be destined for the United States are armed combatants who pose an imminent threat—and can therefore be killed with impunity—stretches common sense beyond the breaking point.

On Trump’s orders, over the last two months US military forces have turned the Caribbean into a killing field, destroying 15 small boats and taking the lives of over 60 unidentified individuals who were on them. Proud of this accomplishment, the president and his secretary of defense have repeatedly posted what can only be described as “snuff films” of the ships and their crews bobbing in the ocean and then exploding into flames as Hellfire missiles and laser-guided bombs dropped from US drones and attack helicopters obliterate everyone on board.

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Similar shock and awe operations are now targeting the Venezuelan mainland under similarly false premises. The “enhanced US force presence” in the Caribbean, according to the Pentagon, “will bolster US capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities…. These forces will enhance and augment existing capabilities to disrupt narcotics trafficking and degrade and dismantle TCOs”—transnational criminal organizations which President Trump alleges are being directed by Venezuela’s embattled and illegitimate president, Nicolás Maduro.

Target Maduro

Overthrowing Maduro is the Trump administration’s true goal; just as it has been since his first term in office. “Why can’t the US just invade Venezuela?” the president repeatedly asked his national security aides back in 2018 citing successful episodes of gunboat diplomacy against Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989. In his memoir In the Room Where it Happened, former national security adviser John Bolton recalled that President Trump suggested it would be “cool” to invade Venezuela. He considered the South American nation to be “really part of the United States.”

At the time, Trump had seasoned national security aides willing and able to explain to him the folly of military intervention in Venezuela for US foreign policy interests: A unilateral invasion would violate international law and the UN charter; Washington would face opposition from all of Latin America; and military intervention would require occupying and pacifying a major nation of over 30 million people through a protracted deployment of US troops on the ground.

Those arguments remain valid. But today, the president is surrounded by sycophants appointed to do his bidding rather than to advise him of its costs. To avoid the quagmire of occupation, military options on Trump’s desk are reportedly focused on strategic airstrikes targeting Maduro for assassination, and on bombing raids to coerce the Venezuelan military into taking out Maduro themselves or turning him over to US authorities. And since flagrantly stealing an election he overwhelmingly lost in July 2024, Maduro has no allies in the region—aside from Cuba. While Mexico and Colombia have criticized the US boat attacks, at home and abroad Maduro remains a pariah president with few friends to come to his defense.

War Powers Resolution

The reluctance to be seen as defending Maduro extends to Capitol Hill, complicating political efforts to restrain Trump’s interventionist impulses. Democrats, joined by Senate Republicans Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski, have criticized the boat attacks as illegal; they have tried to invoke the 1973 War Powers Resolution that requires the president to seek congressional authorization to engage in sustained armed hostilities—so far without success. In early October, Senate Joint Resolution 83, directing the president to halt hostilities against narcotics traffickers without congressional authorization failed in the Senate by a vote of 51-48.

Still pending is Senate Joint Resolution 90 intended “To direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities within or against Venezuela that have not been authorized by Congress.” The resolution expresses Congressional concern that “The publicly reported authorization for the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct covert lethal operations within Venezuela, the significant augmentation of United States Armed Forces assets, personnel, and operations in proximity to Venezuela, and statements from United States Government officials regarding planning for ground strikes within Venezuela indicate imminent involvement of United States Armed Forces in hostilities within or against Venezuela.” And it calls on the president to cease and desist: “Congress hereby directs the president to terminate the use of United States Armed Forces for hostilities within or against Venezuela, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force.” But senior Senate aides interviewed for this article remain unsure that enough Republican votes exist to move the resolution forward.

Might Makes Right

Even if Congress miraculously passed a resolution to invoke the War Powers Act, it is unlikely that Trump will heed the law and adhere to the Constitution. Just this past weekend, the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, T. Elliott Gaiser, informed members of Congress that the War Powers Resolution does not apply to the ongoing military operations against small boats in the Caribbean because US troops were not in danger. “The operation comprises precise strikes conducted largely by unmanned aerial vehicles launched from naval vessels in international waters at distances too far away for the crews of the targeted vessels to endanger American personnel,” another senior official explained. 

To further circumvent the War Powers Act to conduct bombing raids on land, the New York Times reported this week, Trump’s Justice Department is drawing up a “legal rationale” for the assassination of Maduro and his top generals accusing them of being high-ranking members of a “narcoterrorist” entity. “The Justice Department is expected to contend that designation makes Mr. Maduro a legitimate target,” according to the Times, “despite longstanding American legal prohibitions on assassinating national leaders.”

Since his inaugural speech on January 20, when Trump announced the US would “take back” the Panama Canal, the president has made it clear that his foreign policy will not respect the sovereignty of other nations. Despite opposition from his MAGA constituents to expending US resources abroad, Trump seems dedicated to enhancing his power through the subjugation of other countries. Unable to coerce Canada into becoming the 51st state, he is now turning his attention southward, toward a region which Washington has historically treated as its “backyard.”

After all, an emperor needs an empire. “Trump’s ambitions will not stop with Venezuela,” warns former Obama deputy national security advisor, Benjamin Rhodes. Already, Trump has falsely labeled Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, “an illegal drug leader” and threatened to take aggressive action against Colombia. Trump has reportedly ordered the Pentagon to draw up plans for the deployment of US troops and intelligence operatives for ground operations against cartels inside Mexico. If the United States manages to capture or kill Maduro, the administration could be emboldened to escalate regime change efforts against Cuba.

“Within the Western Hemisphere,” Rhodes suggests, “Mr. Trump is beginning to act like Mr. Netanyahu in the Middle East or Mr. Putin within the former Soviet Union—a right-wing leader claiming a sphere of influence where he is free to act as he chooses.”

Trump has the power to resurrect the era of gunboat diplomacy for his own edification. Congressional Democrats don’t have the votes to stop him, and Republicans don’t have the will. Latin Americans can protest, but they are too outgunned to resist. Russia and China may well find a division of the globe into spheres of influence to their advantage.

But sustaining empires is expensive and inevitably breeds ill-will among the subjugated. All empires collapse eventually. In time, the inter-American community, and the American people—in whose name these abuses of power are being conducted—will rise to challenge Trump’s imperial, and imperious ambitions and it will become clear, at home and abroad, that the emperor has no clothes.

Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, expectations have been that his administration will use escalating sanctions to pursue regime change in Cuba—much as he did during his first term. With Marco Rubio, previously the hardest of hardliners in the US Senate, now serving as secretary of state—and doubling as national security adviser—the stage appears set for a return to a punitive policy of “maximum pressure” to push the teetering Cuban economy over the edge. “In 2019, the policy was maximum pressure, but we never got to maximum pressure,” Mauricio Claver-Carone, then Trump’s special envoy to Latin America, told a Miami audience in April. “And now we’re going to ramp up that pressure.”

On June 30, the Trump White House officially took the first step to “ramp up” a campaign of pressure against Cuba—in the form of National Security Presidential Memorandum-5. The directive explicitly states that it is a “reissuance” of NSPM-5 from 2017—a word-for-word return to Trump’s policies from his first term—“on strengthening the policy of the United States toward Cuba,” with just two amendments (explained below). NSPM-5 reiterates restrictions on travel and commerce with Cuba, without explicitly expanding the restrictions that currently exist. But the directive also orders US agencies to revisit their regulations on travel and commerce with Cuba by the end of July—an indication that tighter restrictions and more punitive sanctions could be forthcoming later this summer.

Invoking the new directive, last week the State Department levied sanctions against Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and two of his ministers, to mark the fourth anniversary of the July 11, 2021, protests in Cuba during the pandemic. The sanctions consist of permanently denying visas to the Cuban leaders—a meaningless penalty.

To understand the implications of NSPM-5, The Nation sat down with two Cuba specialists, William M. LeoGrande and Geoff Thale, who have co-authored a comprehensive new study, “US-Cuban Relations: A Realist Case for Pragmatic Engagement.” Their report, conducted for the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, asserts that the “national interest of the United States would be better served by resetting US policy toward Cuba, embarking on a path of engagement aimed at eventually normalizing relations.” In the following Q&A, LeoGrande and Thale critique Trump’s hostile Cuba policy—and offer an alternative course of engagement far more likely to serve the interests of the United States and the Cuban people.

—Peter Kornbluh

The Nation: On June 30, President Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 5—setting the stage for his second-term Cuba policy. Except the directive is almost identical to the one he issued during his first term. What is Trump attempting to accomplish by reissuing a policy package that has largely remained in place since 2017?

William M. LeoGrande: The new NSPM is a reinstatement and reaffirmation of the sanctions package Trump announced in 2017 when he repudiated President Obama’s normalization policy. It signals a continuation of the policy of hostility but does not appear to dramatically increase sanctions. In some ways, it is less severe than the “maximum pressure” policy Trump imposed in 2019 under the influence of national security adviser John Bolton.

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There appears to be a tug of war underway on Trump’s foreign policy team between pro-sanctions interventionists like Marco Rubio and MAGA skeptics who are wary of foreign entanglements. The “America First” faction would prefer to leave Cuba on the back burner by reaffirming the status quo rather than escalating US involvement. And that’s what NSPM-5 does.

But a lot will depend on the details of the new regulations implementing the policy, and nothing forecloses Trump from imposing new sanctions in the future, as he did in his first term.

Geoff Thale: Agreed. Reissuing NSPM 5 is more a gesture than a substantial shift in policy. Current sanctions already restrict most trade with Cuba, limit travel to the island, and put some pressure on foreign visitors and foreign investors. Issuing NSPM 5 allows the administration to talk tough on Cuba without doing anything new.

TN: The new NSPM is almost identical to the old NSPM, with just a few word changes. Can you explain the difference between them, and why the new language is important?

WML: There are two substantive changes in the new NSPM. First, it directs the State Department to update the so-called “Restricted Entities” list—an official list created by Trump during his first term of Cuban enterprises with which US citizens and companies are banned from doing business. And it expands the criteria of the list to include entities that operate “on behalf of” the Cuban armed forces, not just ones operated by the armed forces. The new list, along with a list of prohibited hotels, was released on July 11, but it simply adds about a dozen new hotels to list—not a drastic change.

The other significant change in the new NSPM prohibits “indirect” as well as “direct” transactions with entities on the “Restricted” list. Presumably, an indirect transaction would be one that goes through some intermediary entity that is not listed.

GT: Adding the words “and indirect” might suggest that the administration could pursue what are called “secondary sanctions”—penalties against entities from other countries (such as Spain or Canada) that do business with Cuba. But the “Restricted Entities List” is a list of Cuban enterprises tied to the military with whom US citizens and companies cannot do business. It doesn’t apply to third-country entities, at least in its present form.

But secondary sanctions, if imposed, could be very damaging to the Cuban economy. They might force current foreign investors and trading partners to withdraw from Cuba, and they would certainly deter new investors, at a time when Cuba urgently needs hard currency and foreign investment. Though they might, ironically, offer new opportunities for Russian and Chinese investment as others withdraw.

TN: The NSPM orders US agencies to update their Cuba regulations within 30 days. We will likely know what those are by the beginning of August. What can we expect in terms of future restrictions on the right to travel for educational tours such as the ones The Nation leads to Cuba?

WML: Surprisingly, the NSPM appears to leave group people-to-people travel intact by spelling out the conditions under which it is licensed. Of course, Trump can always add new sanctions on travel, remittances, etc., as he did during his first term. But the new NSPM is more a reaffirmation of the status quo than it is an escalation of sanctions.

GT: Since the NSPM announcement, the administration has added a dozen hotels—including the Gran Aston in Havana where some educational tour groups have stayed—to the “prohibited” list. New regulations in the next month certainly could create more obstacles for travel. But, overall, the NSPM seems to preserve nonacademic educational travel, and travel to “support the Cuban people.” So significant new restrictions on travel seem unlikely.

TN: Trump has touted his Cuba policies as “maximum pressure.” But you are co-authors of a new, and extremely timely, policy study—“US-Cuban Relations: A Realist Case for Pragmatic Engagement”—that presents a cogent argument for a very different approach. What are the origins of this study? What is “pragmatic engagement”?

GT: You know, it became clear during the 2024 election season that national security arguments were the only compelling set of arguments that might motivate either a Democratic or a Republican administration to change course on Cuba. So in the summer of 2024 we pulled together a set of experts on Cuba policy with whom we could consult on recommendations for a new policy approach focused on national security. We did one-on-one interviews and drafted this policy paper around national interest arguments.

WML: In assessing foreign policy options, realists look first at the national interest, so we asked ourselves what policy toward Cuba would best advance a range of US interests. We focused on the priorities President Trump has voiced with regard to the Western Hemisphere: managing migration, containing the influence of US global rivals, halting the flow of narcotics, and securing access to strategic minerals.

A pragmatic engagement policy is one that adapts US objectives to our capabilities. In other words, what works? What can be done by the United States unilaterally, at low cost, with little downside risk, to advance our objectives. In the paper we argue that US objectives are more likely to be advanced by engaging with Cuba rather than by maintaining a policy of sanctions and hostility, which hasn’t advanced US interests despite being in place for more than 60 years.

GT: President Trump’s foreign policy has focused on defending US national interests, and US security. In Latin America, in particular, that policy has focused on migration issues, on limiting the influence of China and Russia, and on drug policy. We argue that these US interests would be more effectively advanced by engaging with Cuba than by maintaining or further tightening our embargo.

An example: Cuba’s weakened economy has led to a wave of migration; hardening our border can slow that wave but not stop it. And tightening the screws on the Cuban economy will only contribute to migration pressures. The Trump administration has suspended dialogue with Cuba on migration issues, making migration management even harder. Reengaging with Cuba on migration talks, and steps to ease economic pressures that drive migration (especially steps that might help the Cuban private sector) would serve our national interest more effectively than a policy of maximum pressure would.

TN: Cuba is already in a dire economic situation. What are the humanitarian consequences of further destabilizing Cuba economically?

WML: US sanctions have played a major role in the current humanitarian crisis on the island, along with the Covid pandemic and policy mistakes by the Cuban government. More intense sanctions mean a deeper crisis, increasing pressures for emigration, reducing the Cuban government’s capacity to cooperate on issues of mutual interest like narcotics interdiction, and opening the door to China and Russia as they come to Cuba’s aid. None of these outcomes serve US interests.

GT: Food shortages and malnutrition are already issues in Cuba, and the country is receiving aid from the World Food Program. Energy shortage means frequent blackouts. The healthcare system is struggling to provide basic services. Tightening the US embargo further, through secondary sanctions or other measures, is going to increase hunger and human suffering, decrease hope, and drive further migration.

TN: Given the dire situation on the island, what are the next steps that a prudent and “pragmatic” US policy should take?

GT: First, we can help the Cuban economy and the private sector there by taking Cuba off the list of “State Sponsors of Terror.” This inaccurate designation deters foreign businesses, banks, and governments from interacting with Cuba, and makes it much harder for the private sector to carry out international financial transactions. We should permit what’s called “correspondent banking,” so that private businesses in Cuba have the ability to open US bank accounts and operate in regular banking channels. We should let US investors, and that means mostly Cuban Americans, invest in private and cooperative businesses in Cuba. All of those are easy measures that would help the Cuban economy and the private sector and ease the pressures that drive migration. Obviously, we should make it easier for humanitarian aid groups to send food, medicine, and other supplies without the restrictions and red tape that currently exist.

These are all first steps. We need to be realistic and recognize that they won’t transform Cuba, or US-Cuban relations overnight. But they would set us on a path that serves US national and security interests.

WML: We should engage! That is the basic lesson of the Obama–Raul Castro breakthrough to normalize relations in December 2014 which successfully advanced US interests before Trump reverted to a policy of perpetual hostility.

Engagement is possible and productive. During the two years that Obama’s policy was in place, the United States and Cuba reestablished diplomatic relations and signed 22 bilateral cooperation agreements on issues of mutual interest. Educational and cultural exchanges and travel flourished, enriching both countries. New economic links were established. Cuban and Cuban American families were reunited. And the two governments for the first time opened diplomatic discussions about tough issues like human rights and property claims.

Engagement is popular. United States allies around the world cheered Obama’s policy, especially in Latin America. Opinion in the United States was overwhelmingly positive, even among Republicans. By the end of the Obama administration, even the majority of Cuban Americans in Miami favored lifting the embargo.

Engagement is unavoidable. Cuba is only 90 miles away and it’s not going anywhere. Over the years, even Republican presidents have learned that there are some problems Washington cannot solve unilaterally. That realization led almost all of them to engage diplomatically with Cuba on one issue of another, almost always with positive results. Only Obama had the courage to attempt full normalization, and he made more progress in two years than all his predecessors and successors collectively have made in more than half a century.

As Donald Trump strolled through the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on March 17—marking his territory and advancing his hostile takeover of the iconic cultural monument—he casually announced that 80,000 pages of TOP SECRET documents on JFK’s assassination would finally be released—the very next day. “I don’t believe we are going to redact anything,” the president advised the press pool. “People have been waiting decades for this.”

Indeed, 27 years after a special declassification law known as the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act mandated the release of millions of pages of investigative and contextual documents—and eight years after the law’s final deadline for full disclosure of the most sensitive of those records—the Kennedy papers are now finally in the public domain, uncensored. Kennedy assassination sleuths, historians, reporters, curious citizens, and, quite likely, foreign intelligence services are now sifting through the final tranches of some 63,400 pages of records that have been haphazardly posted, so far, on the website of the National Archives Records Administration (NARA). Another 17,000 pages will be added “in the coming days” as they are digitalized, NARA noted in a statement posted on X this week.

So far, none of the thousands of PDF files have yielded any information that would challenge the official historical narrative that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting on his own, shot and killed President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Instead, the smoking guns of history are emerging from granular details of now fully declassified CIA covert operations. The final revelations in the documents turn out to be the CIA’s most guarded of secrets: sources and methods, agent identities and global targets. The unredacted documents name names—of officials, operatives, assets, informants and collaborators. They identify places, collaborating countries, espionage techniques, expenditures, and previously unknown clandestine activities. Those operations include how the CIA manipulated elections in numerous nations, sabotaged economies, plotted to kill foreign leaders and overthrew undesirable governments abroad—while also busily conducting illegal operations at home.

Who knew, for example, that the CIA was secretly spying on Washington’s famous muckraking newsman Jack Anderson? And that in the early 1960s the CIA had almost as many agents working under diplomatic cover as the State Department had actual diplomats abroad? Or that CIA director John McCone conducted furtive “dealings” at the Vatican with Pope John XXII and Pope Paul VI which, according to one of McCone’s aides, “could and would raise eyebrows in some quarters.”

The JFK papers reveal that the Agency was running a massive telephone wiretap operation in Mexico—codenamed Project Lienvoy—out of the office of Mexican President Adolfo López Mateos—who was himself a CIA collaborator and approved the surveillance operations. They identify Mexico, along with 14 other nations whose intelligence services were “assisting us” in covert efforts against Cuba. According to one declassified memo, López Mateos told the CIA station chief that he was “delighted that a decision had now been made to get rid of Castro.” As part of Operation Mongoose, the CIA managed to contaminate an entire cargo shipment of Cuban sugar bound for the USSR “with a chemical used in the process of denaturing alcohol,” according to one Mongoose update. “When this cargo of sugar is refined in the Soviet Union the contaminated bags will completely contaminate the entire shipment,” the secret report continued, “making the sugar unfit for human or animal consumption in any form.” The documents also expose how the CIA financed and orchestrated the 1966 election of its chosen coup-plotting military man, Gen. René Barrientos in Bolivia. They record in greater detail than previously understood how agency operatives financed—at $10,000 a day—street protests in British Guiana that pushed the liberal government of Cheddi Jagan from power in late 1964.

And those are just a few of the many major revelations they contain.

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For Trump, the release of the documents plays well with his conspiracy-minded base, reinforcing suspicions about the so-called “deep state.” This presumably will assist his efforts to purge the FBI and the CIA and bring them under his control, under the guise of restoring public confidence in these national security agencies. This high-profile declassification also allows Trump to claim the mantle of the Transparency President—even as his administration moves systematically and autocratically to erase government databases, gut National Archives staffing, burn and shred federal records, and, overall, reduce public access to information. Given the escalating threat to the public’s right-to-know, the standard of openness set by the release of the JFK papers, and the unique law that made it possible, is arguably more important than the historical content of the documents themselves.

Thank You, Oliver Stone!

Ironically, the declassification of the JFK records is the direct result of the mass marketing of perhaps the most discredited and disreputable of all assassination conspiracy theories—the New Orleans witch hunt conducted by district attorney Jim Garrison and immortalized in Oliver Stone’s popular 1991 movie, JFK. Played by Kevin Costner in the film, Garrison originally claimed that the assassination of the president was “a homosexual thrill-killing”—and, on trumped-up charges, unsuccessfully prosecuted a local businessman for the crime; Garrison subsequently expanded his conspiracy pool of alleged assassins to include the CIA and FBI.

Like Garrison’s malevolent and baseless investigation, Stone’s movie was complete fiction. But it generated widespread public outrage over the US government secrecy that continued to surround the Kennedy assassination. A dramatic scroll at the end of the movie noted that, almost 30 years later, millions of pages of CIA, FBI, and other government records related to the assassination remained classified. “Even the records created by the investigative commissions and committees were withheld from public view and sealed,” noted the Executive Summary of the final 1998 report from the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) created by Congress in the aftermath of the movie. “The suspicions created by government secrecy eroded confidence in the truthfulness of federal agencies in general and damaged their credibility.”

Indeed, the public uproar generated by the film over this inexplicable lack of transparency mobilized Congress to pass the “JFK Act” in 1992. This unique law mandated the review and release of all documentation related to the murder of the president and empowered an independent five-member board with jurisdiction to force top secret records into the public domain.

Under the supervision of the ARRB, the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, the White House, and all other relevant government and law-enforcement agencies spent four years locating, reviewing and releasing vast files of documents, including those accumulated by prior federal and congressional investigations, relating specifically and broadly to all direct and indirect aspects of the assassination. By the time the ARRB submitted its final report to President Clinton and closed its doors, over 5 million pages had been declassified, under the act.

But many of those pages showed blacked out redactions of information—mostly sources and methods—and several thousand documents were withheld in full on national security grounds—particularly by the CIA and FBI. For those deferred records and still redacted pages, the Kennedy Assassination Records Act contained a specific mandate: With few exceptions, the agencies were required to process and declassify them in full—unredacted—by October 26, 2017.

Trump’s Deferral

When the deadline arrived for the final and full release of the JFK papers, Donald Trump had been president for eight months. During that time, a bureaucratic battle played out behind the scenes, with NARA officials pressing the CIA and the FBI to comply with the JFK Act, and officials there pushing back on the lack of time to fully review the records, and the need to keep secret names and places to protect agents and informants from retribution. Even NARA itself accepted the need to redact personal information in the some of the documents—such as social security numbers. In a letter to Trump one month before the deadline, NARA chief archivist, David Ferriero, advised the President that some 211 documents contained social security numbers of living persons, the release of which “would cause an identifiable harm to law enforcement by increasing the possibility of identity theft and related crimes.” For those documents, NARA requested “continued postponement of records in the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.”

As an assassination conspiracist himself—who can forget Trump’s bizarre claim during the 2016 election that Senator Ted Cruz’s father was linked to Oswald—one of Trump’s many promises during the campaign was to assure the final release of the Kennedy documents. “The long-anticipated release of the #JFK files will take place tomorrow,” he tweeted on October 25. “So interesting.”

Some 2891 records were indeed released pursuant to the legal deadline. But some were redacted, and hundreds more were withheld in their entirety. ”Based on requests from executive offices and agencies the President has allowed the temporary withholding of certain information that would harm national security, law enforcement, or foreign affairs,” NARA stated in a press release. In a recent interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Trump admitted that he had yielded to arguments presented by then–CIA director Mike Pompeo that there were certain secrets the CIA had to protect. Trump gave the agencies a six-month extension to further review the JFK records; at the end of that period, he postponed full compliance of the JFK Act for another three years, until 2021.

By then, of course, Joe Biden was president. On his watch, further records were released uncensored in 2021, 2022, and 2023. But Biden also accepted the arguments of the CIA and FBI that certain records, and portions of others, needed to remain secret for the sanctity of national security.

For the discerning researcher, the extraordinary nature of this week’s release reveals what kind of final secrets the CIA was determined to safeguard. The CIA did not want the American public to know that it was spying on US journalists; it did not want Mexicans to know that their president had actively collaborated in one of the agency’s biggest and most effective telephone tap operations; it did not want citizens in Canada, Britain, Israel, Holland, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile to know that, in the early 1960s, their governments’ intelligence services secretly assisted CIA espionage operations to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba; it did not want Bolivians to know that covert cash had bought and paid for the election of a CIA-chosen candidate in the mid 1960s. Nor for Parisians to know that 123 “diplomats” in the US embassy in the early 1960s were, in fact, undercover spies. But now we know.

Maximum Transparency?

These are just a handful of hundreds of revelations contained in the JFK records; as reporters and historians comb through the records, many more will undoubtably surface, lifting the shroud of secrecy that has kept this history hidden for decades. Simply stated, they provide the American public with a far greater understanding of what has been done in our name, but without our knowledge. And they remind the global community of the myriad abuses of power the United States has committed in the past—and is certainly capable of in the future.

Trump officials are already trumpeting the significance of the final declassification of JFK records as proof of the president’s commitment to truth and transparency. “I think it’s a great move,” Robert Kennedy Jr. told reporters when Trump issued his directive to release the rest of the JFK papers on January 23. “[We] need to have more transparency in our government and he’s keeping his promise to have the government tell the truth to the American people about everything.” The president “is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency,” the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, claimed this week.

Given Trump’s open assault on access to information over these last two months, nothing could be further from reality. Yet, by fully implementing the JFK Act, Trump has, perhaps inadvertently, established a historic precedent for full disclosure of classified documentation. That is a standard of transparency and accountability to which he, too, must be held. Someday Congress will pass a DJT Act to fully expose the misconduct of the Trump era, and the secret side of the dark history we are living today will be fully revealed.

On November 15, just one week into the final, lame-duck phase of Joe Biden’s White House tenure, the president received a forceful congressional letter urging him to take “immediate action” to provide critical humanitarian and energy infrastructure assistance to Cuba. “The Cuban people are currently facing widespread blackouts and an escalating energy crisis,” stated the letter, co-sponsored by Representatives Barbara Lee and James McGovern, along with 16 other signatories. “The situation is not only causing immense suffering for the Cuban people but also poses serious risks to U.S. national security interests,” they wrote. “If left unaddressed, the crisis will almost certainly fuel increased migration, strain US border management systems, and fully destabilize the already-strained Caribbean region.”

To date, there has been no response from the Biden White House. But last week during a hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken testified that “I do not anticipate any changes in our policy towards Cuba during the pendency of this administration.” Despite the president’s promise during the 2020 campaign that he would restore the historic US policy of normalized relations that Barack Obama announced 10 years ago today, Biden’s legacy on Cuba appears destined to be one of frustrating and infuriating inaction—leaving in place the previous Trump administration’s hostile and punitive policies, and enabling the next Trump administration to quickly escalate its regime-change posture toward Cuba after January 20, 2025.

The Obama-Biden Breakthrough

Four years ago, few members of the political establishment and the Cuba policy advocacy community could have anticipated this ominous outcome. Expectations were high that the incoming Biden administration would restore the successful process of positive engagement that the Obama-Biden administration had engineered—and Trump had decimated. After all, Biden was present at the creation of Obama’s history-changing détente with Cuba; the then-Vice President was one of only a handful of senior White House officials who knew about the secret negotiations with Raul Castro’s government that Obama had authorized to finally achieve a modus vivendi with Cuba.

Those secret talks—conducted by two National Security Council officials. Benjamin Rhodes and Ricardo Zuñiga, with Raul Castro’s son, Maj. Alejandro Castro and another Cuban military officer, over the course of 18 months—led to a historic breakthrough on December 17, 2014. On that dramatic day exactly 10 years ago, which Cubans iconically refer to as “diez y siete d”—17 D—Obama and Raul Castro both announced an agreement to end the acrimony of the past and normalize diplomatic ties. Just two weeks later, Biden attended the inauguration of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in Brasilia where, as one White House aide recalled, he received accolades from one Latin American leader after another for finally normalizing US bilateral relations with Cuba.

As Biden knows, the US détente with Cuba was a substantive success for the interests of both nations. The Obama administration moved quickly to remove Cuba from the State Department’s list of nations that support international terrorism, officially re-open embassies in Washington and Havana, lift restrictions on remittances, restore commercial flights to the island as well as loosen travel restrictions so US citizens could see Cuba’s realities for themselves, and expand trade, commerce and a US business presence on the island. The influx of travelers, and businesses such as Airbnb, provided substantive inputs for the Cuban economy, most notably in the expansion of Cuba’s entrepreneurial private sector. The two countries also advanced their mutual security interests by establishing a bilateral commission to oversee collaboration on key issues such as counternarcotics operations, counterterrorism cooperation, disaster management, and normalization of migration. In less than two years, Washington and Havana signed 22 bilateral agreements to advance those issues through mutual cooperation.

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Trump’s Regression

Obama’s posture of engagement proved so successful that an inter-agency national security review conducted during the first months of the Trump administration concluded that the policy should be sustained. “[T]he review was sent to Trump recommending he keep in place Obama’s drive to normalize relations with Cuba,” Foreign Policy reported in 2017. “He nixed that idea after promising on the campaign trail to cater a new policy to Cuban-American hardliners.” During his first administration, Trump systematically dismantled the Obama-Biden policy of détente with Cuba, replacing it with dozens of cruel, punitive sanctions—including cutting off wire-transfer remittances during the pandemic—that have taken a costly toll on Cuba’s economy and its people. Assaulting the rights of US citizens to freely visit Cuba, Trump curtailed flights, barred cruise ships, and created a “Restricted Entities” list—the hotels, restaurants, bars and businesses which US travelers can no longer legally patronise. Only seven days before leaving office, Trump mendaciously redesignated Cuba as a state that supports international terrorism, imposing even more economic penalties against the island.

During the 2020 campaign, Biden stated that “in large part I would go back” to the Obama era of engagement with Cuba. He recognized the benefits of that approach to the Cuban people, and to US relations in the hemisphere. “This is more than about Cuba,” he noted, “it’s about all of the Caribbean and it’s about all of our friends and allies in Latin America.”

But after Biden’s inauguration, his administration took little action to remove the Trump sanctions and restore Obama’s policy of normalized relations. After almost three years of inexplicable delay during the pandemic, the Treasury Department finally restored Western Union’s Cuba service and the ability of Cuban Americans to wire critically needed remittances to their relatives on the island; Biden also restored commercial air service to regional airports in Cuba—which Trump had canceled—while maintaining the prohibition lists on where travelers can stay, eat, drink and shop. Last May, the Treasury Department finally issued long-promised regulations that would allow Cuban entrepreneurs to open bank accounts in the United States. Yet, the Biden administration has refused to remove Cuba’s designation as a state that supports international terrorism, even as US officials quietly acknowledged that Cuba does not belong on the list.

What Biden Can Do

The congressional letter to Biden specifically requests that he remove Cuba from the list of terrorist states to facilitate “access to energy and economic relief for the Cuban people.” To address Cuba’s spiraling crisis, the Representatives also urged Biden to expedite humanitarian assistance and technical support; suspend all sanctions that impede aid and donations to Cuba; and fast-track the export of critical equipment to repair and modernize Cuba’s electrical grid. “We urge your administration to act swiftly to implement these measures and mitigate the growing crisis in Cuba while advancing U.S. interests in the region,” the letter concluded.

To be sure, whatever executive action Biden might take during the final days of his difficult presidency is subject to reversal by the incoming hardliners, led by Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Marco Rubio. But Biden could and should implement these measures—to urgently assist a Cuban populace in need, as well as to resurrect the model of peaceful coexistence as a successful alternative to a US posture of hostility and aggression that has failed to advance US interests for over 60 years. Toward that goal, he should also order the expedited declassification of the key secret files relating to the Obama détente—including the interagency assessment, conducted during the first Trump administration, that positive engagement was advancing US interests as well as those of the Cuban people. Those documents represent the verdict of history on a model of creative diplomacy and peaceful coexistence that is, today, more relevant than ever.

Biden’s legacy as vice-president includes the historic Obama-era détente in US-Cuban relations. In the waning days of his troubled tenure, his presidential legacy could also include reminding the world that Washington is capable of a sensible, productive and normal policy toward Cuba.

As Senator Robert Menendez cleans out his desk in the Hart Senate Office Building, he leaves Congress as one of the most corrupt US legislators in modern times. The senator’s July 16 conviction on 16 counts of bribery, extortion, and acting as an unregistered foreign agent has dramatically revealed how he abused his power and influence as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to line his pockets. Lost in the scandal of his flagrant corruption, however, is how Menendez used his political muscle for years to corrupt US policy toward Cuba.

Menendez rose to power in Union City, New Jersey, a mini-Miami on Hudson with the largest concentration of Cuban exiles outside Florida. He was the product of the state’s Democratic political machine and a reliably liberal vote on most issues during his six terms in the US House of Representatives and 18 years in the Senate—but not on Cuba.

On relations with Havana he was, as one longtime associate put it, “unmovable”—a position Menendez attributed to his family history in Cuba, even though he was born in the United States and his parents came as economic immigrants in the early 1950s, long before Fidel Castro’s revolution. During his corruption trial, the Senator reached for this legend when trying to explain the $635,000 in cash and gold bars the FBI found in his home in 2022, claiming that hoarding cash was a family tradition because his parents had faced “confiscation” in Cuba. The jury didn’t buy it.

Being tough on Cuba was a way for an aspiring politician to court Cuban exiles, not only in Union City, but in Miami as well, where Menendez made regular fundraising trips, starting when he was Union City’s mayor. Along with Robert Torricelli (another New Jersey Democrat driven from the Senate by a corruption scandal), Menendez was a favorite of the militant and the monied Cuban Americans in south Florida, who, from 1992 to 2006, contributed a million dollars to his campaign coffers to jump-start his political career in the House of Representatives.

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To satisfy that constituency, Menendez became an implacable and pugnacious foe of even the smallest steps to relax tensions with Havana. In 1993, as a freshman House member, he introduced the “Free and Independent Cuba Assistance Act” prohibiting the president from lifting the embargo until Cuba became a democracy with a market economy. The bill didn’t pass, but it provided the blueprint for the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996 (aka Helms-Burton), on which Menendez was an original cosponsor. That law, more than any other, has hamstrung every president’s authority to engage with Cuba.

Menendez opposed President Ronald Reagan’s 1988 migration agreement with Cuba because it “gave up too much,” and he opposed the Clinton administration’s 1993 negotiations to repatriate migrants who committed crimes in the United States. During the 1994 rafters migration crisis, he joined Republicans demanding that President Clinton cut off all travel and remittance flows to Cuba and impose a military naval blockade to topple the regime. Clinton agreed to the financial sanctions, not the blockade. Menendez then opposed Clinton’s 1995 migration accord with Cuba regularizing safe and legal migration.

Menendez had an equally dim view of travel. He has opposed “people-to-people” educational travel ever since President Clinton first introduced it in 1999, calling it tourism in disguise and caustically accusing travelers of lying on the beach, smoking Cuban cigars, and sipping Cuba Libres.

Even measures benefiting Cuban American families were unacceptable. Menendez opposed easing US restrictions on remittances, arguing—falsely—that the regime was confiscating most of money. In May 2022, when President Biden eliminated Trump era limits on family remittances and authorized air links to cities besides Havana to facilitate family visits, Menendez complained that it sent “the wrong message” to the Cuban regime.

Clashing With Obama

Senator Menendez was a thorn in President Obama’s side from the moment he entered the White House. Obama had campaigned on the need for a new approach to Cuba, but Menendez was having none of it. Before the election, he warned Obama, “If you want my support, I don’t want you making any policy changes on Cuba without consulting me.”

Just weeks after the inauguration, Menendez showed that he meant business by blocking an Omnibus Appropriations bill needed to keep the government open, because the bill facilitated agricultural sales to Cuba and relaxed travel restrictions. He relented only when Obama’s treasury secretary pledged in writing to interpret the law narrowly and consult with the senator before changing Cuba policy.

When the Organization of American States convened in June 2009 to repeal the 1962 suspension of Cuba’s membership, Menendez, chair of the Senate subcommittee that approves foreign aid, threatened to cut off US funding—making up 60 percent of the OAS budget—if Cuba was readmitted. Under US pressure, the OAS reactivated Cuba’s membership provisionally, effective only if Cuba accepted the organization’s democratic principles. Cuba declined the invitation.

When USAID subcontractor Alan Gross was arrested in Cuba in December 2009, US officials hoped to win his release by downsizing the aggressive “democracy promotion” programs they inherited from George W. Bush. Cuban diplomats indicated that they were open to the idea, but Menendez got wind of the plan and called the White House demanding that it be abandoned. Rather than pick a fight with the senator, the administration capitulated.

Alan Gross sat in a Cuban jail for another four and a half years. Throughout, Menendez opposed any negotiations to win his freedom. When Gross finally came home on December 17, 2014, as part of Obama’s historic decision to normalize relations with Cuba, Menendez criticized the “swap of convicted spies for an innocent American” in a deal that “vindicated the brutal behavior of the Cuban government.”

After the early clashes with Menendez, the Obama White House asked the senator what steps to improve relations with Havana he could support. The answer came back: none. That rigidity proved to be Menendez’s undoing. Obama was committed to changing Cuba policy, and if Menendez was unwilling to consider even modest steps, consulting him was pointless. When Obama and Raúl Castro announced their agreement to normalize US-Cuban relations, a chagrined Menendez joined the chorus of Republicans denouncing the new policy as “a reward that a totalitarian regime does not deserve.”

Menendez then spent the next two years opposing every step toward normalization. He rebuked the president for taking Cuba off the State Department’s list of state sponsors of international terrorism, calling it a “reward…for decades of repression.” He criticized every regulatory change that made travel and commerce between Cuba and the United States easier. He joined with Marco Rubio (R-FL) to block Obama’s appointment of an ambassador to Havana and the appointments of other candidates he deemed soft on Cuba.

Of course, he bitterly criticized Obama for visiting Cuba in 2016, declaring, “It is totally unacceptable for the President of the United States to reward a dictatorial regime with an historic visit when human rights abuses endure and democracy continues to be shunned.”

When President Donald Trump abruptly reversed Obama’s normalization policy in 2017, tightening economic sanctions, Menendez applauded the move as “a step in the right direction,” lamenting only that it did not go far enough.

Menendez and Biden

The doors of the White House reopened for Menendez when Joe Biden became president. Biden relied on Cuban Americans to shape his Cuba policy, regularly inviting selected community leaders to the White House for consultations. Menendez blackballed anyone who advocated lifting the embargo, skewing the administration’s view of Cuban American opinion. Biden also spoke with Menendez regularly. Working the room after his 2023 State of the Union address, he was overheard telling Menendez, “Bob, I gotta talk to you about Cuba.” Meanwhile, senators and House members who supported Obama’s policy of engagement waited months for an audience with the president.

Menendez reached this pinnacle of influence over Cuba policy partly because of his personal relationship with the president, forged during their years together in the Senate. But his principal source of influence was his position as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a perch from which he could either fast-track or block Biden’s foreign policy priorities and appointments. “He has used the chairmanship of that committee as a venue for intimidation and retribution, to raise the cost of doing anything he doesn’t like,” said Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser. In a closely divided Senate, Biden needed every Democratic vote to advance his sweeping legislative agenda. The Biden White House decided early on that Cuba policy was just not important enough to antagonize Senator Menendez.

The result has been a policy much closer to Trump’s than to Obama’s—a continuation of punishing economic sanctions that have contributed to the largest migration crisis in Cuban history.

A Brighter Future for Cuba Policy?

The impending retirements of Biden and Menendez, one with dignity, one in disgrace, may bode well for relations with Cuba—if Vice President Kamala Harris can finally retire Donald Trump. Harris’s record on Cuba is sparse but progressive. In 2017 and 2019, she cosponsored Senate bills to end restrictions on travel, and during her 2020 run for the presidency, she called for lifting the embargo. A generation younger than Biden, she is less shackled by the Cold War mindset that framed his Cuba policy.

As vice president, Harris has said little about Cuba, but her work to reduce the root causes of migration by boosting Central American economies has no doubt given her an appreciation of how economic sanctions against Cuba are spurring more and more people to flee their homeland.

“Most people don’t want to leave home,” she said, describing the core assumption of her approach to migration. “When they do, it is usually for one of two reasons: Either they are fleeing harm or to stay home means they cannot satisfy the basic needs of their families.” The solution, she explained, is “to help people find hope at home.” The way the United States can help Cubans find hope at home is to return to a policy of engagement that alleviates the acute humanitarian crisis on the island and offers Cubans the prospect of a brighter future.

“Cuba,” as former Foreign Service officer Wayne S. Smith was fond of observing, “seems to have the same effect on American administrations as the full moon has on werewolves.” Smith devoted his career—in and out of government—to advancing the cause of dialogue, diplomacy, and normal relations between Washington and Havana. He lived to see his tireless efforts come to fruition when President Barack Obama began normalizing relations in 2014, only to have President Donald Trump reverse course, returning to the failed policy of hostility and regime change.

At the time of Smith’s death at age 91 on June 28, 2024, the cause he championed— rapprochement between Washington and Havana—remains as critical, and as elusive, as ever.

As a young diplomat, Wayne Smith was posted to Havana just months before the triumph of Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959. When the Eisenhower administration broke relations in January 1961, he was one of the last US officials to leave, carrying with him the American flag that had flown over the Embassy. Eighteen years later, he returned as “principal officer” of the reopened US “Interests Section”—part of the Carter administration’s incremental and halting efforts to improve relations.

In a comprehensive, and witty, options memorandum, “Possible Steps to Improve Relations with Cuba,” he recommended a wide range of economic, cultural, military, and diplomatic steps to move US policy toward normal relations. He proposed lifting the embargo on food and medicine, calling it “unconscionable.” He advocated opening the door to selected Cuban exports, including Cuba’s renowned tobacco products (of which Smith was a connoisseur). He suggested an exhibition baseball game in Havana. Given Cubans’ fanatical love of the sport, he argued, baseball diplomacy would “emphasize the affinities between our two countries.” The Soviet Union, he noted, “does not play baseball.”

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Smith was also one of the first officials to identify advantages for US security interests in counternarcotics collaboration with Cuba. “This strikes me as an initiative to which only the Mafia could object strongly,” he wrote.

When officials in the Reagan administration misrepresented Cuba’s willingness to negotiate over Central America and threatened Castro with military force, Smith advised them that threats would get them nowhere. “The Cubans have seen it all before,” he cabled Washington, “and are no more likely to respond now than previously.” Smith was so disgusted with the mendacity of his own government that he turned down an ambassadorial appointment on principle and resigned from the Foreign Service.

Leaving government liberated Smith to publicly advocate for a more rational US policy, which he did for more than 30 years, writing countless opinion articles, reports, and policy proposals. (He also wrote about Cuba for The Nation.) Smith traveled to Cuba frequently for meetings and conferences. For him, freedom to travel to Cuba was a constitutional right. In December 1994, he organized a delegation of academics to visit Cuba without the requisite US license with the intention of being fined so they could challenge the restrictions in court. Ten years later, Smith created and chaired the Emergency Coalition to Defend Educational Travel (ECDET), which filed a lawsuit challenging George W. Bush’s new restrictions on academic study abroad programs in Cuba. The suit was dismissed on national security grounds.

Wayne Smith’s penultimate visit to Cuba remains his most poignant. As part of Barack Obama’s and Raúl Castro’s December 17, 2014, agreement to normalize bilateral ties, formal diplomatic relations were restored in the summer of 2015. Accompanied by his daughter, Melinda, Smith attended the ceremony to officially reopen the US Embassy—the same building that he had closed as a young attaché in January 1961. Walking with her father to the Embassy, Melinda Smith recalls all the Cubans in the streets reaching out to shake his hand, yelling out to him, “Gracias, Smith. Gracias, gracias!” The raising of the American flag to re-inaugurate the Embassy represented “the pinnacle of his life’s work and he cried when it went up the pole,” Melinda remembered. “But the people’s recognition and gratitude for that work and personal sacrifice was what he most cherished and kept with him until the day he died.”

Wayne Smith was prescient about what measures could begin to improve US-Cuban relations, and many of his recommendations were eventually adopted. Exhibition baseball games were played during both the Clinton and Obama administrations. US Coast Guard counternarcotics cooperation with Cuba began during the Clinton administration and has been so successful that every president since has kept it in place. Food and medicine exports to Cuba were legalized (albeit with limits) in the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act and 2000 Trade Sanctions Reform Act. Even Cuban cigars could appear in the United States if they are produced by private farmers. Yet what Henry Kissinger called the “perpetual hostility” between Washington and Havana remains in place.

Even though President Joe Biden has reversed some of the draconian economic sanctions imposed by President Trump, he has left others in place, contributing to Cuba’s current economic and humanitarian crisis—a crisis that has prompted almost a million Cubans to leave their homeland in the largest exodus since 1959.

The fundamental failure of Biden’s Cuba policy is the failure to keep his 2020 campaign promise to return to President Obama’s policy of normalization. Instead, his policy has remained anchored in the traditional framework of hostility and regime change he inherited from Trump. The result is a dysfunctional hybrid policy that purports to be “tough on the regime but soft on the people,” as Brian Nichols, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, put it—as if it were possible to cripple the Cuban economy with sanctions without immiserating the Cuban people.

The reasons Wayne Smith so often articulated in favor of normal relations still pertain. The policy of hostility and sanctions has failed, producing no improvement in human rights or democracy despite more than 60 years in force. If anything, Washington’s pursuit of regime change fosters a siege mentality among Cuban leaders, making them even less tolerant of domestic opponents.

By throttling the Cuban economy, sanctions reduce the standard of living on the island, prompting people to leave, thereby aggravating US migration problems. A policy of hostility limits Washington’s ability to cooperate with Cuba on issues of mutual interest like transnational crime, environmental protection, climate change, and public health. The embargo’s limits on travel arguably violate the constitutional right of US citizens to travel and constrict cultural exchanges. The embargo’s limits on commerce deprive US businesses of opportunities for trade and investment. Finally, US hostility encourages Cuba to turn to Washington’s global rivals, Russia and China, for assistance and security—even though they don’t play baseball.

It is a policy, as Wayne was fond of saying, that has “reached new heights of absurdity.”

He titled his memoir, The Closest of Enemies, neatly capturing the inherent irrationality of perpetual hostility between two neighbors so closely linked by history and culture. Next January, a new US president will have the opportunity to reimagine and reshape US relations with Cuba in ways that better serve the interests of both the United States and the Cuban people. That new president, whoever he or she may be, should pay heed to Wayne Smith’s legacy, and his sage advice about how to rebuild the bridges between the United States and Cuba—bridges that were burned in haste so many years ago.

On December 1—just two days after the death of Henry Kissinger renewed international attention to the US role in the 1973 coup in Chile against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende—an airliner transporting a former Chilean military officer took off from Florida and landed in Santiago. Police from INTERPOL/Chile boarded the plane and took custody of Pedro Barrientos, a 74-year-old ex-lieutenant in Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s army who stands accused of participating in the atrocities committed after the coup.

“Today, Pedro Barrientos was removed from the United States to Chile where he is wanted for the torture and extrajudicial killing of Chilean citizens, including Victor Jara in 1973,” tweeted US Ambassador to Chile Bernadette Meehan. “This case,” she stated, “serves as a reminder of the US Government’s commitment to pursuing human rights abusers who seek shelter from justice in the United States.”

Indeed, the deportation of Barrientos culminates a decades-long, bilateral effort to bring a notorious Pinochet-era human rights violator to justice. Fifty years after the torture and execution of Jara—Chile’s renowned troubadour, whom one commentator compared to a combination of Bob Dylan and Martin Luther King Jr.—Barrientos will now stand trial for one of the most emblematic crimes committed by the Chilean military in the aftermath of the September 11, 1973, US-backed coup. His arrest and repatriation mark a historic milestone in Chile’s ongoing quest for accountability for the atrocious violations of human rights that defined the Pinochet dictatorship.

Victor Jara was detained the day after the coup, along with dozens of colleagues and students, while attempting to defend from military attack the campus of the Santiago University of Technology where he worked. Along with thousands of other supporters of Salvador Allende’s government, he was taken to the Chile Stadium—a sports arena that the military transformed into a concentration camp—where he was tortured, beaten, and executed on September 15. Several soldiers would later testify that Lt. Barrientos shot Jara, and proudly showed off the gun he had used. To disguise evidence of his summary execution, Jara’s captors riddled his body with machine gun fire. An autopsy reported 44 bullet wounds.

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At the time of his death, Jara was an international cultural icon and leading advocate for social justice. His songs such as “Te Recuerdo Amanda,” “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz,” and “Plegaria a un Labrador,” continue to be sung around the world today. “My guitar is not for the rich, no, nothing like that,” he sang in “Manifiesto,” a song which became an anthem for the Allende government. “My song is of the ladder we are building to reach the stars.” In a tribute to Jara during a concert on the 40th anniversary of the coup in Santiago, Bruce Springsteen covered “Manifiesto” and said that the Chilean folk singer “continues to be a great inspiration.”

Just as his songs captured the aspirations of Chileans for a better society, Jara’s brutal murder became a symbol of Pinochet’s repression—and the pursuit of justice for the victims of the dictatorship. Joan Jara, Victor’s widow, became a leader in that quest that has endured for five long decades. “From the memory of Victor’s body in the morgue I was able to find a voice, to accuse, to accuse, to accuse, to give testimony,” she recalled in one poignant interview. “I had to take on where they cut Victor off,” she stated in another. “I had to go on running from where he was stopped. I had to just go on, and try, in a way, not to take his place, [but] to take my place for what he was fighting for.”

In 1978, Joan Jara courageously initiated legal proceedings in Chile to identify her husband’s killers. But, as with all human rights cases during the Pinochet dictatorship, her initial quest for accountability was met with obstruction, denial, and disregard from the military authorities and their subservient courts. Even after Pinochet was forced to step down from power in 1990, it took another 22 long years for the Chilean courts to identify and indict eight military officers and soldiers for the murder of Victor Jara—among them Pedro Barrientos.

By that time, however, Barrientos had been quietly living in the United States for over two decades; he had even managed to become a US citizen, falsely claiming on his residency and naturalization papers that he had never served in the Chilean military and had never been involved in human rights abuses. At the request of a Chilean judge, the FBI tracked Barrientos down in 2012 at his home in Deltona, Fla. A Chilean television program on the Jara case that year publicized Barrientos’s presence in the United States. But Chile’s extradition petitions stalled because of the high standard of evidence required to extradite a US citizen.

Two unique legal proceedings eventually led to Barrientos’s being deported. In 2013, the San Francisco–based Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) filed a civil suit in Florida on behalf of the Jara family, drawing on a novel law called the Torture Victims Protection Act. Conceived by international human rights lawyer Almudena Bernabeu, then-director of CJA’s Transitional Justice Program, the suit assembled substantial evidence against Barrientos. Multiple witnesses challenged his denials that he was ever at the Chile Stadium in the days following the coup. At the civil trial held in Orlando, Fla., in June 2016, one solder testified that Barrientos “used to show his pistol and say, ‘I killed Victor Jara with this.’”

After a lengthy deliberation, the Florida jury found Barrientos liable for the murder of Jara and ordered him to pay the family $28 million in compensatory and punitive damages. That moral victory—Barrientos had no resources to pay the civil damages—in a US court of law inspired a Netflix documentary on the case, Massacre at the Stadium: A Victor Jara Story. “Today, there is some justice for Victor’s death and for the other families in Chile who have sought truth,” Joan Jara said on the courthouse steps after the verdict was handed down.

The compelling evidence of Barrientos’s criminal service in Pinochet’s military presented during the civil suit accelerated a far more significant legal effort by the US government: to strip Barrientos of his US citizenship and deport him back to Chile. After US authorities located Barrientos in the United States, a little-known Homeland Security agency, the Human Rights Violators & War Crimes Center (HRVWCC), opened an investigation into his case. A bureaucratic descendent of the State Department’s Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations, the HRVWCC is an amalgam of investigative, law enforcement, and legal bureaus operating in the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, the FBI, and the Justice Department, according to its mission statement, dedicated to “identifying, investigating, prosecuting, and removing human rights violators and war criminals found within the jurisdiction of the United States.” Originally known as the Human Rights Violators Unit, during the last 20 years the HRVWCC has been involved in the arrest of over 480 perpetrators of human rights crimes who, like Barrientos, managed to find safe haven in the United States.

Drawing on testimony and evidence presented during the civil suit, on July 18, 2022, the Department of Justice immigration litigation office filed a “complaint to revoke naturalization of Pedro Pablo Barrientos.” The 48-page court filing charged that Barrientos was the highest-ranking officer of a military unit based at the Chile Stadium between September 12 and September 17, 1973; that he “participated and assisted in the operation of the detention center”; that soldiers “under the Defendant’s authority…carried the corpses of detainees from the basement of the Chile Stadium to load into trucks outside the stadium”; and that “on multiple occasions between 1978 and 1980, all within the confines of a Chilean Army officer’s club, Defendant acknowledged he had shot Victor Jara in the head.” Despite these atrocities and his spending 16 years in the Chilean military, on his US immigration and naturalization forms Barrientos had denied having any prior military service, according to the Justice Department complaint. “Thus, Defendant’s citizenship was illegally procured and was obtained through Defendant’s willful misrepresentation and concealment of material facts.”

After a year of legal wrangling, US District Judge Roy Dalton Jr. voided Barrientos’s US citizenship, ruling that he had obtained it under false pretenses. “Now it has surfaced that Barrientos’s answers were false,” Judge Dalton submitted in his order.

Stripped of his citizenship, Barrientos then became subject to arrest and deportation as an “undesirable” illegal immigrant. On October 5, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement fugitive operations agents, supported by local Florida sheriff, police and highway patrol officers, dramatically intercepted Barrientos’s car during a traffic stop and took him into federal custody. According to a statement released by the ICE Tampa office, “Barrientos will now have to answer the charges he’s faced with in Chile for his involvement in torture and extrajudicial killing of Chilean citizens.”

Indeed, Barrientos will now be formally prosecuted, judged, and sentenced in Chile for atrocities committed during the first days of the military dictatorship more than a half-century ago. With pro-Pinochet sentiment on the rise in Chile, the case carries a timely historical, legal, and political significance. Joan Jara, who died at age 96—just 18 days before Barrientos was deported back to Chile—predicted the importance of justice for her husband, and all other victims of Pinochet’s atrocities after Barrientos was found culpable in Florida: “I hope,” she said, “the verdict continues the healing.”

The recent 50th anniversary of the military coup in Chile brought renewed international attention to the many villains of the US intervention to overthrow Chile’s constitutional government—chief among them Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, and CIA director Richard Helms. Their roles in undermining the presidency of the democratically elected Socialist, Salvador Allende, and then assisting the consolidation of the ruthless regime led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, remains one of the most renowned cases of official criminality in the annals of US foreign policy.

As the anniversary of the September 11, 1973, coup passed last month, the Biden administration faced a dilemma: how to acknowledge this sordid history without actually atoning, let alone calling more public and political attention to US involvement in Chile’s 9/11. In a small gesture of declassification diplomacy, the administration finally declassified two 50-year-old documents from a long list of still-secret records requested by the Chilean government; US Ambassador Bernadette Meehan quietly attended at least one 50th anniversary commemoration, and Biden dispatched his special emissary on Latin America, former Senator Chris Dodd, to attend the special ceremony on the actual anniversary in front of La Moneda palace. On September 11, a State Department spokesperson released a well-crafted statement citing “an opportunity to reflect on this break in Chile’s democratic order and the suffering that it caused”—while avoiding any reflection on the US role in aiding and abetting those events half a century ago. “This commemoration is also an opportunity for us to reflect on Chile’s courageous return to democracy,” the statement read, shifting the focus away from the beginning of the dictatorship to its ending, after Pinochet lost an October 5, 1988, plebiscite intended to legitimize the continuation of his bloody regime.

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To reinforce that point and draw attention to the far more positive history of the US role in the dramatic events of October 1988, this week the US Embassy in Santiago held a special ceremony to honor Harry G. Barnes Jr., who served as US ambassador during the final years of the dictatorship. “The Chief of Mission’s residence will be named ‘The Barnes House,’ according to a US Embassy press advisory, “to recognize Ambassador Barnes’ support of and solidarity with the Chilean people who sought to defend human rights and restore democracy to their country via peaceful and democratic means.”

The event was pegged to the 35th anniversary of the October 1988 plebiscite that marked the beginning of the end of the Pinochet regime. But it will be remembered as the one substantive commemorative ceremony organized by the US government around the 50th anniversary of the military coup itself, refocusing on a time when the United States supported the forces of democracy rather than the forces of dictatorship.

In the long saga of the US role in Chile, Ambassador Barnes stands out as a rare heroic figure. A career diplomat—his previous postings included India, and Romania during the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu—he arrived in Chile in mid-November 1985 with instructions to promote “the orderly restoration of democracy as speedily as possible.” With radical discontent growing against Pinochet’s dictatorship, the Reagan administration now viewed the regime as a liability, and, even worse, a catalyst for the resurrection of the left in Chile. Indeed, Barnes also received instructions to work toward the “limitation of the influence of the Chilean Communist Party.”

During his three-year stint as ambassador, Barnes aggressively pushed Pinochet to return Chile to civilian rule and end the regime’s ongoing human rights violations. “The ills of democracy can best be cured by more democracy,” Barnes pointedly remarked as he presented his credentials to General Pinochet on November 18, 1985. “I quote[d] Winston Churchill to the effect that nothing is more important than human rights except more human rights,” he recalled in an oral history on his career with the Library of Congress. “Pinochet did not like that.”

Indeed, Pinochet came to despise Ambassador Barnes and banned him from entering La Moneda Palace again. The first major confrontation with the regime came in July 1986, when Barnes attended the funeral of Rodrigo Rojas, the teenage US resident set on fire with gasoline and burned to death by a military patrol during a protest, Pinochet’s police force attacked the procession with water cannons and tear gas; the regime then falsely accused Barnes of inciting a riot by attending the service. After the US Embassy began supporting voter registration drives and the “No” campaign in the lead-up to the October 1988 referendum on Pinochet’s continuation in power, the general denounced US interference and “Yanqui imperialism.” The military-controlled media in Chile took to referring to Ambassador Barnes as “Dirty Harry.” US intelligence officials reported that Pinochet was considering declaring the ambassador persona non grata and “throwing Barnes out of the country.”

Barnes used the close contacts he had established both inside the military and among the pro-democracy opposition to the regime to expose Pinochet’s personal efforts to cover up his military’s responsibility in the case of Los Quemados—the burned ones—which cost Rodrigo Rojas his life and critically wounded a young woman, Carmen Quintana. But his most significant achievement as US ambassador was blowing the whistle on the dictator’s Machiavellian plot to stage an “auto-golpe” on the night of the October 5 referendum if he lost.

In a vain effort to legitimize his regime, Pinochet orchestrated a plebiscite that he believed would make him dictator-for-life. He would be the only candidate in a “Sí” or “No” vote. As the opposition successfully organized the “campaign of the No” and it became clear that Pinochet would lose, he developed a plan to suspend the vote count, use his intelligence agents to assault pro-democracy forces in the street, annul the plebiscite, and declare martial law. “I am not leaving, no matter what,” Pinochet told his subordinates, according to US intelligence sources.

In a secret cable a week before the referendum, Ambassador Barnes warned Washington that an “auto-golpe” was possible. “It cannot be ruled out, and we must be prepared to react to it, and swiftly, while there is still a chance it might be reversed,” he reported to Washington. Once Barnes received concrete intelligence on Pinochet’s plan, he sounded the alarm loud and clear. US officials now had “a clear sense of Pinochet’s determination to use violence on whatever scale is necessary to retain power,” he wrote in a secret dispatch on October 1. He predicted “probable substantial loss of life.”

Over the next four days, US government personnel, led by Barnes, mobilized to pressure key Chilean military and diplomatic officials to oppose Pinochet’s planned coup. When the “No” won on October 5 by a vote of 54.7 percent to 43 percent, an “apoplectic” Pinochet called the members of the military junta into his office and demanded that they sign a decree giving him emergency powers to cancel the plebiscite. All of his generals refused. One the most infamous and entrenched dictators in modern times was pushed from power—without a shot being fired.

Thirty-five years later, as Ambassador Meehan unveiled the plaque designating the US residency as “the Barnes House,” she noted that Barnes had “turned this house into a refuge for those who fought for the peaceful return of democracy” in Chile. Honoring his contribution to the end of the Pinochet regime, she reminded the dignitaries and family members gathered at the ceremony, comes at a “global inflection point” when “democracy is under attack around the world.” Honoring Barnes serves as a repudiation of coup plotters from the past and, more importantly, the present, and it memorializes a time when the US worked to thwart a coup, rather than promote one.

On August 25, the Central Intelligence Agency quietly posted on its website two documents on the military coup in Chile that had been kept top secret for half a century: the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) for the morning of the September 11, 1973—the day of the coup—and for September 8, 1973, as the Chilean military finalized its plans to overthrow the democratically elected government of Socialist Salvador Allende. The newly released documents proved almost impossible to find and read on the CIA website, buried among dozens of other previously declassified PDBs. Eventually, the State Department sent out a press advisory providing the links. The release of the PDBs was “in accordance with our commitment to increased transparency,” according to the press release. “We remain committed to working with our Chilean partners to try and identify additional sources of information to increase our awareness of impactful events throughout our shared history.”

As the 50th anniversary of the coup approaches, that commitment will be tested as Chileans, and their government, seek to obtain additional classified documents on the US role in undermining democracy and supporting dictatorship in Chile. This week a delegation of Chilean congressional representatives from the Socialist Party met with US Ambassador Bernadette Meehan to lobby her for release of the remaining secret records on Chile; earlier this month, the Chilean Congress voted almost unanimously to request that the Foreign Ministry solicit still-secret records on US “intervention in Chile’s sovereignty before, during and after the coup of 1973.” And the Chilean government of Gabriel Boric has already appealed to the Biden administration for a special, 50th-anniversary gesture of declassification diplomacy. “We still don’t know what President Nixon saw on his desk the morning of the military coup,” as Chile’s ambassador to Washington, Juan Gabriel Valdés, stated in an interview before the PDBs were released. “There are details that remain of interest to [Chileans], that are important for us to reconstruct our own history.”

Censored History

Among the documents on President Nixon’s desk on the morning of September 11, 1973, was the PDB—a daily CIA intelligence summary that contained three paragraphs on the opening salvos of the military coup in Chile. Fifty years after Nixon read it, we finally know what it says—very little. The intelligence provided to the president on the initiation of the coup was equivocal and erroneous. “Although military officers are increasingly determined to restore political and economic order, they may still lack an effectively coordinated plan that could capitalize on the widespread civilian opposition,” the PDB advised, incorrectly. “President Allende, for his part,” the PDB stated more accurately, “still hopes that temporizing will fend off a showdown.”

But Nixon had access to far more detailed and dramatic intelligence. A special CIA “CRITIC”—Critical Advance Intelligence Cable—that would have been distributed on an urgent basis to the highest levels of the White House on September 10, provided concrete reporting on the date, time, and place of the planned coup; another top secret CIA memo that reached the White House the morning of September 11 contained an urgent request from “a key officer in the military group planning overthrow President Allende” who asked “if the U.S. Government would come to the aid of the Chilean military if the situation became difficult.” How the president of the United States responded to that request is one of the details of the history of the coup that remain unknown.

Those dramatic CIA documents are among the thousands of secret records on Chile that have already been declassified. Indeed, Chile is one of the best-documented cases of covert US intervention for regime change. After Pinochet’s arrest in London in 1998 for human rights violations, hundreds of CIA operational records were finally released under a special “Chile Declassification Project” mandated by President Bill Clinton—along with approximately 24,000 other White House, NSC, FBI, and State Department records on the US role in Chile between 1970 and 1990. In 2016 President Obama ordered a special release of top-secret documents related to General Pinochet’s role as the mastermind of the act of terrorism that killed former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his young colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt in Washington, D.C., in September 1976.

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And yet, half a century later, there are still highly classified records that the US government continues to safeguard that would reveal critical details on what it did in, and what it knew about, Chile.

Third-Country Covert Collaboration

Among those secrets is how the CIA approached the Australian intelligence service, the ASIS, in late 1970 and asked for covert support in Santiago to help manage its Chilean agents. The CIA has not declassified a single document on this unique clandestine collaboration; we only know about it from the efforts of a tenacious Australian professor named Clinton Fernandes who, several years ago, filed a transparency lawsuit against the ASIS in Canberra. His legal petition resulted in the release of administrative records—documents on the more mundane side of setting up an espionage “station” in Santiago, such as rental agreements and the purchase of office equipment and vehicles for two agents. Both the CIA and the ASIS continue to hide operational records that include numerous intelligence reports from the Australian covert operatives to their CIA counterparts on meetings with Chilean assets embedded within the armed forces, the newspaper El Mercurio—a recipient of CIA funding—and the Christian Democratic party, among other key CIA-connected organizations in Chile.

Similarly, the United States government continues to withhold records on Brazil’s pivotal role in undermining the Allende government and abetting the installation of the Pinochet regime—the subject of a new book, El Brasil de Pinochet, by Brazilian reporter Roberto Simon. After Allende’s inauguration, President Nixon specifically ordered a secret approach to the Brazilian military regime for support of US efforts to undermine the Popular Unity government. No US documents have been released on those early communications; but one revealing memorandum of a December 1971 Oval Office meeting between Nixon and Brazilian military leader Gen. Emílio Garrastazu Médici indicates that a certain degree of collaboration may have developed.

During the meeting, Médici told Nixon that Allende would be overthrown “for very much the same reasons that Goulart had been overthrown in Brazil,” and “made it clear that Brazil was working towards this end,” according to a declassified summary of the meeting. Nixon responded “that it was very important that Brazil and the United States work closely in this field” and offered “discreet aid” and money for Brazilian operations against the Allende government. The two leaders agreed to set up a secret back channel for communications on the anti-Allende operations, but if that channel was ever used, neither the US nor Brazilian governments have released the messages that passed through it.

Brazil became the very first nation to officially recognize the military junta in Chile—a diplomatic orchestration coordinated with the Nixon administration, which wanted to avoid immediately embracing the new regime it had secretly helped to power. But Washington soon turned on the spigot of US economic, military, and political assistance, some of which was covert, to help Pinochet consolidate his violent rule. The CIA, for example, secretly financed a special delegation of Christian Democrats to tour Europe to publicly justify the coup to the international community. The US documents on this small but important post-coup propaganda operation remain highly classified.

CIA and DINA

Nor have a multitude of secret files on the CIA’s covert assistance to the development of the Chilean intelligence agency DINA into the repressive apparatus it became ever been released. In February 1974, Nixon and Kissinger dispatched a special emissary, CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters, to meet secretly with Pinochet in Santiago and convey “our friendship and support” as well as “our wish to be helpful in a discreet way.” According to a secret report to Kissinger on their conversation, Pinochet directly asked Walters and the CIA to assist DINA’s “formative period” and identified Col. Manuel Contreras as “his key man.” “I told him that we would be glad to have Contreras or anyone else come up to see us,” Walters informed Kissinger, “to see what we could do to be of assistance to them.”

Yet the CIA files on Contreras’s first visit to Langley headquarters in 1974 and what the CIA agreed to do to assist the organizational formation and operations of DINA remain locked in agency vaults. Nor has the CIA ever declassified a single page of the personnel file it opened on Contreras in mid-1975, when high-ranking CIA officials decided to actually put the DINA chieftain on the covert payroll as an informant/collaborator. The intelligence information and collaboration Contreras provided to the CIA remains top secret. So, too, do the memorandums on the internal pushback inside the agency against putting Latin America’s most notorious torturer on the secret US payroll. Those still-classified arguments prevailed; after only a couple of months, the CIA station chief in Santiago informed Contreras that he was, essentially, fired! The classified records on this dramatic episode would be extraordinarily revealing, for Chileans and US citizens alike.

Contreras and the DINA were the driving force behind the creation of Operation Condor—a transnational effort by the military regimes in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, among others, to coordinate efforts to track down and eliminate civilian and militant opposition. Because foreign intelligence services were involved, the CIA has withheld key historical records including those relating to how it learned of Condor, and what actions it took in response to death squad missions undertaken by the Condor secret police agencies. What steps the CIA took in the aftermath of Condor’s most infamous terrorist operation—the September 21, 1976, car-bombing in Washington, D.C., that took the lives of Letelier and Moffitt—also remain shrouded in secrecy.

To its credit, on the 40th anniversary of the Letelier-Moffitt assassination in September 2016, the CIA finally declassified a comprehensive review, done in 1987, of its early intelligence on the case, which cited “convincing evidence that President Pinochet personally ordered his intelligence chief to carry out the murder[s].” But most of the raw intelligence records that assessment is based on remain secret 47 years later. Perhaps more importantly, the evidentiary files of a major Department of Justice investigation, conducted during the last year of the Clinton administration, identifying Pinochet as the intellectual author of an act of international terrorism in Washington, D.C., also remain off-limits to public scrutiny. Those files include more than 40 depositions taken in Chile from Pinochet henchmen, as well as a draft indictment that summarizes the evidence of his role as a mastermind of international terrorism. This documentation is not only relevant in Chile, where the ultra right continues its attempts to whitewash Pinochet’s criminality; it could contribute to the efforts of our country and others to protect themselves from future threats of state-sponsored international terrorism.

Finally, there is the matter of Pinochet’s personal corruption. A special Senate investigation into “Money Laundering and Foreign Corruption” in 2005 identified financial records that revealed over 100 offshore bank accounts, created with false Pinochet passports under such names as Augusto Ugarte and Jose Ramon Ugarte, among other fabricated identities, to hide over $28 million in ill-gotten funds. The evidence of illicit gains is already overwhelming. But the US Commerce Department continues to withhold even more banking records that could remind Chileans, and the world, of the corruption that accompanied Pinochet’s repressive dictatorship.

The Verdict of History

The declassification of US files “promotes the search for truth and reinforces our nations’ commitment to democratic values,” Chilean Foreign Ministry official Gloria de la Fuente stated in thanking the Biden administration for its efforts to respond to Chile’s request for documents. Indeed, at a time when prominent and powerful Chileans continue to insist that Pinochet was “a statesman” and to deny the realities of his barbaric regime, these documents have an immediate role to play in the divisive ongoing debate over the legacy of the coup and its meaning for Chile’s modern society—in the present and the future. As Chile evaluates its past on this powerful 50th anniversary, its citizens have a right to a full accounting—and the accountability that an airing of this dark history can bring. Not only should the United States commit to releasing its remaining records, but so too should the Brazilians, the Australians, and the other countries who played a role in Chile’s violent past.

But Chileans are not the only constituency for this important history. At a time when numerous nations, including the United States, are confronting the dire threat posed by authoritarianism to the survival of democratic institutions, access to the complete historical record on what happened in Chile remains critical to us all.

s Henry Kissinger reaches 100 years of age on May 27, Chileans are preparing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the bloody military coup that the former US national security adviser helped orchestrate in September 1973. Kissinger’s controversial career is littered with scandals and crimes against humanity: support for mass murderers and torturers abroad, domestic wiretapping, clandestine wars in Indochina, and, as Greg Grandin reminds us, secretly sabotaging the quest for peace in Vietnam. But his pivotal role in the covert US efforts to undermine democracy in Chile, aiding and abetting the rise of the infamous dictator Augusto Pinochet, will always be the Achilles’ heel of Kissinger’s much-ballyhooed legacy. 1

The declassified historical record leaves no doubt that Kissinger was the chief architect of US efforts to destabilize the democratically elected government of Socialist Party leader Salvador Allende. Once Allende was overthrown, Kissinger became the leading enabler of Pinochet’s repressive new regime. “I think we should understand our policy—that however unpleasant they act, this government is better for us than Allende was,” he told his deputies as they reported to him on the human rights atrocities in the weeks following the coup. At a private June 1976 meeting with Pinochet in Santiago, Secretary of State Kissinger offered platitudes rather than pressure: “My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world,” he told Pinochet, “and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going communist.” 2

❶ Between Allende’s election on September 4, 1970, and his inauguration two months later, the CIA launched a major covert operation to block his ascendance to the presidency. Ordered by President Nixon and overseen by Kissinger, the operation—code-named FUBELT—led to the assassination of Gen. René Schneider, the pro-constitution commander in chief of the Chilean Army. But the operation failed to foment a military coup.3

The day after Allende’s inauguration, Nixon scheduled a meeting of his National Security Council on November 5 to establish what US policy toward Chile would be. But Kissinger requested that the meeting be postponed by a day to give him time to personally present this pivotal memorandum to Nixon and persuade him to reject the State Department’s position that Washington could establish a modus vivendi with an Allende government. Kissinger lobbied the president to adopt an aggressive, if covert, effort to “oppose Allende as strongly as we can.”4

❷ In his presentation to the president, Kissinger acknowledged that Allende had been legitimately and democratically elected—“the first Marxist government ever to come to power by free elections”—and would adopt a moderate position toward the United States. In Kissingerian logic, that made Allende even more of a threat. Among the rationales Kissinger presented for destabilizing Allende’s new government was one key factor: “The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on—and even precedent value for—other parts of the world, especially in Italy. The imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.” As Kissinger advised the president, “its ‘model’ effect can be insidious.”5

❸ Kissinger successfully persuaded the president to approve this clandestine destabilization policy. At the NSC meeting the next day, Kissinger reiterated his arguments for intervention. “Developments in Chile are clearly of major historic importance, and they will have ramifications that go far beyond just the question of US-Chilean relations,” his talking points for the NSC meeting dramatically began. “The question therefore,” Kissinger stated after outlining the purported threats to US interests of a successful Allende government, “is whether there are actions we can take ourselves to intensify Allende’s problems so that at a minimum he may fail or be forced to limit his aims, and at a maximum might create conditions in which collapse or overthrow might be feasible.”6

❹ At the NSC meeting the next day, according to a secret summary, Nixon backed Kissinger and parroted his position. “Our main concern in Chile is the prospect that he [Allende] can consolidate himself and the picture presented to the world will be his success,” the president informed his top national security managers.7

❺ The objective of Kissinger’s policy of hostile intervention came to fruition on September 11, 1973—Chile’s own 9/11. Kissinger then ushered in a policy of assisting the new military regime, which would become renowned for murder, torture, disappearances, and even international terrorism on the streets of Washington, D.C.8

“The Chilean thing is getting consolidated,” Kissinger informed Nixon a few days after the coup, “and of course the newspapers are bleating because a pro-Communist government has been overthrown.” “Isn’t that something,” Nixon mused about what he called “this crap from the Liberals” on the denouement of democracy in Chile. “Isn’t that something.”9

Kissinger also lamented the failure of the US press to celebrate their Cold War accomplishment. As he told Nixon, “in the Eisenhower period we would be heroes.”10

On September 23, 1973, just 12 days after the bloody military coup in Chile, one of the world’s most famous poets, Pablo Neruda, died in the Santa María medical clinic in Santiago, where he was being treated for prostate cancer. At the time of his death at age 69, a private plane sent by the Mexican government was waiting to transport the Nobel laureate into the safety of exile. Given his long history as a leading member of Chile’s Communist Party, and his close ties to the deposed government of Salvador Allende, Neruda had many reasons to flee Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s forces.

Neruda’s doctors, according to an obituary in The New York Times, attributed his death to “heart collapse.” An official death certificate listed the cause as “cancer cachexia”—a withering condition associated with severe weight loss.

Last week, however, an international team of forensic scientists submitted a special report to a Chilean judge suggesting that Neruda may have died from poisoning, not cancer. Their evaluation of the pulp in one of his molars confirmed the presence of Clostridium botulinum, some strains of which can cause paralysis of the nervous system. The team determined that the bacteria had entered Neruda’s body before his death and burial.

The long-awaited report has still not been made public by Judge Paola Plaza, who is overseeing the case; a summary reviewed by The New York Times makes it clear that the findings are far from definitive. But that has not stopped members of the Neruda family from characterizing it as a smoking gun. “We’ve found the bullet that killed Neruda, and it was in his body. Who fired it? We’ll find out soon, but there’s no doubt Neruda was killed through the direct intervention of a third party,” Neruda’s nephew, Rodolfo Reyes, said in an interview with the Spanish news service, EFE.

“Neruda’s body has spoken to science,” Reyes told The Nation in a separate e-mail. “Now we are waiting for the [judge] who is in charge of this case to conduct an extensive review of these various tests that have been carried out during these 12 years, and, we hope, to issue a resolution.” Judge Plaza has indicated she may issue a ruling in March on whether Neruda’s death should be investigated as a crime.

The circumstances of Neruda’s death have been under judicial review since 2011, when his former chauffeur Manuel Araya first claimed that the poet had received an unexplained injection in his stomach that rapidly led to a deterioration of his condition and his death only hours later. Neruda’s family and the Chilean Communist Party took the case to court, and in 2013 a judge ordered that Neruda’s remains be exhumed for forensic evaluation. Two years later, an initial scientific assessment identified the bacteria in his molar but could not determine when and how it had gotten there. In 2017, a panel of 16 scientists unanimously rejected the official cause of death, stating they were “100 percent convinced” that Neruda had not died of cancer cachexia, as the death certificate stated.

At the same time, a separate inquiry was taking place into the death of another prominent civilian opponent of the Pinochet regime, former Christian Democrat president Eduardo Frei. Frei died unexpectedly in 1982 after routine hernia surgery at the same clinic where Neruda had been treated. In January 2019, after years of judicial inquiry, a doctor associated with the Chilean secret police, Frei’s driver, and four others were convicted and sentenced to prison for killing Frei with mustard gas during his hospitalization. Then-President Sebastián Piñera made it clear that the Chilean government now officially agreed that Frei had been murdered.

The renewed scrutiny of Neruda’s case also comes as the 50th anniversary of the US-backed military coup, and the poet’s subsequent death, approaches in September. The current Chilean government is headed by progressive President Gabriel Boric, who was elected through a coalition of Socialist and Communist parties similar to the historic election of Salvador Allende in 1970. Boric is already preparing a series of commemorative events focusing on three themes: memory, human rights, and the future of democracy. Those events will likely include tributes to Neruda, who remains one of the country’s most famous cultural figures, despite recent criticism of his long history of misogyny—and his confession in posthumously published memoirs of sexually assaulting a maid in his hotel room in Sri Lanka, where he was posted as a young diplomat in 1930.

Born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, Neruda became a world-renowned poet at age 19 with the publication of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, which has since been translated into 35 languages. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. The Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez applauded Neruda as “the greatest poet of the 20th century.”

While his romantic poetry received worldwide acclaim, Neruda’s poetic rendering of fascism and repression also transfixed his global readership. “Preguntaréis por qué su poesía no nos habla del sueño, de las hojas, de los grandes volcanes de su país natal? (“And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry speak of dreams, and leaves, and the great volcanoes of his native land?”) he wrote in “Explico Algunas Cosas,” (I Explain A Few Things), a 1936 poem denouncing Gen. Francisco Franco’s ongoing human rights atrocities during the Spanish Civil War. And then Neruda answered that question: “Venid a ver la sangre por las calles, venid a ver la sangre por las calles, venid a ver la sangre por las calles!” (“Come and see the blood in the streets, come and see the blood in the streets, come and see the blood in the streets!”)

Had he lived to write about the atrocities of the Pinochet regime, Neruda could have written the same words about his native land. The 50th anniversary of his death, by murder or not, will inevitably enhance global reflections on the infamous coup. It will also not be forgotten that his funeral service, attended by almost 2000 mourners who came out of hiding to chant “with Neruda, we bury Salvador Allende,” will go down in history as the very first public protest against Pinochet’s nascent military dictatorship.

On October 28, 1962—that dramatic day exactly 60 years ago when Nikita Khrushchev publicly ordered the removal of nuclear ballistic missiles his forces had just installed on the island of Cuba—the Soviet premier sent a private letter to President John F. Kennedy regarding the resolution of the most dangerous superpower confrontation in modern history. Officially, the USSR withdrew the missiles in return for a vague US non-invasion-of-Cuba guarantee. Secretly, however, the crisis was resolved when President Kennedy dispatched his brother Robert to meet with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin on the evening of October 27 and agree to a top-secret deal: US missiles in Turkey for Soviet missiles in Cuba.

“I feel I must state to you that I do understand the delicacy involved for you in an open consideration of the issue of eliminating the US missile bases in Turkey,” Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy in his private note, seeking to confirm the arrangement in writing. “I take into account the complexity of this issue and I believe you are right about not wishing to publicly discuss it.”

Dobrynin gave the confidential letter to Attorney General Robert Kennedy on October 29. But instead of passing it on to the president, the next day Kennedy returned the letter to the Soviet ambassador. The United States would “live up to our promise, even if it is given in this oral form,” Kennedy told him, but there would be no written record. “I myself, for example, do not want to risk getting involved in the transmission of this sort of letter, since who knows where and when such letters can surface or be somehow published,” Dobrynin’s detailed report to the Kremlin quoted Kennedy as saying. “The appearance of such a document could cause irreparable harm to my political career in the future. This is why we request that you take this letter back.”

So began the epic cover-up of how the crisis actually ended and nuclear war was averted. President Kennedy was determined to keep the missile swap secret—to safeguard US leadership of the NATO alliance of which Turkey was a member, as well as to protect his political reputation, which, like his brother’s, would suffer if it became known that he had actually negotiated with the USSR in order save the world from self-destruction. To hide the quid pro quo, the president took a number of active measures: among them lying to his White House predecessors, misleading the media, and orchestrating a political hatchet job on his own UN Ambassador, Adlai Stevenson—the first, and virtually the only, adviser to urge Kennedy to consider a missile exchange to resolve the crisis diplomatically, without the use of force. After JFK’s assassination, a handful of his former White House aides sustained the cover-up. They would maintain a wall of silence that endured for more than 25 years, obfuscating the true history, and real lessons, of the Cold War crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon.

A Bodyguard of Lies

Within hours of Khrushchev’s radio broadcast on the morning of October 28, announcing his order to dismantle and repatriate the nuclear missiles, President Kennedy began to spread a false narrative of how the crisis had concluded. His secret White House taping system captured Kennedy’s phone calls to his three surviving predecessors—Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, and Herbert Hoover—about how he had dealt with it. He misled Eisenhower, telling him that “we couldn’t get into that [Turkey] deal,” as missile crisis historian Sheldon Stern reported in his book Averting “the Final Failure.”

“We rejected that,” he lied to Truman, about Khrushchev’s public demand on the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, saying that “they came back with and accepted the earlier proposal” [on the non-invasion pledge]. To Hoover, Kennedy falsely reported that the Soviets had gone back “to their more reasonable position” on non-invasion.

The next day, the president conferred with his brother about Khrushchev’s unexpected letter on the missile swap and decided that there should be no paper trail about the secret agreement. “President Kennedy and I did not feel correspondence on our conversations was very helpful at this time,” was the message Robert Kennedy provided to Ambassador Dobrynin, according to Kennedy’s top-secret account of their meeting. “He understood our conversation, and in my judgement nothing more was necessary.”

The president then set about fostering stories in the media that would distance himself from any speculation about a quid pro quo. He gave a green light to his closest friend, Charles Bartlett, whom Kennedy had used as a secret emissary to Soviet intelligence officials during the missile crisis, to write the inside story of decision-making that ended the conflict; Bartlett teamed up with another Kennedy confidant, Stewart Alsop, to co-author the controversial article “In Time of Crisis” for The Saturday Evening Post, which began to circulate around Washington in early December 1962.

The Saturday Evening Post story established the official narrative of how the missile crisis was resolved. Indeed, the opening quote of the article, “We’re eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked”—attributed to Secretary of State Dean Rusk during the crisis—instantly became the iconic summation of how the world was spared the fate of atomic Armageddon. Threatening to invade Cuba, Kennedy had resolutely won the game of nuclear chicken with the Soviets; Nikita Khrushchev had “blinked,” withdrawn the missiles and given America a major Cold War victory. “Rusk’s words,” the authors of the article intoned, “epitomize a great moment in American history.”

But the article also contained a savage political smear on UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, casting him as “soft” on the Soviets for favoring political negotiations over military action. Worse, he was an appeaser. Alsop and Bartlett quoted an “unadmiring official” as stating that “Adlai wanted a Munich. He wanted to trade US bases for Cuban bases.” Before it was published, the editors of The Saturday Evening Post began distributing the article to the New York and Washington media with a press release titled “The Controversial and Hitherto Unrevealed Role Played by U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson During the Height of the Cuba Crisis.” The attack on Stevenson immediately set off a political firestorm, as President Kennedy must have known it would.

As Kennedy White House aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recounted in his widely read memoir A Thousand Days, on December 1 the president summoned him to the Oval Office and told him that the forthcoming article “accused Stevenson of advocating a Caribbean Munich.” Because of Kennedy’s close friendship with Bartlett, the president said, “everyone will suppose that it came out of the White House.” He told Schlesinger to “tell Adlai that I never talked to Charlie or any other reporter about the Cuban crisis, and that this piece does not represent my views.”

In truth, Kennedy had talked to Bartlett as the story was being written; it did represent his views, or at least his political purposes, since he had surreptitiously edited the article and orchestrated the hatchet job on Stevenson as a way to distance the White House from how the missile crisis really ended. “In fact, the ‘nonadmiring official’ was Kennedy himself,” historian Gregg Herken revealed in his book The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington.

“The president had penciled in the ‘Munich’ line when he annotated a typescript of the draft article,” Herken wrote, drawing on interviews with members of Stewart Alsop’s family and correspondence between Alsop and the executive editor of The Saturday Evening Post, Clay Blair Jr., letters published in full for the first time—60 years after the missile crisis—by my organization, the National Security Archive. President Kennedy’s role “must remain Top Secret, Eyes Only, Burn After Reading, and so on,” Alsop wrote to Blair four months after Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, when his editor urged him to write a “tell-all” about the president’s participation in the drafting of the article. The manuscript page with the president’s handwritten remarks, Alsop said, had been returned to Kennedy in 1962 and destroyed. “I sent the ms. to Himself as a Christmas present, through Charlie [Bartlett]. It has long since been reduced to ashes,” Alsop wrote. “It would have made an interesting footnote to history, at that.”

Protecting the Myth of Presidential Toughness

In the years following Kennedy’s assassination, his top advisers, though privy to the secret deal, sustained the sacred myth of the Cuban missile crisis. Early memoirs from former officials such as Theodore Sorensen, among others, withheld all references to the missile swap. Robert Kennedy’s diary of the crisis did contain a detailed account of his climactic October 27, 1962, meeting with Dobrynin about the quid pro quo. But when the diaries were posthumously published in 1969 as the best-selling book Thirteen Days, those passages were omitted. Twenty years later, at a Moscow conference on the missile crisis, Sorensen confessed that he had quietly cut the references to the missile trade. “I was the editor of Robert Kennedy’s book,” he admitted. “And his diary was very explicit that [Turkey] was part of the deal; but at that time, it was still a secret even on the American side…. So I took it upon myself to edit that out of his diaries.”

“There was no leak,” former national security adviser McGeorge Bundy wrote in his book Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years, finally revealing the cover-up in 1988. “As far as I know, none…of us told anyone else what had happened. We denied in every forum that there was any deal.”

Indeed, only in the late 1980s and early 1990s did the full history of the diplomacy, negotiation, and compromise that resolved the missile crisis finally emerge. In 1987, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library began to release declassified transcripts of the secret tapes that recorded Kennedy’s meetings with his advisers during the conflict; they captured the president weighing the merits of a missile trade that might avert a nuclear conflagration. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Foreign Ministry archives began to share key documentation, including Dobrynin’s cables to Moscow reporting on his meetings with Robert Kennedy. A series of international conferences, including 30th and 40th anniversary meetings in Havana bringing together surviving Kennedy White House officials, former Soviet military commanders, and Fidel Castro, significantly advanced the historical record on how the dangerous nuclear confrontation began—and how it really ended.

That historical record remains immediately relevant today, as Russian threats to use nuclear weapons in its war of aggression against Ukraine have created another “time of crisis.” The degree to which the lessons of the past are applicable to the present remains unknown. But 60 years ago, in his October 28, 1962, letter to President Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev issued a prescient warning for coexistence in a world of nuclear weapons: “Mr. President, the crisis that we have gone through may repeat again. This means that we need to address the issues which contain too much explosive material. But we cannot delay the solution to these issues, for continuation of this situation is fraught with many uncertainties and dangers.”

erious instability in Cuba will have an immediate impact on the United States,” warns a secret CIA intelligence estimate, citing massive migration, civil strife and “pressures for US or international military intervention.” The dire situation amounts to a “nightmare scenario,” according to a confidential State Department memorandum that calls for a substantive change in US policy to address the looming crisis. “If ever a foreign policy case cries out for dramatic US leadership,” the memo advises, “Cuba today is that case.”

These red-flag alarms were actually all written in the early 1990s—as Cuba faced what the CIA called a “devastating economic decline” after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But it is not hard to imagine similar internal warnings circulating inside the Biden administration over the past several months as Cuba struggles to emerge from another dire economic crisis often compared to that “special period” 30 years ago.

With their tourism-dominated economy decimated by the impact of the Covid pandemic on travel, Cubans are again abandoning their country; this spring over 70,000 have made their way to Central America and trekked northward to cross the Mexican-US border as illegal immigrants; as thousands of Cubans did during the 1994 balsero crisis, others are increasingly setting sail in rickety boats toward Florida. The country is suffering from severe shortages of electricity, fuel, medicine, foodstuffs and other necessary commodities. Blaming Trump-era economic sanctions on trade, travel, and finance, Cuban officials have recently warned US journalists that the hot summer months could bring renewed civil unrest—the clear intent, they say, of an ongoing US strategy of deprivation and destabilization.

Now, the Biden administration has tacitly acknowledged that the wreak-havoc policies they inherited are inimical to US security and diplomatic and humanitarian concerns. On May 16, the State Department announced that it would rescind a number of Trump-initiated sanctions on Cuba and reset Washington’s punitive posture. The limited measures the US plans to implement do not approximate the scale of Obama-era efforts to normalize US-Cuban relations. But they reflect a strategic appreciation that a policy of at least partial engagement is needed to advance real national and international interests, as well as the humanitarian needs of the Cuban people.

o make Biden’s Cuba policy reset politically palatable, and to blunt the effect on the midterm and 2024 elections, the administration has focused on changes designed “to further support the Cuban people,” empower the private sector, and bring Cuban-Americans together with their loved ones on the island. The first measure announced by the State Department was the restoration of the Cuban Family Reunification Parole Program—a mechanism for Cuban-Americans to expedite immigration applications for relatives on the island that Trump shut down after his State Department shuttered the US Consulate, in response to unexplained health incidents among Embassy personnel in Havana in 2017. The Biden administration also announced it would reverse Trump’s cruel decision to suspend commercial air flights to all regional airports on the island—a decision that has created extreme transportation hardships for Cuban-Americans seeking to visit relatives who live in the Eastern and Western provinces.

But the most consequential change is Biden’s decision to lift the $1000 per quarter cap on remittances that Trump imposed. As part of Obama’s strategy for normalization, there were no restrictions on remittance levels; several billion dollars annually flowed directly to tens of thousands of Cuban families enabling them to purchase goods, transform their homes into AirBnBs, and create small businesses. In an effort to provide an informal mechanism for foreign investment in Cuba’s growing private sector, the Biden Administration has now authorized “donative (i.e., non-family) remittances, which will support independent Cuban entrepreneurs.”

“We will work to expand entrepreneurs’ access to microfinance and training,” according the May 16 announcement. In addition, the administration plans to relax embargo restrictions on Cuban access to Internet-related cloud technology, application programming interfaces, and e-commerce platforms and expand “support of additional payment options for Internet-based activities, electronic payments, and business with independent Cuban entrepreneurs.”

For advocates of a commonsense Cuba policy, Biden’s belated decision to restore a semblance of sanity to US-Cuba relations is positive but partial. It is “a timid but very welcome step,” as Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, a staunch supporter of normalized ties, characterized the initiative. “I hope this announcement is the beginning of a wholesale renunciation of a discredited policy that is beneath our country and has exacerbated the hardships inflicted on the Cuban people,” Leahy noted, in an effort to prod the Biden administration into taking more definitive actions. Effective diplomacy, he suggested, “requires inspired and principled engagement.”

iden was in the Obama White House when it established the successful model of such “principled engagement” just seven short years ago. But that historic accomplishment already appears to be lost on his administration as it continues to cautiously navigate the contentious domestic politics of Cuba policy. Consequently, contradictions abound in its new approach.

For example, the administration appears to have opened the door to more, and easier, travel to Cuba by reinstating the “people-to-people” general license category for group trips that Trump eliminated. But, as veteran Cuba tour guide Christopher Baker pointed out in a Facebook post, until Biden “also removes the existing Trump ban on use of ANY hotel in Cuba (all of which are government owned), reinstating the group ‘people-to-people’ license effectively restricts groups to small numbers capable of staying in private B&Bs.” And by refusing to reinstate the “people-to-people” license for individual travel, the administration is further limiting the number of US citizens who will visit the island.

Similarly, the Biden administration has taken the urgent step of lifting restrictions on remittance amounts, but it has yet to rescind Trump’s order to shut down Western Union and other smaller wire transfer services to Cuba because they processed money through a state financial entity that took a minuscule transaction fee. The Trump administration forced Western Union to close over 400 service centers in Cuba, cutting off the fastest and most effective way for Cuban American families to support their relatives during the pandemic. State Department officials say they are in talks with the Cuban government to establish a civilian agency to process electronic transfers of funds, but that could significantly delay the flow of desperately needed remittances in the coming weeks and months. In its announcement, the State Department vaguely stated that it would “engage with electronic payment processors to encourage increased Cuban market accessibility.”

he limited, contorted nature of the administration’s new Cuba approach—and its failure to take a new approach until now—is a result of Biden’s effort to mollify the hardline Cuban-American Democratic senator from New Jersey, Robert Menendez. With the Senate evenly split, the president needs Menendez’s vote to pass his legislative agenda—not to mention Menendez’s cooperation as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee to pursue Biden’s foreign policy objectives. The administration has also evaded any Cuba policy initiatives, until now, to increase the odds of victory this coming November for Representative Val Demings, who is running against the arch-conservative Cuban-American Republican Senator Marco Rubio in Florida. Beating Rubio in November would kill three political birds with one stone: help the Democrats keep their Senate majority; eliminate the leading protagonist of a hardline, regime change policy in Congress, and undercut Rubio’s own presidential aspirations.

Neither Menendez nor Demings, however, appear to be appeased. Menendez clearly does not believe in the constitutional rights of US citizens to travel; he professed to being “dismayed” that the Biden administration was authorizing educational, people-to-people group travel to Cuba, which he described as “akin to tourism.”

“For years, the United States foolishly eased travel restrictions arguing millions of American dollars would bring about freedom and nothing changed,” Menendez charged, ignoring the overwhelming data on the expansion of the private sector around the influx of US visitors, including his own constituents. Representative Demings also condemned Biden’s limited modification of the travel restrictions, as well as the renewed US efforts to support the private sector. “Allowing investments in the Cuban private sector and easing travel restrictions will only serve to fund the corrupt dictatorship,” Demings said in a statement.”

Nor is Biden’s limited Cuba initiative likely to curry favor with Latin American nations who are due to gather for the Ninth Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles in early June. A potential boycott, led by Mexico, is brewing, in protest of Biden’s exclusion of Cuba—along with Nicaragua and Venezuela—from the Summit. In a dramatic, high-profile state visit to Havana last week, Mexican President Andrés López Obrador denounced Washington’s decision not to invite Cuba and announced that he would not attend unless all nations in the region did also. Honduras and Bolivia, along with some 20 Caribbean countries, have said they will also not attend unless Cuba is invited. While in Havana, Lopez Obrador also denounced the US embargo against Cuba and demanded that it be lifted; at press conference this week he declared that the US was pursuing “a genocidal policy” toward Cuba.

Whether the Summit implodes over the threatened boycott or goes forward, the United States is certain to face a major rebellion against its Cuba policy—to the detriment of its other pressing diplomatic, economic, and security interests in the region. To address those issues, and to ease the humanitarian crisis in Cuba that threatens US interests in peace and stability in the Caribbean, the Biden administration will have to significantly expand its engagement strategy beyond the measures announced this week. There is no time to lose to manage this potential nightmare scenario. The State Department admonition from the early 1990s remains as relevant now as it was then: “If ever a foreign policy case cries out for dramatic US leadership, Cuba today is that case.”

In mid-December, some 114 members of Congress sent a forceful letter to President Joe Biden calling for “immediate humanitarian actions” to lift the economic sanctions “that prevent food, medicine, and other humanitarian assistance from reaching the Cuban people.” With Cuba struggling to emerge from a dire, Covid-generated economic crisis, the congressional representatives are pushing the White House to end the restrictions imposed by the Trump administration on remittances and travel and restore the Obama-era policy of engagement with the island nation. “Engagement,” the members concluded, “is more likely to enable the political, economic, and social openings that Cubans may desire, and to ease the hardships that Cubans face today.”1

Full engagement with Cuba, of course, would require lifting the US embargo—a demand the congressional letter conspicuously fails to make. As the embargo approaches its 60th anniversary, terminating it would require not only White House action but a vote in Congress that the Democratic leadership has neither the political capacity nor the moral courage to prioritize. Indeed, the humanitarian measures that these members of Congress are asking of President Biden are intended to soften an economic crisis that, for decades, the embargo has explicitly attempted to create.2

Imposed by the proclamation of John F. Kennedy on February 3, 1962, and codified into law during the Clinton administration, the “embargo on all trade with Cuba” has evolved through many manifestations of punitive economic sanctions and commercial restrictions over the past 60 years. “The embargo is outdated and should be lifted,” Barack Obama declared during his dramatic but short-lived effort to normalize US-Cuba relations. Instead, this “mold-encrusted relic” of the Cold War, as The Nation once described it, remains in place—the framework of a protracted, and failed, US endeavor to promote regime change, as well as an enduring symbol of the perpetual hostility of US policy toward the Cuban revolution.3

During the past six decades, The Nation has consistently opposed the US embargo against Cuba. The magazine has published editorial after editorial, story after story, with titles like “Endless Embargo,” “Tightening the Chokehold on Cuba,” “An Embargo That Serves No Purpose,” and “The Stupid Embargo.” The arguments for ending el bloqueo, as the Cubans refer to it, and adopting a sane, humanitarian, and normal US posture toward Cuba remain as relevant today as when they were published.4

Cuba’s economy…depended on the United States for such essential items as trucks, buses, bulldozers, telephone and electrical equipment, industrial chemicals, medicine, raw cotton, detergents, lard, potatoes, poultry, butter, a large assortment of canned goods, and half of such staple items in the Cuban diet as rice and black beans…. A nation which had been an economic appendage of the United States was suddenly cut adrift; it was as if Florida had been isolated from the rest of the country, unable to sell oranges and cattle or to bring in tourists, gasoline, automobile parts, or Cape Canaveral rockets.5

—“Cuba Today: An Eyewitness Report,” by Samuel Shapiro,
Sept. 22, 19626

We are antagonizing allies and enemies alike, and giving to others a market which geographically has been and should be ours. All this in the name of isolating Castro, but all we are doing is isolating ourselves.7

— Editorial, “The Inertia of Folly,” March 2, 1964 8

At the heart of the United States policy toward Cuba is the economic embargo. It was laid on to make things hard for the Cuban people in the expectation that they would recognize Fidel Castro as the man responsible for their hardship and throw the rascal out. The scheme has not worked; such schemes rarely do. Instead, the Cubans identified the cause of their troubles as the government of the United States. They rallied to Castro and he, for more than a decade, has used us as a whipping boy.9

—“Cuba: Policy of Malign Neglect,” by Richard O’Mara,
Nov. 22, 197110

For fifteen years we have tried to bring down the Cuban Government, by an airtight trade embargo, by diplomatic boycott, and even sordid efforts apparently organized by the CIA to assassinate Prime Minister Castro and other Cuban leaders. With both Mr. Nixon and Mr. Ford making highly publicized missions to Peking and Moscow…one wonders why we maintain our unyielding stand toward Cuba….11

From the vantage point of common sense, economics and diplomacy, we should be moving to normalize our relations with Cuba—not because we are looking for a love affair but because it is the only reasonable course for two neighboring nations….12

—“Common Sense and Cuba,” by Senator George McGovern,
Feb. 6, 197613

Among its other efforts to dismantle the Cuban revolution, the United States has imposed one of the longest, most strictly enforced and extensive trade embargoes on record. That embargo, twenty years old this year, has produced endless bitterness but has failed to accomplish its original purpose: the economic isolation of Cuba…. Obviously the United States has everything to gain by lifting the trade ban and nothing perceptible to lose. The market is there, the currency is there, the desire is there. Ultimately, Washington will gain more influence not only in Cuba but throughout the hemisphere by re-establishing trade and diplomatic relations with the island than by perpetuating a retaliatory embargo that long ago lost its punch.14

—“An Embargo That Serves No Purpose: Twenty Years of ‘El Bloqueo,’”
by Maisie McAdoo, Dec. 4, 198215

Under the fashionable label of “promoting democracy,” Representative Robert Torricelli is propelling a new “punish Cuba” bill through Congress…. Torricelli’s missionary passion is directed toward tightening the already strict U.S. embargo on Cuba, so as to, in his words, “shorten the suffering of the Cuban people by isolating Castro and forcing him out.” Despite recent polls showing that a significant sector of Cuban-Americans oppose tightening the embargo, Torricelli claims to speak for that community. This presumption has led to some dramatic exchanges with those Cuban-Americans who call his bill a “new Platt Amendment,” referring to the 1901 act that said the United States had the right to intervene at will in Cuban affairs.16

—“Tightening the Chokehold on Cuba,” by Saul Landau,
June 15, 199217

In a 1992 letter to the Bush Administration, protesting the tightening of the Cuba embargo, the U.S. Catholic Conference noted that embargoes “are acts of force…morally unacceptable, generally in violation of the principles of international law, and always contrary to the values of the Gospel.”18

The Cuba embargo is all of the above and worse. Put in place by President Kennedy’s executive order in 1962, it is a fossilized relic of an era that refuses to recede into cold war history. Since its inception, the trade embargo has become, as the Bay of Pigs invasion was once called, “a perfect failure” in all ethical, political and economic respects. It hurts the Cuban people but has failed to shake the government.19

Still, the “wreak havoc” crowd [in Congress], financed by Miami’s hard-line exile community, has managed to keep opposition to the embargo at bay. The logic of their position—to squeeze Cuba until it implodes into civil war—runs directly counter to U.S. national interests in the Caribbean. More than one major Pentagon study has pointed out that destabilization of Cuba will generate hundreds of thousands of refugees and extreme political pressure for U.S. military intervention—a prospect the Southern Command, and presumably the U.S. public, would rather avoid.20

—Editorial, “Freeing Cuba,” Jan. 26, 199821

The Administration frequently says that it wishes to see a “peaceful transitional process” in Cuba. And yet, if the objective is to get rid of Castro, then one cannot expect the process to be peaceful, for the hard fact is that Castro will not simply resign or fade away because the United States wants him to; rather if need be, he would fight, and many Cubans would fight with him. Thus, if one aims to remove the Castro government, then one must be ready for a bloody civil war—a war which would result in tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Cuban refugees on our shores. Is that what the Administration wants?22

—“Washington’s Costly Cuba Policy,” by Wayne S. Smith,
July 3, 200023

Since the end of the Cold War, the embargo has proved a serious embarrassment for Washington. Instituted as part of a broad set of punitive measures designed to isolate the Castro regime, the trade sanctions have succeeded only in isolating the United States. Every year for the past decade the United Nations has voted overwhelmingly to condemn the US blockade; the last vote, on November 27, was a 167-to-3 defeat for the United States, with only the Marshall Islands and Israel supporting Washington….24

—“Cuban Embargo-Busters?” by Peter Kornbluh,
Dec. 13, 200125

What do you call a US policy that…detains and fines a class of New York high school students for taking a study trip over spring break? A policy that has been repudiated at the United Nations by virtually every other country in the world? A policy that, after forty-eight years of abject failure, is still based on the false assumption that success—in the form of “regime change”—is just around the corner? Imperial? Illogical? Irrational? Insane? As Wayne Smith, former chief of the US Interest Section in Havana, has observed, Cuba seems to have “the same effect on American administrations that the full moon has on werewolves.”26

—Editorial, “Changing Course on Cuba,”
May 14, 2007 27

Imagine a country developing and producing its own Covid-19 vaccines, enough to cover its entire population, but being unable to inoculate everyone because of a syringe shortage…. Because of the 60-year US embargo, which punishes civilians during a pandemic, the country is facing a shortage of millions of syringes.28

This reality is a consequence of what amounts to US economic warfare, which makes it extremely difficult for Cuba to acquire medicine, equipment, and supplies from vendors or transportation companies that do business in or with the United States. Syringes are in short supply internationally, so no company wants to be bogged down navigating the complicated banking and licensing demands the US government places on transactions with Cuba….29

If human rights are to be a core pillar of US policy, as a White House spokesperson recently declared, then the embargo must end. It is a policy that indiscriminately targets and harms civilians. It is a systematic violation of human rights on a massive scale.30

—“Biden’s Failure to End Trump’s War on Cuba Is Threatening Lives,”
by Danny Glover, June 29, 202131

Behind closed doors and with little fanfare, on October 8, President Joe Biden signed the Helping American Victims Afflicted by Neurological Attacks Act into law. Known as the “Havana Act”—a misnomer since most of the purported “attacks” took place far from Cuba—the legislation authorizes the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department to compensate a growing number of agents and diplomats who have experienced a cluster of cognitive-related injuries from a mysterious, and still unidentified, source. The impetus for the new law came from complaints by a number of injured US personnel that their own government, particularly during the Donald Trump era, has been dismissive of their medical needs and the legitimacy of their injuries.1

“We’re not making this up—this happened to real people,” one injured Havana embassy official stated in a dramatic interview with NBC News in October. “It just seems important to humanize this,” another told NBC, “to help all my fellow Americans understand that, as much skepticism as still seems to surround this, it’s very real.”2

Indeed, public skepticism remains high—enhanced by proponents of the mass hysteria theory as the likely explanation gaining traction in the opinion pages of the media, as well as by misleading coverage of a secret government study that debunked the initial theory of a “sonic attack” in Cuba. “Is the Havana Syndrome Real? A Newly Declassified Report Says It May Be Crickets,” The National Interest reported. “Secret State Department Report Suggests Likely Cause of Havana Syndrome: BUGGED,” was the headline of a Daily Beast story. “A Declassified State Department Report Says Microwaves Didn’t Cause Havana Syndrome,” declared BuzzFeed News, which obtained the document under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).3

The portion of the document that is readable does not support any such assertions. But 80 percent of the 98-page report, written for the State Department by the elite JASON scientific advisory group, has been redacted on national security grounds—to protect the intelligence operatives present among those in Cuba who experienced what is officially being called an “anomalous health incident.” About half of the approximately 200 cases of AHIs in China, Colombia, Austria, Germany, Australia, India, Vietnam, and other locations have been reported by members of the CIA.4

The fact that CIA spies are involved has cast a long shadow of secrecy over the efforts to resolve this national security mystery. As in the case of the JASON report, information has been restricted and heavily censored; official investigations have been compromised by the lack of access to classified records; and congressional oversight has been kept at arm’s length until recently. The lack of transparency has delayed progress in determining the cause and culprit behind these incidents. Most important, it has left those who experienced these traumatic injuries in the dark about what happened to them and what it means for their health and well-being.5

“Excessive Secrecy”

ince late 2016, when a CIA operative experienced what was described as “severe pain and a sensation of intense pressure in the face, [and] a loud piercing sound in one ear,” the saga of the syndrome has been dominated by secrecy. For weeks, the CIA kept secret that its agents were reporting being stricken, one by one, in their Havana homes by what they described as “an invisible beam of energy”—in hopes of ascertaining what was happening to them before it became public. But after rumors of a mysterious malady spread through a panicked embassy community, Ambassador Jeffrey DeLaurentis, the chief of mission, convened a staff meeting in late March 2017 to discuss the incidents. Close to 50 embassy personnel gathered in a SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility), where DeLaurentis explained that the mystery ailments were being investigated and that medical support was available. “He concluded the meeting by asking the assembled staff to avoid talking about the situation outside the secure confines of the embassy, even with their families,” because the matter was classified. “We thought that was nuts,” one official told ProPublica. “There were family members who were attacked at home. How could we not tell them to watch out for this?”6

The delay in sharing information between the CIA and the State Department was a critical error in managing the emerging crisis, according to the first internal State Department investigation—an investigation that itself was delayed as the Trump administration appeared to stall any inquiry that would acknowledge the CIA presence in Cuba. By law, any security incident involving embassy personnel requires the convening of an Accountability Review Board, usually within 60 days of a credible episode. But even as reported cases of injuries to US diplomats and operatives multiplied in Cuba and then spread to the Canadian embassy, the ARB was not convened until early 2018—more than a year after CIA agents first reported symptoms. “Both at [Havana] Post and in Washington, response to the incidents was characterized by excessive secrecy that contributed to a delayed response,” the ARB concluded.7

The ARB evaluation itself became a major example of that excessive secrecy. The State Department refused to show the report to Congress’s investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, approving a briefing instead. The Trump administration similarly resisted a request from the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Robert Menendez, to turn over an unclassified copy to Congress.8

Nor was the ARB report shared with a team of investigators from the National Academy of Sciences that had been commissioned by the State Department to identify the cause of the injuries. In an interview, Dr. David Relman, the chairman of the NAS’s Standing Committee to Advise the Department of State on Unexplained Health Effects on U.S. Government Employees and Their Families at Overseas Embassies, told me how his team was denied access to relevant national security records. Even an unclassified CDC epidemiological assessment was off-limits; the NAS team finally obtained the CDC report through unofficial channels.9

The JASON report was among the classified assessments withheld from NAS investigators. Stamped secret and titled “Acoustic Signals and Physiological Effects on U.S. Diplomats in Cuba,” the “rapid response study” evaluated eight tape recordings, made in Havana by US personnel, of a shrill buzzing sound they associated with their injuries. Through acoustic analysis, the JASON team concluded the recorded sounds were “an excellent match” to the mating call of the Indies short-tailed cricket.10

But the report clearly pointed out the tenuous correlation between the recordings and the injuries. Seven of the recordings were, in fact, not made “simultaneously with reported onset of symptoms” but rather at different times and places; moreover, some victims reported hearing no sound at all. The JASON scientists specifically stated that “the sound pressure intensity levels of the recorded and audible sounds are not, by themselves, the cause of reported long term harm” to the victims. The main takeaway from the report was not that the din of lovelorn crickets caused the Havana syndrome but that something else did.11

Microwaves, perhaps? Neither microwaves nor other energy sources could “produce both the recorded noise/video signals and the reported medical effects,” the JASON report said, leaving open the possibility that a directed-energy device could indeed generate the health incidents alone. Contrary to BuzzFeed’s assertion that JASON “dismissed” microwaves as the potential cause, the study contained a section on mitigating the threat of “electromagnetics” if they were identified as the source of the syndrome. Those recommendations are, predictably, redacted.12

The Trump administration managed to cover up the existence of the classified JASON report; it endeavored to do the same with the unclassified NAS report. Dr. Relman noted that the NAS expected the State Department to publicly release its report after it was submitted in August 2020. Instead, the administration withheld it. “The American people and their elected representatives deserve to read what we have found,” Dr. Relman stated publicly in October 2020, in an effort to prod the State Department to release the report. The study was eventually leaked to The New York Times and NBC News—presumably by one of the victims who had obtained a copy—and then was posted on the NAS website on December 5, 2020.13

Reviewing all plausible theories—chemical poisoning and psychological factors among them—the NAS team concluded that “many of the distinctive and acute signs, symptoms, and observations reported by [State Department and CIA] employees are consistent with the effects of directed, pulsed radio frequency.” It was beyond the NAS’s ability to identify the source, the report observed. But, its authors warned, “the mere consideration of such a scenario raises grave concerns about a world with disinhibited malevolent actors and new tools for causing harm to others.”14

The Question of Russia

s cases of anomalous health incidents among intelligence, military, and diplomatic personnel have proliferated around the world, the identity of those “malevolent actors” and what “new tools,” if any, they may be using have become the subject of intense speculation and debate. A study released by the Cuban Academy of Science in September, for example, dismissed the idea that such actors and devices exist. “No known form of energy can selectively cause brain damage (with laser-like precision) under the conditions described for the alleged incidents in Havana,” the report stated. The injuries experienced by the US and Canadian embassy communities were likely due to “a heterogeneous collection of medical conditions, some pre-existing before going to Cuba and others acquired due to mundane causes.” It also cited conditions for the “psychogenic propagation of malaise”—commonly known as mass hysteria—as a causal factor for the trauma experienced by some victims.15

Other authoritative investigators have made similar arguments. An early FBI investigation into the source of the maladies included an evaluation by the bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Unit that also focused on psychogenic causes—without actually interviewing any of the US personnel whose brain injuries were medically confirmed. “I mean, I have verified physical injuries,” Kate Husband told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, describing the concussion-like brain disorder that has left her unable to work and ended her diplomatic career. The FBI study remains classified.16

US scientific experts also dispute that a directed-energy device that could inflict such injuries actually exists. As Cheryl Rofer, whose 35-year career at Los Alamos Laboratories included work on microwave technologies, argued in Foreign Policy, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and no evidence has been offered to support the existence of this mystery weapon.”17

But an informed debate on weaponized microwaves has been rendered nearly impossible given the tight secrecy that surrounds the R&D of such technology. Both the United States and the Russians have been exploring such technologies for decades. The CIA began to research the potential for microwave weaponry as a component of its MKULTRA mind control program in the 1950s—after analyzing Soviet scientific literature that suggested that microwave radiation could be used to disorient military and diplomatic personnel. One early MKULTRA experiment was titled “Effects of radio-frequency energy on primate cerebral activity.” In the mid-1960s the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated another secret study—code-named “Project Pandora”—of the impact of microwaves on the behavior of monkeys, in an effort to determine whether the Soviet program of beaming microwaves at the US embassy in Moscow was an attempt to debilitate personnel posted there. The “Moscow Signal,” as the radiation was referred to in secret cables, targeted the embassy from 1953 to 1979, creating an eerie, if distant, precedent for what appears to be the targeting of US personnel around the world today.18

More recent Moscow-connected cases are receiving renewed attention from investigators. In 1996, a National Security Agency counterintelligence officer named Mike Beck was stricken with extreme vertigo in his hotel room while on a mission to a “hostile country.” “There is intelligence information from 2012 associating the hostile country to which Mr. Beck traveled in the late 1990s with a high-powered microwave system weapon that may have the ability to weaken, intimidate, or kill an enemy over time and without leaving evidence,” states an NSA document that was declassified in 2014 as part of a workers’ compensation case Beck filed after he and a colleague on that mission both developed a rare form of Parkinson’s disease. “The 2012 intelligence information indicated that this weapon is designed to bathe a target’s living quarters in microwaves, causing numerous physical effects, including a damaged nervous system.”19

That information, and the name of the country where Beck sustained his injuries, remain highly classified—despite their obvious relevance to understanding the causes of the current cases of unexplained health incidents. Sources familiar with the still-secret intelligence report told The New York Times the country was Russia.20

Russia is also tied to the more recent case of veteran CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos, who experienced extreme vertigo with nausea and tinnitus in his hotel room during a December 2017 trip to Moscow. He subsequently developed debilitating headaches that forced him to retire from the agency. For three years, the CIA medical office rejected his requests for medical treatment and workers’ compensation, but under the new leadership of director William Burns, his claims have been accepted as part of the increasing cohort of AHI cases. Polymeropoulos considers his case, and those more recently reported, to be “an act of war.” He has become a high-profile proponent of an aggressive US response.21

These cases have contributed to a rough consensus within the national security agencies that the AHI injuries are real; that the cause is some type of modernized, and mobile, microwave-energy device; and that the likely culprit is Russian military intelligence. “Senior officials in the Trump and Biden Administrations suspect that the Russians are responsible for the syndrome,” reported Adam Entous, who has covered this story extensively for The New Yorker. “Their working hypothesis is that operatives working for the G.R.U., the Russian military-intelligence service, have been aiming microwave-radiation devices at U.S. officials, possibly to steal data from their computers or smartphones, which inflicted serious harm on the people they targeted.” During a June summit in Switzerland, Biden reportedly raised the issue with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. The memorandum of their conversation remains classified.22

Seeking Transparency

long with “excessive secrecy,” the Trump administration’s response to the health incidents, according to its own ARB report, was characterized by a “lack of senior leadership, ineffective communications, and systemic disorganization.” But those affected did not find the Biden administration any more responsive or transparent, at least initially. “We have been disheartened to learn and experience that staff within the Department continue to 1) Deny employees and injured family members access to proper medical evaluation and treatment 2) Reject scientific evidence regarding the injuries and treatment needs and 3) Invalidate our injuries and experiences,” a group of 21 State Department officials wrote on May 25 to Deputy Secretary of State Brian McKeon. They demanded that the State Department leadership “stand by the women and men advancing our foreign policy by prioritizing the health, safety and security of our officers.”23

In 2018, eight former members of the Havana embassy community retained the renowned Washington, D.C., whistleblower lawyer Mark Zaid to represent them. On their behalf, Zaid played a role in pressing Congress to pass the Havana Act. Along with The New Yorker’s Entous, Zaid—the founder of the James Madison Project, a public interest legal firm dedicated to promoting right-to-know matters on national security—filed a FOIA lawsuit seeking access to thousands of pages of secret records generated by the State Department’s investigations of AHIs. “Congress needs to push for greater transparency from the executive branch as to what it knows about these incidents. Sometimes even more valuable than compensation is knowledge,” Zaid observed. “We’re looking for answers,” he told NPR in mid-October. “We’re tired of the subterfuge of the US government hiding this information.”24

Leading members of Congress repeatedly pressed both the Trump and Biden administrations for more information—and have repeatedly complained about the failure to comply. “The Department has not been forthcoming with key details about the incidents involving the serious injuries incurred by several of these personnel,” stated a letter that six senators, led by New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen, sent to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo just before Trump left office. “We also have very limited information regarding the Department’s assessment of causation and ways to prevent future incidents. It is imperative that the Department provide us the relevant information currently in its possession.” Shaheen and Senator Susan Collins subsequently drafted the Havana Act, which mandates reports to Congress by the CIA and the State Department on the distribution of compensation funds in an effort to increase the flow of information to lawmakers.25

Biden signed the bill with a growing sense of urgency to resolve this mystery as cases mushroom around the world. In August, Vice President Kamala Harris’s trip to Vietnam was delayed by the evacuation of two US officials from Hanoi who had suffered syndrome-like symptoms. In September, a member of the CIA entourage accompanying director William Burns to India experienced an AHI; in October, five families of US diplomats in Bogotá were reportedly stricken as Secretary of State Anthony Blinken prepared to visit Colombia.26

Indeed, beyond the harm done to dozens of individuals who have been diagnosed with brain trauma, the phenomenon of unexplained health incidents is creating a crisis of confidence in the national security and foreign policy establishments. Recently, the State Department relieved Ambassador Pamela Spratlen of her duties supervising the Health Incident Response Task Force only six months after Secretary Blinken appointed her “to reaffirm our commitment to make certain that those affected receive the care and treatment they need.” Spratlen had reportedly refused to reject the FBI study on mass hysteria, offending the injured Foreign Service officers for whom she’d been appointed to advocate. Around the same time, the CIA’s Vienna station chief was relieved of his duties for failing to aggressively investigate multiple reports of AHIs among his agents in Austria. “It’s obvious how a US adversary would have much to gain from the disorder, distress, and division that has followed,” said Senator Shaheen.27

That the Biden administration is actively investigating the mysterious injuries to US national security personnel is no longer in question. The State Department and the Pentagon have established task forces to intensify their bureaucratic focus on the issue; the CIA has upgraded its efforts by appointing a new task force chief—an undercover counterterrorism operative who is a veteran of the campaign to track down and kill Osama bin Laden. The Joint Intelligence Community Council has held classified high-level briefings to share information between agencies. “Addressing these incidents has been a top priority for my Administration,” Biden said in a statement issued when he signed the Havana Act. “We are bringing to bear the full resources of the U.S. Government to make available first-class medical care to those affected and to get to the bottom of these incidents, including to determine the cause and who is responsible.”28

When and if that determination comes, it will be met with widespread skepticism given the intensity of the debate surrounding this enigmatic phenomenon—unless the investigative record is declassified for public scrutiny. Five years after CIA operatives first experienced mysterious health problems in Cuba, the paper trail of secret documentation is long and getting longer; and there are no signs that Biden plans to lift the veil of excessive secrecy that has characterized and compromised this inquiry from the beginning. As a growing list of individual health incidents morphs into a perceived but still unexplained national security threat, that lack of transparency will continue to deprive AHI victims of the information that they have a need to know—and, like the rest of us, the right to know.29

On September 21, 2017, more than 30 members of the US Embassy community in Havana, Cuba, sent a letter to the State Department imploring Secretary Rex Tillerson not to reduce the embassy staff in response to a series of mysterious “acoustic incidents” experienced by US intelligence and diplomatic personnel. “[W]e understand there are a series of decisions being made this week regarding the operating status of the Embassy,” the urgent letter stated. “We are aware of the risks of remaining at Post. And we understand there may be unknown risks.” Rather than an “ordered departure,” the diplomats and spouses proposed an alternative: “We ask that the Department give us the opportunity to decide for ourselves whether to stay or leave.”

Despite their determination to remain, Tillerson ordered a severe reduction of embassy personnel, effectively shuttering the consulate and leaving only a skeletal staff to handle emergencies.

This week, almost four years later, President Joe Biden finally ordered a “review” of staffing levels at the US Embassy in Havana. His decision comes in the wake of anti-government protests that have forced the administration to put Cuba on its policy agenda. To mollify hard-liners such as Senator Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the White House is framing the review in interventionist terms. Increased staffing, Biden said yesterday, “will enhance our ability to engage with civil society”—code words for backing an opposition movement.

But as the State Department convenes a restaffing working group, the support for engagement over estrangement put forth by the embassy personnel in 2017 deserves to be remembered. Their letter—it has never been fully published before now—argued that the benefits of sustaining full US diplomatic functions in Cuba outweighed the personal risks the embassy officials and their families confronted at the time. Faced with mystifying neurological injuries spreading through the embassy community—maladies we now know have hit hundreds of US intelligence, diplomatic, and military personnel around the world—the staff’s conclusion deserves all the more weight for the simple reason that they were the people at risk.

he so-called Havana Syndrome began with members of the CIA station in Cuba and spread to diplomatic personnel and some of their spouses. Starting in late 2016, one CIA operative after another experienced pulsating pressure around their head along with a metallic grinding sound in their ears. A cluster of symptoms such as headaches, dizziness, tinnitus, hearing loss, sleep disorders, and cognitive disorientation followed. As rumors of these ailments swept through the embassy community in the spring of 2017, a few diplomats and family members flew to Miami for medical evaluation. Eventually, two dozen intelligence and diplomatic personnel suffered ill effects from a source that, to this day, remains unknown.

In February 2017, the new Trump administration quietly lodged a formal diplomatic complaint with the Cuban government. “It is not us,” then-President Raúl Castro reportedly advised Ambassador Jeffrey DeLaurentis. Castro subsequently invited the FBI to come to Cuba to investigate. No less than six FBI investigative missions to Havana failed to find any evidence of a cause or culprit for the unexplained injuries.

Cases of the Havana Syndrome, however, continued to appear. That August, a CIA officer staying at the Hotel Nacional was stricken. Back at Langley, CIA officials became convinced that their agents were being targeted and moved to repatriate them. On September 13, 2017, according to a recently declassified internal investigative report done by the State Department’s Accountability Review Board (ARB), “CIA inform[ed][Acting Assistant Secretary Francisco] Palmieri of its decision to withdraw personnel from Havana for the foreseeable future.” Some two weeks later, Tillerson followed the CIA’s lead and issued his draw-down directive for US diplomats and their families.

Tillerson’s decision, the ARB report concluded, violated State Department protocols. “The decision to draw down the staff in Havana…was neither preceded nor followed by any formal analysis of the risks and benefits of continued physical presence of US government employees in Havana,” according to the report. In a heavily censored section titled “Risk Benefit Analysis or Lack Thereof,” the document states: “The State Department has had such a process for a number of years, however, [and] no such analysis has been done to date…for Cuba.”

The signatories of the Havana embassy letter conducted their own informal assessment of the risks. “The acoustic incidents have been stressful, to say the least,” they wrote. “We do not want to minimize the pain of seeing colleagues affected, nor our own concerns in the face of something so mysterious and potentially severe.”

At the same time, they understood, and accepted, the hazards of remaining in Havana. “We knew coming into our tours in Havana there would be challenges—it is a hardship post, after all. And the challenges have been many,” they noted. But, they argued, there were also substantial benefits to keeping the embassy fully operational. They urged the secretary of state to adopt the same voluntary protocol used for the threat of the Zika virus in Cuba: “A tangible risk exists for pregnant women or women who are in their child-bearing years—a risk of brain damage to a child. Yet State allows individuals to evaluate this known risk and decide whether or not they wish to remain at post.”

They wanted to stay at their post to advance US interests and the interests of the Cuban people. An operational embassy meant collaborating with Cuba on such key issues as counterterrorism, counter-narcotics, environmental protection, and migration. “We are highly motivated to implement the National Security Presidential Memorandum and continue our work on the 22 agreements signed with Cuba over the last two years,” the signatories advised. “Reducing staff at the Embassy,” they pointed out, “would necessarily mean a change in policy.”

Moreover, it would signal that the United States was prepared to cut and run in the face of adversity. “We also worry about the precedent it would set if we were forced to leave,” states the letter. “We do not know who the culprit of these incidents is, nor the tool, but we have an idea about the motives. And if we were to draw down, that could encourage imitation by America’s enemies around the world.”

hat prediction was prescient. Whether at the hand of imitators or the same culprit, reports of what Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines describes as “anomalous health incidents” have spread far beyond Cuba’s borders. The Havana Syndrome, US officials have finally admitted, is, in fact, a global condition with US intelligence, military, and diplomatic personnel experiencing cognitive injuries from an unknown source in countries such as Austria, Germany, China, Uzbekistan, Russia, and even as close to home as the White House gates, where officials recently reported similar health episodes.

From recent classified briefings on Capitol Hill, it is now clear these incidents began in other countries long before the first reported case in Cuba, and they have escalated since they successfully drove US spies and diplomats out of Havana and disrupted US–Cuban relations. “As many as 200 Americans have now reported possible symptoms of Havana Syndrome,” according to an NBC News broadcast this week. “Almost half of those reporting symptoms are linked to the CIA, say officials, with possible cases in Berlin and Vienna and on every continent but Antarctica.”

Under the supervision of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the administration has recently convened two high-level working groups—one to determine the cause of the injuries, and another to address how to mitigate the risk of future injuries. A number of recommendations recently made by a group of more than 20 injured employees and family members are under consideration, among them technological protections, centralized medical services, specialized training, and pre-departure preparation for new personnel going to high-risk posts such as Havana.

To be sure, the Cuban government will be highly suspicious of any embassy staffing with the stated purpose of interfering in Cuba’s internal affairs. It remembers that diplomatic ties were originally broken in early 1961 after Fidel Castro accurately labeled the embassy “a nest of spies” as the CIA secretly prepared for the Bay of Pigs invasion.

But restaffing the embassy remains necessary for basic diplomatic functions. Among other benefits, the reopening of the consular section will restore normalized immigration—a critical need of both nations. A staffed consulate could process visas for thousands of Cubans who want to visit their families in the United States—or immigrate permanently—as well as for Cuban entrepreneurs who in the past traveled to Miami to build supply chains for their private-sector businesses on the island. As the economy has deteriorated, more and more people are risking their lives trying to cross the Florida Strait on small boats and rafts. Making emigration safe and legal again would avert a brewing migration crisis and bring Washington back into compliance with the 1994 migration agreement that requires it to provide at least 20,000 immigrant visas to Cubans annually. Finally, a fully staffed embassy could resume a discussion with Cuba on key bilateral agreements made during the Obama era that have lain moribund since Trump took office—including a diplomatic dialogue on human rights.

As the embassy staff understood in 2017, a well-functioning embassy remains essential to fulfilling the US mission in Cuba. “[W]e have stayed here because we find our work fulfilling, we are supporting national security and foreign policy priorities, and we are having a positive impact on the Cuban people,” the signers of the letter wrote before they were forced to depart their posts in Havana almost four years ago. For those very reasons, it is time for them to return.

THE LETTER

Dear Assistant Secretary Palmieri, Deputy Assistant Secretary Creamer, Ambassador Todd, and Ambassador Stephenson and AFSA Colleagues,

This is a message from over 30 members of Embassy Havana—Foreign Service generalists and specialists, colleagues from other agencies, eligible family members, some present in Havana, and some evacuated. We have excluded the Chargé d’Affaires from this process; this is a grassroots effort.

First, we want to thank all of you, as well as DS, OBO, MED, and many others for your support during these very challenging last days, weeks, and months as we dealt with the unprecedented acoustic incidents and recovery from a major hurricane.

Second, we understand there are a series of decisions being made this week regarding the operating status of the Embassy in response to the acoustic incidents. We know you are hearing and reading very alarming stories in the media and directly from some of our colleagues who were affected by the acoustic incidents. We would like to take this opportunity to share our perspective with you.

We knew coming into our tours in Havana there would be challenges—it is a hardship post, after all. And the challenges have been many. But we have stayed here because we find our work fulfilling, we are supporting national security and foreign policy priorities, and we are having a positive impact on the Cuban people and the bilateral relationship. And on top of it all, we and our families have full lives in Havana. We support each other and have bonded under trying circumstances.

The acoustic incidents have been stressful, to say the least. We do not want to minimize the pain of seeing colleagues affected, nor our own concerns in the face of something so mysterious and potentially severe. But over the last many months we have thoroughly discussed these incidents, inside and out, as individuals, as family units, and as a community. We have been given every opportunity to leave if we so choose. Some of our colleagues chose to leave, but most have stayed. In fact, eight of us, many of whom have families with small children, decided to extend for a third or fourth year, even after knowing about the incidents.

We are aware of the risks of remaining at Post. And we understand there may be unknown risks. We ask that the Department give us the opportunity to decide for ourselves whether to stay or leave. This would be in line with State’s policy regarding Zika: A tangible risk exists for pregnant women or women who are in their child-bearing years—a risk of brain damage to a child. Yet State allows individuals to evaluate this known risk and decide whether or not they wish to remain at post.

We are highly motivated to implement the National Security Presidential Memorandum and continue our work on the 22 agreements signed with Cuba over the last two years. Reducing staff at the Embassy would necessarily mean a change in policy. We also worry about the precedent it would set if we were forced to leave. We do not know who the culprit of these incidents is, nor the tool, but we have an idea about the motives. And if we were to draw down, that could encourage imitation by America’s enemies around the world.

Finally, we will respect the Department’s ultimate decision. But, if we were to go on ordered departure, we would request that our colleagues and families who evacuated Havana the week of September 4 ahead of Hurricane Irma be allowed to return to Post to pack up and say good byes. This would be very important for closure.

Thank you for the Department’s constant support, and for listening to our perspective.

Sincerely, Embassy Havana Community

Exactly 60 years ago, as the CIA-led invasion force approached the Bay of Pigs, Fidel Castro declared Cuba a socialist state. “What the imperialists cannot forgive is that we are here,” Castro said in a speech, filled with anger and pride, at the funeral of 11 air force personnel killed during the preliminary airstrikes on April 15, 1961. “This is what they cannot forgive: the fact that we are here right under their very noses,” he told an audience of thousands as he rallied the country to fight the impending invasion. “And that we have carried out a socialist revolution right under the nose of the United States!”

With his country facing the imminent threat of US aggression, this was Castro’s first public proclamation of Cuba’s ideological direction. As such, the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) has identified April 16, 1961, as its symbolic date of origin. The last several party congresses have been scheduled on the anniversary of the invasion, tying the ideology of the revolution to the David vs. Goliath victory over the CIA’s brigade of exiles in the Bahia de Cochinos. Just as the Bay of Pigs marked a turning point for the young revolution, the 8th Party Congress convening this weekend is a major juncture for Cuba.

At the top of its agenda, the PCC will address how Cuba can recover from its pandemic-induced economic slowdown. Amid that crisis, the politburo and party cadre will also bid goodbye to their first secretary, Raúl Castro. As he approaches 90 years of age, Castro is relinquishing his powerful position as party leader. His retirement marks the official end of the Castro era—and an opportunity for the Biden administration to reconsider six decades of US hostility toward Cuba.

hat the post-Castro era portends is a matter of intense speculation—on the island and in the international community. “This will be the Congress of Continuity,” signaled the PCC’s official convocation about the change in leadership, “expressed in the gradual and orderly transition of the main responsibilities of the country to new generations.”

But many Cubans who are experiencing the most desperate economic situation since the collapse of the Soviet Union seem less interested in continuity than in change. Like so many countries battered by the coronavirus, Cuba has seen its economy severely contract—by an estimated 11 percent. Shortages of oil, food, and basic goods are widespread; inflation is rampant. Under Miguel Díaz-Canel, who took over as president from Raúl Castro in 2018 and who is now expected to assume his duties as first secretary of the PCC, the government has received high marks for public health management during the pandemic and for developing several vaccines that are now in final trials. But the clamor for bold reforms to revive Cuba’s moribund economy, as expressed through the relatively new phenomenon of social media on the island, is growing louder.

As he steps down, Raúl Castro leaves a legacy of tentative reform. When he took over from his ailing older brother in July 2006, Raúl Castro initiated an effort to move Cuba into the modern, globalized world. Cuba, he famously stated, would reform “sin prisa pero sin pausa”—without haste but without pause. Castro haltingly opened the state-monopolized economy to small private sector entrepreneurship, establishing a list of 120 authorized work sectors for which Cubans could obtain self-employment licenses. To provide incentives for food production, Castro allowed farmers to sell a portion of their crops at private markets. He lifted restrictions on cell phone ownership, broadened Internet access, allowed Cubans to buy and sell homes, and even authorized the French automaker Peugeot to open a dealership in Havana for the few Cubans who could afford a new car. While a clear departure from Fidel’s far more orthodox approach to a state-controlled, centralized economy, the advance of these reforms proved to be limited and impeded by party infighting and bureaucratic resistance.

Only under extreme pressures from the Covid-19 crisis has the Cuban government finally implemented policies that Raúl Castro announced more than a decade ago. To advance economic efficiency, in January Cuban officials initiated the long-delayed merger of Cuba’s dual currencies—the peso, which the majority of Cubans use, and the convertible peso used mostly in the tourism and business sectors to obtain foreign currencies that Cuba can then use to pay for foreign imports. In February, Díaz-Canel’s government expanded the number of private-sector occupations from 120 to over 2,000. Last week, the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Trade and Foreign Investment even announced that it would welcome Cuban American investment on the island—an effort to attract a natural investor community and rebuild a constituency for normalized relations with the United States.

s head of state, Raúl Castro’s most consequential achievement was the December 17, 2014, accord with President Barack Obama to reestablish bilateral diplomatic ties and advance toward normal economic relations. After 55 years of perpetual hostility, peaceful coexistence quickly provided benefits for the expansion of Cuba’s economic development—fueled by a massive influx of US travelers, US companies seeking business opportunities, and Obama’s decision to lift the cap on the flow of remittances from Cuban American families to relatives on the island.

Making good on his campaign promises to “cancel” the Obama-Castro agreement, Trump took a wrecking ball to the US policy of positive engagement with Cuba. His craven application of US sanctions on travel, remittances, and trade escalated as he trolled for Florida votes in the 2020 election. Pandering to the Cuban American electorate, he even invoked the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. “We will honor your courage with my administration’s determination to defeat communism and socialism,” Trump pompously predicted last fall during a special White House forum with elderly veterans of the CIA’s exile brigade. “And we will do that in our country too.”

Despite his own campaign promises to return to a sensible policy of engagement with Cuba, President Joe Biden has, so far, left all of Trump’s sanctions in place. Three months after his inauguration, remittances are still restricted, travel is still severely limited, and the US Embassy in Havana, all but closed by the Trump administration, continues to operate with a skeleton staff. “Joe Biden is not Barack Obama when it comes to his politics towards Cuba,” the administration’s top National Security Council official on Latin America, Juan Gonzalez, told CNN last week, admitting that the administration saw no urgency in redressing Trump’s punitive approach. “I’d say that [with] the disorder we inherited from the previous administration, [Cuba] might not be where we will invest our initial political capital or the time of this administration.”

With a policy of hostility still in place, the symbolism of the Bay of Pigs invasion continues to resonate in the current debate over US-Cuba relations—as an act of aggression that defines the self-defeating danger of US intervention. Even John F. Kennedy’s own postmortem on the debacle remains relevant to the Biden administration’s reconsideration of US policy. “A wise man once said, ‘An error doesn’t become a mistake until you refuse to correct it,’” the chastened president told the press after the Bay of Pigs invasion failed. There were, he said, “sobering lessons for us all to learn.”

Much has changed since the CIA-led paramilitaries landed on the beaches of Playa Giron. The Cold War is over; the Castros are gone; and Cuba is undergoing an economic transformation and a generational transition of leadership.

But much remains the same. The United States still appears unable to accept that the Cuban revolution is, as Fidel Castro stated, “here right under their very noses.”

On October 6, 1976, a Cuban airliner carrying 73 passengers was blown out of the sky off the coast of Barbados. All of the men, women, and children aboard were killed in what was, at the time, the most flagrant act of aviation-related terrorism ever committed in the Western Hemisphere.

CIA and FBI intelligence reports identified two leaders of the violent anti-Castro movement, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, as masterminds of the plane bombing. Both were arrested and incarcerated in Caracas, Venezuela, their base of operations. Both managed to get out—Posada escaped from prison in 1985 and, a year later, Bosch was acquitted by a Venezuelan tribunal after dubious legal proceedings. And both eventually returned to the United States, illegally, to take up residence in that bastion of anti-Castro activity, Miami. Despite the fact that the Justice Department identified Bosch and Posada as purveyors of terrorism (“For 30 years Bosch has been resolute and unwavering in his advocacy of terrorist violence,” one DOJ assessment stated in 1989, before President George H.W. Bush ordered his release from an immigration detention center and granted him asylum), both of them managed to evade full accountability for their atrocities and live out their violent lives as free men in Florida.

Their cases reflect a long history of perverted politics surrounding terrorism and Cuba—which continued with outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s shameless decision to redesignate that country as a sponsor of terrorist acts. “The State Department has designated Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism for repeatedly providing support for acts of international terrorism in granting safe harbor to terrorists,” Pompeo declared on January 11, reversing the Obama administration’s decision to delist Cuba in 2015. To make this claim, Pompeo reportedly circumvented his own State Department’s Bureau of Counter-Terrorism, where the professional analysts know there is no evidence to support it. Indeed, the Cuba designation has been widely denounced as baseless—a self-serving political gambit by Pompeo to attract Florida voters to his expected 2024 presidential campaign, and Donald Trump’s parting effort to sabotage the incoming Biden administration’s ability to restore sanity to US-Cuban relations.

The State Sponsor of Terrorism (SST) list was created in 1979 as part of the Export Administration Act—a legal clause intended to give the executive branch the ability to restrict exports, arms transfers, and other commercial transactions to sanction rogue governments for backing international terror campaigns. Syria, Libya, Iraq, and South Yemen were the first nations to be designated sponsors of international terrorism. But on March 1, 1982, the Reagan administration formally added Cuba. No clear rationale was given at the time, and the economic sanctions that accompanied the designation were inconsequential, since the US embargo already prevented commercial relations with the Castro government. But in his January 1982 State of the Union address, Reagan telegraphed that he would redefine Cuba’s support for revolutionary movements in Central America as support for terrorist activity. “Toward those who would export terrorism and subversion in the Caribbean and elsewhere, especially Cuba and Libya,” he told Congress, “we will act with firmness.”

Once Cuba was on the list, it proved impossible to get it off—not because there was ongoing evidence of Cuban support for terrorism, but because no president wanted to face the political repercussions from the powerful anti-Castro lobby in Florida. In the mid 1990s, the Clinton administration’s top Cuba official, Richard Nuccio, began exploring ways to remove Cuba from the list but found little interest from his superiors. “I never saw any intelligence that justified Cuba’s listing on the terrorism list,” recalls Nuccio, who held the title of “Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State for Cuba” at the National Security Council. “It was done for political reasons and sustained for political reasons.”

Yet, even as political inertia kept Cuba on the terrorism list, Washington and Havana found ways to collaborate on counterterrorism efforts. During the 1984 presidential campaign, Cuban authorities uncovered what they believed to be an extremist plot to assassinate President Reagan in North Carolina; Fidel Castro authorized one of his top UN diplomats in New York to pass that information to the head of US security at the UN mission. In 1997, after Luis Posada Carriles—by then a fugitive in Central America—orchestrated a series of hotel bombings in Havana that killed one foreign businessman and injured 11 others, the US Interests Section in Havana began to share intelligence on bomb plots that enabled Cuban authorities to intercept the bombers. In May 1998, Castro dispatched a special emissary, the famed writer Gabriel García Márquez, to Washington with a message for Clinton about a plot to bomb another passenger plane and a discreet invitation for an FBI team to come to Havana and review the intelligence. García Márquez met with the National Security Council’s counterterrorism czar, Richard Clarke, and other officials in the West Wing. Clarke agreed to an FBI-Cuban collaboration; a team of agents quietly traveled to Havana in June for three days of confidential briefings.

The election of Barack Obama created high expectations for what Obama called “a new beginning with Cuba” and an honest revision of the terrorism list. “I know there’s a longer journey that must be traveled to overcome decades of mistrust,” Obama declared in April 2009, a few months after his inauguration, “but there are critical steps we can take toward a new day.” For the first six years of his presidency, however, removing Cuba from the terrorism list was a “critical step” Obama could not muster the political will to take. Instead, the administration revisited the SST designation following the December 17, 2014, accord between Obama and Raúl Castro to normalize diplomatic relations. As part of that dramatic announcement, Obama directed Secretary of State John Kerry to undertake a full legal and intelligence review to determine if Cuba met the statutory criteria for “rescission of Cuba’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism.”

After 33 years on the SST list, on April 14, 2015, Obama certified to Congress that “(i) the Government of Cuba has not provided any support for international terrorism during the preceding 6-month period; and (ii) the Government of Cuba has provided assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future.” The United States would “continue to have differences with the Cuban government, but our concerns over a wide range of Cuba’s policies and actions fall outside the criteria that is relevant to whether to rescind Cuba’s designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism,” the White House stated in a press release. “That determination is based on the statutory standard—and the facts—and those facts have led the President to declare his intention to rescind Cuba’s State Sponsor of Terrorism designation.”

Those “facts” have remained essentially the same over the past five years—despite Pompeo’s decision to reverse Obama’s rescission. The aged US fugitives that Cuba is once again accused of harboring have been on the island for close to half a century. While condemnable, their crimes do not meet the statutory criteria for international terrorism, as American University professor William LeoGrande has pointed out in Responsible Statecraft. Similarly, the Colombian guerrilla leaders in Cuba cited in the State Department designation are there under an international accord for peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the militant National Liberation Army, facilitated by Cuba and Norway—not because Cuba is providing safe haven for them to organize terrorist atrocities. “Cuba has been Norway’s partner in the Colombian peace process,” Norway’s foreign minister, Ine Marie Eriksen Søreide, stated last week, rejecting Pompeo’s arguments. “If a country risks being placed on a terrorism list as a result of facilitating peace efforts, it could set a negative precedent for international peace efforts.”

“Cuba opposes terrorism. It has been a victim of this scourge,” President Miguel Díaz-Canel reminded the world last week. Members of Congress, former Obama administration officials, and even veteran CIA experts have also denounced the Trump administration for crassly playing politics with the deadly serious threat of terrorism. “In the final days of the Administration, efforts to politicize important decisions concerning our national security are unacceptable and threaten to damage future diplomatic efforts toward Cuba and set a harmful precedent for future designations,” Senators Patrick Leahy, Amy Klobuchar, and seven other senators wrote to Pompeo. “One of the consequences of the sort of misuse of the tool that the secretary of state is contemplating is to weaken the deterrence of true state sponsorship of terrorism and undermine the incentives for improved behavior” by rogue states, Paul Pillar, a former deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, warned in The National Interest. “The ultimate cost of misusing and thus weakening the tools of counterterrorism will take the form of lives lost in the future to international terrorism.”

Most immediately, there will be a cost to future US-Cuba relations. Putting Cuba back on the list, as Obama’s former White House aide Ben Rhodes stated via Twitter, is nothing less than “politicized garbage meant to tie [Biden’s] hand.” Although Biden can reverse many of Trump’s executive directives with a stroke of a pen, removing Cuba from the SST list requires a series of time-consuming, statutory steps: a formal State Department review; a presidential certification to Congress, and a 45-day waiting period during which Congress can object before Cuba can be, once again, rescinded. That lengthy timetable gives opponents of positive engagement, led by Pompeo, Senator Marco Rubio, and every other Republican with presidential aspirations and an eye on the Florida electorate, ample opportunity to attack the new Biden administration and attempt to sabotage the restoration of normalized bilateral ties.

Amid the avalanche of executive actions President Biden has promised during his first days in the White House to undo Trump’s ugly legacy, initiating the process to delist Cuba will be taken as an early signal of the new administration’s intent to reset Cuba policy. Restoring a serious, honest approach to US-Cuban relations is at stake, and so is the credibility of US leadership on an issue of grave national and international security. For the sanctity of truth and integrity, it is time to remove Cuba from the terrorism list—once and for all.

oday, America chooses to cut loose the shackles of the past so as to reach for a better future—for the Cuban people, for the American people, for our entire hemisphere and for the world,” President Barack Obama announced on December 17, 2014, inaugurating a new era of “positive engagement” in US-Cuba relations.

For two short years, Obama’s new, historic approach showed remarkable promise: Washington and Havana reestablished full diplomatic relations; Obama reinstated commercial air service as well as cruise ship visits to the island; hundreds of thousands of US citizens exercised their constitutional right to travel, providing direct economic stimulus to Cuba’s expanding private sector; US companies received permission to do business in Cuba; Google helped modernize Cuba’s Internet systems and connectivity, expanding the flow of information and self-expression for the Cuban people; US and Cuban officials established bilateral commissions to advance mutual interests in critical areas for both countries, among them counter-narcotics, environmental protection, human rights, and migration.

And Obama became the first US president to conduct an official state visit to the island in an effort to leave the geopolitical baggage of the past behind. More than six decades of Washington’s perpetual hostility toward the Cuban revolution finally appeared to be over.

Then came Trump.

“I am canceling the last administration’s completely one-sided deal with Cuba,” Trump announced in June 2017. Since then, his administration has dismantled virtually every major component of Obama’s policy, replacing engagement with estrangement and diplomacy with punitive sanctions and imperial demands. As Trump exits the White House screaming and kicking, he is leaving bilateral relations with Cuba, among so many other nations, in tatters.

But last week, two leading foreign policy advocacy NGOs—the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and the Center for Democracy in the Americas (CDA)—released a comprehensive blueprint for reengaging with Cuba. Titled “The United States and Cuba: A New Policy of Engagement,” the report is intended to provide a clear “roadmap” for President-elect Joe Biden’s incoming administration to revisit and redress the abysmal state of current US-Cuba relations. At a briefing for media and foreign policy analysts on December 17 to mark the sixth anniversary of Obama’s historic breakthrough on Cuba, WOLA and CDA representatives said they had provided the “detailed inventory of what needs to be done” to members of Biden’s transition team, and they hoped the report would create a “momentum for engagement” that would lead to stronger US-Cuba ties in the future.

ndeed, the briefing book provides a detailed assessment of how the Biden administration could act quickly to restore, decree-by-decree and statute-by-statute, a policy of constructive engagement—as well as a persuasive argument for why it is in the US interest to do so. “Diplomatic engagement will reduce bilateral tensions, help avoid future crises, and advance U.S. interests on a wide variety of issues,” the report asserts. “Like it or not, many of the most critical problems we face in the Western Hemisphere are transnational—the effects of climate change, the spread of infectious disease, environmental pollution, narcotics and human trafficking, and migration. Progress depends on cooperation with our neighbors, especially near neighbors like Cuba.”

Moreover, “Cuba is changing,” the blueprint continues. “The United States can have a positive influence on the trajectory of change, but only by being engaged. To continue the policies of the past or to simply modify them at the margins will leave the United States out of the game—isolated from its allies, isolated from ordinary Cubans other than small groups of dissidents, and isolated from the rising generation of Cuban leaders who will shape the island’s future.” Even with all the other critical problems the new administration will face—the Covid crisis, economic recovery, and Iran’s nuclear development among them—the report offers a compelling case for making Cuba a foreign policy priority.

The report recommends that in his first few months in office, President Biden use his executive authority to “reverse the damage done by President Trump.” In a series of short presidential directives, Biden could restore the people-to-people category of travel, which permitted hundreds of thousands of US citizens to see Cuba for themselves; reinstate full commercial air and sea service to the island; and abolish the onerous “Cuba Prohibited Accommodations” list that Trump imposed to prevent travelers from staying in Cuban hotels. Biden also has the power to immediately reopen the flow of family remittances that Trump has closed, and to lift sanctions that have curtailed commercial economic activity between the two countries, which has contributed to the dire economic crisis Cubans are now confronting.

At the same time, the WOLA/CDA blueprint recommends specific steps the Biden White House should take to reestablish the channels of civil diplomacy, which provides the foundation for constructive engagement. Those include:

• A personal call from Biden to Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel inviting Cuba to attend the Summit of the Americas, which the United States will host in late 2021.
• Issuing a new Presidential Policy Directive “establishing the core principles of the policy of engagement and directing executive branch agencies to pursue relations of mutual interest with their Cuban counterparts.”
• Nominating a new US ambassador to Havana, which Trump refused to do, and restoring full staffing at the US Embassy, which Trump cut, as well as reopening the consulate.

“Diplomatic re-engagement is a first necessary step in repairing the damage,” the report emphasizes, “and the United States should take the initiative to re-start it.”

fter an initial phase of resetting Obama’s engagement policy, in its second year the Biden administration would undertake a series of initiatives to deepen and consolidate commercial, cultural, and political ties. The United States would increase collaboration with Cuba on international health issues such as pandemic preparation, as well as on environmental protections, artistic and scientific exchanges, and economic engagement. Washington would then be better positioned to engage the Cubans on the important, if contentious, issue of human rights. These steps would go “beyond what the Obama administration was able to accomplish,” the study suggests, “in order to keep the process of normalizing relations moving forward.”

The success of these initiatives would put Joe Biden in the historic position to press for legislation that would end the economic embargo altogether. “The embargo is a central obstacle to the normalization of relations with Cuba, as President Obama recognized when he called on Congress to repeal it,” states the report. But that will require finding the votes in Congress to repeal key sections of three laws—the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, which provided the original authorization for the embargo; the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act; and the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which codified the embargo into law. Removing the embargo-related clauses of these laws would allow Biden to lift the embargo, once and for all, and, like Obama, break the shackles of the past.

Of course, there are formidable political forces arrayed against ending the embargo, and, the report concedes, major obstacles to renormalizing relations with Cuba. Among them are the unresolved mystery of medical maladies suffered by US personnel in Havana and the deepening crisis in Venezuela, “because Republicans will attack engagement as rewarding Havana despite its support for [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro.”

Those Republicans, particularly the ones with presidential aspirations of their own, have already launched preemptive attacks on any potential changes Biden may make. “Trump clearly and powerfully sided with the people of Venezuela and Cuba over their oppressors,” former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley claimed last week in The Washington Post. “A Biden reversal in either country would amount to an embrace of socialism and give a pass to the most monstrous regimes in our hemisphere.” Florida Senator Marco Rubio has urged Biden to “follow in the footsteps of President Trump” rather than “return to the failed Obama Administration policy of rewarding Raúl Castro and Miguel Díaz-Canel…for decades of repressive behavior.”

In fact, Obama’s policy was a major success. As “The United States and Cuba: A New Policy of Engagement” cogently argues, “Engagement accomplished more in two years than the policy of hostility achieved in sixty”—advancing concrete US interests and the interests of the Cuban people. Moreover, it was a history-making game-changer for US foreign policy. “Obama’s opening to Cuba was every bit as historic as Nixon’s opening to China,” states American University professor William LeoGrande, who drafted the blueprint. Despite Trump’s merciless effort to erase that accomplishment, he told The Nation, “Biden now has the opportunity to finish what Obama started.”

Just two weeks before the 2016 election, Donald Trump traveled to Miami to accept the endorsement of the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association. Speaking at a museum in Little Havana dedicated to the paramilitary invasion, he blasted the Obama administration’s normalization of relations with Cuba and lauded those he called “true freedom fighters” in the audience. His efforts to pander to the hard-line Cuban American community seemed a long shot; Trump trailed Hillary Clinton by 3.3 points in the Florida polls, and news reports at the time indicated he was exploring investments in the hotel industry in Cuba. But on November 8, Trump won the state and its critical 29 Electoral College votes by a narrow margin of 1.2 points, paving his way to the White House.

With Florida once again a crucial swing state, it comes as no surprise that Trump has reached out, once again, to the invasion veterans. On September 23, he invited some two dozen aged members of the 2506 Brigade—the name of the CIA-led invasion force—to the White House to hear the candidate they have again endorsed promise that his administration would “very soon” rid the hemisphere of the Cuban revolution. “I canceled the Obama-Biden sellout to the Castro regime,” Trump reminded the vets as he took the opportunity to level new sanctions on Cuba. “I am announcing that the Treasury Department will prohibit US travelers from staying at properties owned by the Cuban government. We’re also further restricting the importation of Cuban alcohol and Cuban tobacco.”

Trump is certainly not the first incumbent to troll for Cuban American votes in a bid for reelection; the cynical use of Cuba policy as a form of political patronage has been a staple of almost every US presidential campaign since the 1959 revolution. But to advance his presidential prospects, Trump is now sacrificing fundamental rights of US citizens—the freedom to pick their places of lodging when they travel; attend the music, book, or cigar festivals of their choice; and purchase the souvenirs they want to bring home—on the altar of electoral politics. At the same time, he is squeezing Cuba’s economy in a cruel and malicious attempt to starve its citizens, as the island nation, like so many other countries, desperately struggles to recover from the costly Covid-19 pandemic.

In the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro famously nationalized the tourist industry, at the time dominated by American mobsters such as Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, and Santo Trafficante. Since then, the Cuban state has maintained full or majority ownership in Cuba’s hotels, rendering all of them off-limits to US citizens under Trump’s new sanctions. But to assure that US citizens can easily identify the locations disallowed by their own government, on September 23 the State Department issued a “Cuba Prohibited Accommodations List.” The list contains the names and addresses of 433 places of lodging, among them some of the most iconic places in the tourism business—the Hotel Nacional, the Riviera, the Melia Cohiba, and the Capri. The list also identifies dozens of smaller boutique hotels and even private homes (casitas) that the US government has determined belong to current or former Cuban government officials or their relatives and are, therefore, “prohibited.”

To be sure, US travelers can still legally visit Cuba and can still stay at many other private homes across the island, more than 36,000 of which are easily accessed through Airbnb. But the new prohibitions on hotel lodgings create considerable obstacles for larger delegations and groups that travel to Cuba for educational tours such as those led by National Geographic, Road Scholar, and The Nation magazine. Trump’s sanctions will also inhibit US citizens from traveling to the island to organize, participate in, or attend professional meetings and events such as music and film festivals and sports competitions. Under the Obama administration, travel to Cuba for those purposes was conducted under a general license. Now, travelers will have to apply for a specific license from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control—an onerous process that empowers administration officials to provide travel permission on a case-by-case basis.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo justified the crackdown on travel as an effort to “deprive the Cuban regime of the resources it uses to oppress the Cuban people.” But the sanctions will directly penalize whole sectors of hospitality workers—taxi drivers, guides, musicians, waiters, maids, busboys, and cooks among them—whose livelihoods, and families, depend on the influx of US visitors and the generous tips they leave behind. Moreover, a significant reduction in the approximately 1 million US travelers who have annually visited the island after the Obama administration adopted its “positive engagement” policy will undercut the entire Cuban private sector, which has dramatically expanded as the tourist traffic has grown. “It’s sickening to hear Trump and the likes of Senator Marco Rubio present this move as intended to benefit the Cuban people,” says Christopher Baker, a veteran travel guide who regularly leads photography, motorcycle, and educational tours to Cuba. “The reality is that this is as beneficial to the Cuban people as a slap in the face.”

With Cuba’s tourism trade all but shut down to combat the pandemic, these new sanctions will have little significance for the foreseeable future. “Trump’s October sanctions are obviously timed to influence Cuban American voters in Florida,” points out American University scholar William LeoGrande, “but as long as the pandemic is preventing travel to Cuba, their impact is more symbolic than substantial.” Trump appeared mindful of that fact as he addressed the Bay of Pigs veterans. “A lot of things are going on right now that I can’t tell you about, but I will be soon,” he told them, hinting at more sanctions to come before the election.

Already, the administration has acted on the president’s promise. On September 28, Secretary Pompeo announced that the State Department’s “Cuba Restricted List”—yet another prohibition list that identifies Cuban businesses off-limits to US citizens and companies—would be expanded to include a Cuban debit card company called American International Services. For many Cubans struggling to survive during the pandemic, the AIS debit card has become an indispensable financial lifeline, allowing them to receive remittances from US relatives that can then be directly spent, using the AIS card, at special dollar stores to purchase food, appliances, and other goods in Cuba.

The move is just the latest, but unlikely the last, administration attack on an estimated $3.7 billion in annual remittances from Cuban Americans to their relatives—a flow of funds that has underwritten the growth of the Cuban private sector and sustained hundreds of thousands of Cubans as the pandemic has created the worst economic crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union. With Cuba’s airports still closed, preventing remittances from being hand-carried to the island, the State Department’s new restrictions leave Cuban Americans with few options to provide humanitarian relief to their relatives—a cutoff that will have dire repercussions for the lives and livelihoods of countless Cuban families. “We unequivocally denounce the Trump administration’s decision on Monday to erect yet another obstacle for those sending remittances to family members in Cuba,” seven leading policy and advocacy groups, among them the Center for Democracy in the Americas, the Cuba Study Group, the Washington Office on Latin America, and Cuba Educational Travel, stated last week. “Prohibiting family members from supporting one another amid a pandemic and food shortage in Cuba, and closing remittance channels without securing a viable alternative, is cruel and runs contrary to American values.”

As the election approaches, President Trump is gambling that his policy of pain toward Cuba will turn out enough hard-liners to outnumber the Cuban Americans turned off by the suffering he has brought to their loved ones on the island. The political appeal of his administration’s punitive policies will certainly be addressed if Trump and Joe Biden hold the second presidential debate—a town-hall-style gathering with questions from the audience, now scheduled for October 15—in Miami. (Depending on the president’s progress in recovering from his coronavirus infection, the debate will likely be reconfigured as a virtual meeting or postponed—although only a day after leaving Walter Reed hospital, Trump tweeted, “I am looking forward to the debate on the evening of Thursday, October 15th in Miami. It will be great!”)

Biden will come prepared to argue that the Obama administration’s history-making effort to normalize relations with Cuba, which included opening the door to travel and lifting all restrictions on remittances, significantly advanced both US interests and the interests of the Cuban people. He will remind Florida’s Cuban American community that Obama’s engagement policy facilitated their access to, and support for, their families on the island—in clear contrast to Trump’s policies, which have blocked both travel and remittances and are designed to separate families and impoverish the Cuban populace.

But Trump will likely resort to the bluster and blarney he shared with the 2506 Brigade veterans at the White House when he compared the Bay of Pigs invasion to his efforts to win reelection. “We will honor your courage with my administration’s determination to defeat communism and socialism. And we will do that in our country too. We’re in the process of doing it right now,” he told them, “and we are meeting it with great force.”

It will be left to voters to remind the president of who won and who lost at the Bay of Pigs, and that the invasion remains not only an internationally repudiated episode of US aggression but also a dramatic symbol of its abject failure.

In the dark early morning hours of November 16, 1989, an elite unit of the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion entered the Pastoral Center of the Central America University (UCA) in San Salvador. The soldiers rousted six Jesuit priests who lived there and executed them in their pajamas, one-by-one, with an AK-47 shot to the back of the head. On orders to “leave no witnesses,” they also murdered the Jesuits’ cook and her 16-year-old daughter, who were found lying together in “an embrace full of bullets,” according to a poignant description of one witness who did survive the massacre.

More than 30 years after this shocking human rights crime generated outrage around the world, a high-ranking Salvadoran military official finally has gone on trial—not in El Salvador, but in Spain. Opening arguments in a Madrid tribunal known as the Audiencia Nacional began on June 8; on June 10, the defendant, former vice minister of public security Col. Inocente Orlando Montano, took the stand to deny charges of terrorism and murder that carry a possible prison sentence of 150 years. The historic proceedings are due to resume in early July when Spanish prosecutors and lawyers for the victims will present witnesses, evidence, and experts to prove that Montano actively participated in what prosecutors called “the decision, design, and execution” of this infamous atrocity.

Montano’s day of reckoning marks the culmination of decades of tenacious efforts to seek justice for the Jesuits—and accountability for those who killed them. Some 12 years have passed since a Spanish lawyer named Almudena Bernabeu, then head of transnational justice at the San Francisco–based Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA), filed the first petitions in Madrid to initiate legal proceedings. Like the Spanish legal efforts against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet 20 years ago, the Jesuit trial has rejuvenated the cause of universal jurisdiction—the unique legal principle that gross violations of human rights demand adjudication, if necessary by nations outside the jurisdiction in which the crimes were committed. “This trial represents a key moment for universal jurisdiction,” states the Guernica Centre for International Justice, which represents the victims in this case, as well as “accountability as a crucial element in transitional justice processes and international criminal law.”

A Murderous Context

El Salvador’s bloody civil war, which lasted from 1979 to 1992, cost the lives of some 70,000 civilians alone. Fueled by billions in US counterinsurgency assistance, the Salvadoran military flagrantly deployed death squads and commando battalions throughout the country, which committed some of the most infamous crimes against humanity in recent memory. Few can forget the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero as he held mass; the rape and murder of four US churchwomen; and the massacre at El Mozote during which over 800 men, women, and children were slaughtered by the Atlacatl Battalion.

Beyond their brutality, those atrocities share another common factor with the execution of the Jesuits: the impunity with which those who gave the orders got away with those crimes. In the aftermath of the Jesuit murders, a broad coalition of human rights activists, lawyers, and agencies—among them the priests’ families, the Jesuit order, conscientious members of the US Congress, and UN and OAS investigators—initiated a concerted campaign to ascertain who ordered the massacre, and to hold them accountable.

The decision to eliminate the Jesuits came amid a Tet-like offensive in San Salvador by the leading guerrilla army, the FMLN. Infuriated by the strength of the insurgency despite a decade-long “scorched earth” counterinsurgency campaign, senior Salvadoran officers led by armed forces Chief of Staff Col. Emilio Ponce decided to kill as many civilian “subversive elements” as they could find.

At the top of Ponce’s target list was the Spanish-born Jesuit priest Ignacio Ellacuría, rector of the UCA, and an influential interlocutor for a peaceful settlement to the bloody civil war—a settlement that threatened the power and stature of Salvador’s senior military officers. At a November 15, 1989, meeting of the high command that Montano attended, an investigation by the UN Truth Commission later determined, “Colonel Ponce called over Colonel Guillermo Alfredo Benavides and, in front of the four other officers, ordered him to eliminate Father Ellacuría and to leave no witnesses.”

Executed alongside Ellacuría were two other priests involved in the peace talks, vice rector of the UCA Father Ignacio Martín-Baró and Father Segundo Montes. Along with the cook, Julia Elba Ramos; and her 16-year-old daughter, Celina Ramos, three other Jesuits were also murdered: philosophy professor Amando López, theology professor Juan Ramón Moreno, and the director of UCA’s low-income children education project, Joaquín López y López. Before the soldiers withdrew, they planted a piece of cardbord at the scene reading: “FMLN executed those who informed on it. Victory or death, FMLN.”

Exposing The Cover-Up

Attempting to frame the FMLN was the first step of a cover-up that included spreading disinformation, destroying evidence, intimidating legal authorities, and even killing potential witnesses. “All these officers, and others, knowing what had happened, took steps to conceal the truth,” states the UN Truth Commission report, “…in order to conceal the responsibility of senior officers for the murders.”

But the official cover-up eventually unraveled under international scrutiny of the murders. Colleagues of the Jesuits quietly arranged for the surviving witnesses, housekeeper Lucia Cerna and her husband, to relocate in California so they could safely share what they saw. In Washington, Representative Joseph Moakley established a congressional task force to investigate. In August 1990, his lead investigator, Jim McGovern, traveled to San Salvador and obtained “breakthrough information on Jesuit slaying and coverup” from one of the military’s “most senior and respected officers,” according to a secret cable titled “The Jesuit Case: Another Big Jolt.” “If the basic story is true,” US Ambassador William Walker reported in a panic to Washington, “…our policy is in peril since the difficult-to-dismiss implications would be that the decision to kill the Jesuits was a deliberate one made at the highest levels of the ESAF [El Salvador Armed Forces].”

Now exposed, the Salvadoran military hierarchy was forced to offer up scapegoats: four mid-level officers and five soldiers from the Atlacatl Battalion. In what was widely perceived as a sham trial, in 1991, seven were acquitted on the grounds that they were just following orders. But Colonel Benavides and an intelligence officer, Lt. Yusshy Rene Mendoza, were convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison. In March 1993, however, the government of Alfredo Cristiani passed an amnesty law; the two officers were then released after being in prison less than two years.

Taking the Case to Spain

For more than a decade after the 1992 peace accords were signed, there was little movement toward judicial accountability in the Jesuit case. In 2004, however, Almudena Bernabeu, then based at the CJA, began traveling to San Salvador to meet with colleagues and relatives of the Jesuits about the possibility of filing a case in Spain. “We had a lot of wine together,” as she recalled her efforts to convince the Jesuit authorities and human rights advocates in El Salvador, who preferred to advance the cause of justice inside the country.

At the time, Spain had become a pioneering nation in the application of universal jurisdiction, a controversial tenet in international human rights law that individual nations can, and should, address unresolved crimes against humanity committed outside their borders. Only a few years before, a Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, had attempted to extradite Gen. Augusto Pinochet from London to Madrid to stand trial for human rights abuses committed during his dictatorship in Chile. In 2006, Bernabeu herself became involved in an effort to use Spain’s unique legal structures to pursue Guatemala’s former dictator Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide, building a case that eventually led a Guatemalan judge to indict and prosecute Ríos Montt in Guatemala City. “This lawyer is the nightmare of torturers and those who commit genocide,” Spain’s leading newspaper, El País, wrote about her.

In November 2008, the CJA and the Spanish Human Rights Association filed a 126-page legal complaint on the Jesuit case in the Spanish National Court. Spain had standing in the matter, their petition argued, because five of the slain Jesuits were Spanish citizens. After a series of evidentiary hearings, on May 30, 2011, Judge Eloy Velasco issued a 77-page indictment for 20 Salvadoran military officers; Spain formally issued arrest warrants and subsequently asked Interpol to detain those officials.

Nabbing Montano

The Spanish indictment threatened, but did not breach, the wall of immunity for Salvador’s top military officers. In El Salvador, nine of the indicted officers were briefly detained but then released pending a formal extradition request from Spain. Predictably, Spain’s request was denied by the Salvadoran courts, leaving the legal proceedings in Madrid without the presence of any defendants to prosecute.

At that critical point, the Jesuit case took a dramatic turn. From the reporting of veteran Salvadoran journalist Carlos Dada, Bernabeu learned that one of the defendants, Colonel Montano, was living in Massachusetts; employing a private detective, she was able to locate his address in Everett. Montano had immigrated to the United States in 2001, lying on his immigration papers about his 31-year career in the Salvadoran armed forces. After the CJA notified US authorities of his whereabouts, federal agents arrested Montano on August 23, 2011. In February 2012, he was indicted for perjury and immigration fraud; Montano pleaded guilty on September 11, 2012, and was sentenced to 21 months in the penitentiary.

That period of detention gave Bernabeu the opportunity to work with both Spanish and US authorities to arrange Montano’s extradition to Spain. Indeed, the extradition proceedings became a dress rehearsal for the trial in Madrid. On February 5, 2016, Judge Kimberly Swank ruled that Montano had committed a “terrorist” crime and approved his extradition. “Montano’s arrival to Spain,” Bernabeu told the press when the extradition order was implemented in late November 2017, “brings hope not only to the families and the Jesuit community but to all victims of El Salvador who have been waiting for justice since the end of the war.”

Truth and Accountability

When the Audiencia Nacional reconvenes on July 8, the Spanish prosecutors and lawyers representing the victims—Bernabeu and Manuel Ollé—will present their full case against Montano. The first scheduled witness, Col. Yusshy Rene Mendoza, is expected to provide an insider’s account of the planning and execution of the Jesuit massacre. Along with Colonel Benavides, Mendoza was convicted in the 1991 trial in El Salvador but released after the amnesty; he left El Salvador and repented his role in the slayings. Mendoza was originally a codefendant with Montano in the Spanish proceedings. But the judges granted a motion by Mendoza’s lawyers to drop all charges against him and allow him to testify as a witness for the prosecution.

Other witnesses will follow, among them the housekeeper Lucia Cerna and former US ambassador to El Salvador William Walker. Secret cables sent by Walker after the massacre are among the hundreds of declassified State Department, Pentagon, and CIA records submitted as evidence in the trial. Many of those documents were gathered by Kate Doyle, who directs the Salvador Documentation Project at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. “The declassified documents contain critical details about the killing of the Jesuits,” explains Doyle, who previously testified in Madrid in November 2009 to authenticate the documentation when it was first submitted, and is scheduled to testify again on July 10. “The United States spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting El Salvador’s military: We trained them, we armed them, we fed them intelligence…. So US officials—military, intelligence, and diplomatic—had really good access and connections, and wrote a lot of secret cables back to Washington about what was unfolding.” Drawing on the declassified evidence, Stanford University professor Terry Lynn Karl, who also testified in Spain in 2009 and presented evidence against Montano during the immigration fraud proceedings, is expected to provide expert analysis about the context and circumstances of the Jesuit massacre.

The prosecution is expected to sum up its case against Montano by mid-July, at which time a panel of three judges will begin to evaluate the evidence. Their ruling is expected by early August.

Whatever the verdict, the Jesuit trial carries a historic significance—for Salvadorans, for the future of universal jurisdiction, and for the simple act of providing justice for the victims. “I counted these priests as friends, and I will never forget their wisdom and strength—their lives were about more than just faith, their lives were a call to action,” said Representative Jim McGovern, now a 12-term congressman from Massachusetts. “We must look at this trial not as an end, but as a milestone on the road to justice and peace in El Salvador.”

The Jesuit case is also likely to renew international debate on the need for, and practice of, universal jurisdiction in Spain, and elsewhere. The trial is “extremely significant” and “has the potential to reopen the discussion in Spain about the necessity and importance of an effective universal jurisdiction law,” states the Guernica Centre for International Justice, which Bernabeu cofounded in 2017. “It also supports the ongoing realization that countries like Spain need to ensure that victims of human rights violations can find redress when legal avenues have been foreclosed in other jurisdictions due to restrictive legislation, corrupt judiciaries, impunity, or political opposition.”

But for the human rights lawyers and Spanish prosecutors inside the Madrid courtroom, the ultimate goal of the trial is to finally provide the truth and accountability the victims have been denied for over 30 years. “At the end of these proceedings,” Bernabeu told The Nation, “my hope is for a true and official record on those really responsible for this horrible crime. There will be no gray, no more doubt. And with that formal truth, we will honor the victims and achieve some justice.”

On March 25, as a team of Cuban doctors and medical technicians set up field hospitals in the Lombardy region of Northern Italy to treat thousands of Italians infected with Covid-19, the State Department issued an absurd warning, via Twitter, against accepting Cuban humanitarian support. “Host countries seeking Cuba’s help for #COVID-19 should scrutinize agreements and end labor abuses,” the message stated. “#Cuba offers its international medical missions to those afflicted with #COVID-19 only to make up the money it lost when countries stopped participating in the abusive program,” a reference to right-wing governments, such as those in Brazil and Bolivia, which under US pressure last year kicked out thousands of Cuban doctors providing medical services—a decision that has come back to haunt the populations of those countries as the coronavirus spreads.

Never mind that the 52 members of the Cuban medical team in Italy are risking their own lives to save those of citizens of a major European nation that is part of the NATO alliance. Or that Cuba, with its highly successful track record of developing antiviral drugs and providing rapid-response support for victims of epidemics and natural disasters, is a much-needed ally in the international struggle against the worst threat the world has confronted in recent history. For the Trump administration, scoring political points in Florida with crass, unwarranted attacks on Cuba’s humanitarian commitment remains a top priority.

But in this “dire moment of dread and pestilence,” as the writer Ariel Dorfman has described our current crisis, it is obvious that US political and foreign policy priorities must fundamentally change. With the survival of the world at stake, Washington’s punitive efforts to roll back the Cuban revolution have never seemed so petty, and so abjectly counterproductive to real US national security interests, as they do now. Rather than condemn Cuba’s humanitarian contributions to fighting the virus around the world, Washington should be actively supporting them. The most immediate way to do that is to suspend US sanctions that severely compromise Cuba’s efforts to safeguard its citizens at home as well as bring medical services to so many others abroad.

ike all nations, Cuba is struggling to contain the spread of the virus. The number of confirmed cases has expanded from a handful—all brought to the island by foreign tourists—identified on March 11 to 170 as of March 30. Over 1,500 people have been hospitalized as symptomatic, and close to 38,000 are being monitored by Cuban doctors in their homes. The Cuban government has closed schools and hotels as well as the country’s borders to all nonresidents, effectively bringing the tourism-driven economy to a standstill.

But unlike most nations, Cuba’s ability to confront the pandemic is hobbled by severe US sanctions that have escalated under the Trump administration. The trade embargo, almost six decades old, continues to hamper Cuba’s financial transactions and its ability to export and import needed materials. Among other punitive measures, the Trump administration has effectively penalized foreign shipping companies ferrying cargo from other countries to Cuba, impeding the flow of oil, foodstuffs, and other commerce critical to the daily needs of Cuba’s citizenry. Even before the coronavirus crisis hit, the Cuban economy was experiencing chronic shortages. There is such a lack of textiles on the island, for example, that the Cuban government has called upon its citizens to manufacture cloth face masks at home to mitigate the spread of the virus.

Given the globalized threat of the deadly pathogen, the security of the United States, and all nations, depends on international humanitarian deterrence. With millions of lives at stake, a humanitarian-based US foreign policy is the only approach that will advance the war against this existential enemy.

For those reasons, a sanctions relief movement is now underway. Last week, UN Secretary General António Guterres issued a call for the waiving of sanctions against countries such as Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela to ensure that those nations can obtain critically needed medical equipment, food, and other supplies. “In a context of global pandemic, impeding medical efforts in one country heightens the risk for all of us,” the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, added in a statement. “At this crucial time, both for global public health reasons, and to support the rights and lives of millions of people in these countries, sectoral sanctions should be eased or suspended.”

Fearful that US sanctions could cost the lives of their relatives on the island, Cuban-Americans are urging the Trump administration to “lift the commercial and financial restrictions imposed by the U.S. on Cuba.” A Spanish-language petition spearheaded by a decorated Iraq War veteran, Carlos Lazo, and posted last week on Change.org, implores President Trump to end sanctions that impede Cuba’s ability to obtain food, medicine, and medical equipment and, instead, to “extend the hand of friendship and solidarity to the Cuban people”—at least for the duration of this calamity. As of March 30, close to 10,000 people had signed the petition.

And in Washington, a coalition of policy advocates, trade lobby associations, and human rights groups led by the Center for Democracy in the Americas has called for the suspension of sanctions, restrictions, and licensing requirements that limit remittances, impede Cuba’s ability to import commercial goods, and block or delay donations of medical equipment such as ventilators, test kits, masks, and gloves. “These unprecedented times require us to recognize our common humanity and take immediate action to limit human suffering,” says the declaration, which is signed by the Washington Office on Latin America, Engage Cuba, and the National Foreign Trade Council, among others. “Doing so will demonstrate U.S. compassion to the Cuban people.”

But sanctions relief will also demonstrate US recognition of Cuba as an invaluable ally in a worldwide struggle that supersedes ideology and is redefining the traditional meaning of national and international security. Cuba has received requests for rapid-response medical teams to fight the virus from not only Italy but also Venezuela, Nicaragua, Suriname, Jamaica, and Grenada; it has a role to play in this global battle that far exceeds its size as a Caribbean island nation. In the confrontation with the coronavirus, Cuba, unlike the United States, is heeding the admonition of UN Secretary General Guterres: “This is the time for solidarity, not exclusion.”

On March 12, as a British ocean liner approached the Bahamas with almost 50 passengers and crew displaying symptoms of, or diagnosed with, the coronavirus, many on board hoped that their “voyage of the damned” to find a Caribbean nation that would allow them to dock was finally over. The coronavirus-stricken cruise ship, MS Braemar, flew the Bahamian flag; surely the British commonwealth where the ship was registered would be obliged to allow them to disembark for treatment and transportation back to the United Kingdom.

Instead, the Bahamian Ministry of Transport declared that the cruise ship would “not be permitted to dock at any port in The Bahamas and no persons will be permitted to disembark the vessel.” Despite frantic efforts by the British Foreign Ministry and Fred Olsen Cruise Lines, which owns the ship, over the next five days several other Caribbean nations, as well as United States, reportedly denied docking rights.

But on March 18, Cuba became the lone nation to accept the ship. Employing strict guidelines from the World Health Organization, the Cuban authorities assisted more than 1,000 passengers and crew members to exit the boat and board a caravan of buses with a special police escort to José Martí International Airport for chartered flights back to the United Kingdom. To contain the virus required “the efforts of the entire international community,” as Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez, explained Cuba’s humanitarian response to Britain’s request for help. “Let’s reinforce health care, solidarity and international cooperation.” As the ship docked at the port of Mariel, some 25 miles west of Havana, Cuban citizens reinforced that message by transmitting, via Facebook, best wishes to passengers on board the Braemar. “I am sitting in my cabin responding to every Cuban who has suddenly sent me uplifting, welcoming messages of support. I am quite honestly in floods of tears at their kindness,” one cruiser, Anthea Guthrie, posted on her Facebook page. “They have made us not only feel tolerated, but actually welcome.”

ike every other nation across the world, Cuba is grappling with the spread of Covid-19. In mid-March, three Italian tourists were diagnosed with the virus and hospitalized; one subsequently died. Other recent travelers to the island have also tested positive and are currently undergoing treatment. Major gatherings at cultural and sports events have been canceled. Until yesterday, however, the government of President Miguel Díaz-Canel refrained from taking drastic action to curtail movement on and to the island. However, on March 20, with the number of confirmed infections at 21 and one death, the government announced that it was closing its borders to non-residents.

Cuba’s medical contributions to the escalating global battle against the pandemic have generated more attention than the containment, so far, of the disease on the island. A drug developed by the Cuban biotech industry, Interferon alfa 2b, which boosts the immune system and has proved effective in previous epidemics such as dengue fever and HIV/AIDS, was among the treatments chosen by Chinese medical authorities to stem the coronavirus outbreak; a number of other nations, including Chile and Spain, have sought access to the drug. Along with supplies of Interferon alfa 2b, a team of Cuban doctors has reportedly been dispatched to Italy to support medical efforts in that Covid-ravaged nation.

Cuba’s international efforts to stem the spread of the virus outside its borders are part of a long and consistent pattern of global humanitarian commitment. For decades, the government has provided full scholarships to thousands of foreign medical students to study at the vaunted Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina, Cuba’s international medical university. Cuban medical brigades have brought free health care and services to impoverished populations in dozens of Third World nations; since 2004, for example, Cuban ophthalmologists have performed eye surgery—cataract, glaucoma, and retina re-attachment procedures, among other treatments—in some 39 nations as part of a humanitarian aid program known as “Operation Miracle.”

The “doctors’ diplomacy” programs have also been internationally recognized for their rapid response to disasters and epidemics. Cuban medical personnel were the “unsung heroes” in Haiti, according to National Public Radio, after the devastating January 2010 earthquake struck that country, killing at least 100,000 people; some 400 Cuban doctors were among the first responders to establish and staff hospitals for thousands of injured Haitians. Cuban medical personnel also established their credentials for courage during the dangerous fight to stem the Ebola epidemic in Africa. “One of the very first countries to step forward was Cuba, which sent more than 200 health professionals to the region—an awe-inspiring contribution for a country of just 11 million people,” stated then–US ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, in October 2016—one of a number of compliments Obama administration officials paid to the achievements of the Cuban Revolution during the two years Washington was pursuing a policy of reconciliation, dialogue, and normalization of relations with Havana. “Noble efforts like these are precisely why the United States and Cuba must continue to find ways to engage, even as our differences persist,” Ambassador Power noted during her UN speech on the positive potential for US-Cuba collaboration in the international medical field and beyond.

ut that engagement, so critical as the world confronts an existential threat to life as we know it, has been destroyed by the current administration’s policies of regime change. Trump has reversed the Obama effort at peaceful coexistence and replaced it with an aggressive set of sanctions, restrictions, and punitive operations that have escalated as the 2020 electoral season evolves. Cuba has accused the United States of targeting its international medical programs by pressing nations to expel Cuban medical brigades; two of them, Bolivia and Brazil, already have. The administration has limited travel to and from the island, and effectively threatened shipping companies ferrying imports to Cuba, disrupting trade and aggravating shortages of foodstuffs and petroleum.

“This pandemic knows no borders nor is it held hostage to history or politics,” states a sanctions relief petition currently circulating among Washington advocacy groups. Drafted by the Center for Democracy in the Americas, the statement calls for lifting all restrictions on remittances, humanitarian donations, and penalties against shipping companies, and for a return to dialogue between Washington and Havana. “The global community must do everything within its power to stop the spread of the virus, protect the people in its path, and ease the suffering it leaves in its wake. For the U.S. government, this means removing the sanctions that hurt the Cuban people the most.”

For Cubans, the irony is not lost that they are being punished at a time when they have a valuable contribution to make to the well-being of so many beyond their borders. “The great paradox is that while the ships contracted by Cuba to carry oil and food are harassed by the United States, the ships carrying the sick that nobody wants in their ports receive solidarity and respect in Cuba,” Cuban journalist Rosa Miriam Elizalde wrote recently in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada.

Indeed, for the passengers who were aboard the MS Braemar, Cuba’s solidarity and respect at a time of dire fear and uncertainty has made a demonstrable difference in their lives. “Thank you, Cuba that you could open your hearts to us. We will never ever forget that you reached out to us when absolutely nobody, and I mean nobody, else would,” Anthea Guthrie wrote on Facebook. “I trust we will never ever forget the help we’ve had from a poor country with a brave, huge heart.”

On October 25, an estimated 1.2 million Chileans gathered in Plaza Italia—now designated as “Dignity Plaza”—in the capital of Santiago to protest ingrained socioeconomic disparity, vast systemic corruption, and other government abuses. Ever since Augusto Pinochet imposed Milton Friedman’s “free market” ideology of privatization on Chile during his military dictatorship, the country has pursued neoliberal economic policies. Chile is one of Latin America’s most prosperous countries, but it also ranks among the 20 most unequal nations on the globe, with the top 1 percent holding 33 percent of the country’s wealth, according to the World Bank. This has led to deep social and economic divisions.

The October 25 expression of people power was largely peaceful, but since the protest movement exploded on October 18—triggered by an increase in subway fares and led by Chilean students—vandalism, looting, rioting, and the burning of metro stations and other buildings and businesses have become an almost daily occurrence in Chilean cities, along with many other forms of opposition to the status quo. The security forces have responded with great violence: In the first month of protests, 22 people were killed and more than 2,000 injured—many by police brutality. Over 200 Chileans have been blinded by rubber bullets fired by police at point-blank range, and more than 6,000 have been arrested. As the protests continue, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, the Organization of American States, and Amnesty International are all investigating evidence of human rights abuses committed by the government of conservative President Sebastián Piñera. The Chilean Congress is now weighing a motion to remove him from office.

During a visit to Santiago on November 22, Nation contributor Peter Kornbluh sat down with award-winning Chilean journalist Mónica González Mujica to obtain her unique perspective on these dramatic events. González has had a long, prolific career as a writer, editor, and investigative reporter in Chile, exposing the human rights crimes of the Pinochet regime and documenting political and economic corruption in the post-Pinochet era. In 2002 she founded and directed a weekly magazine, Siete+7; in 2005, she founded and became executive editor of the daily newspaper Diario Siete. In 2007, she cofounded (with US journalist John Dinges) the Center for Investigative Journalism (CIPER), where she was executive editor until earlier this year. González just received Chile’s highest media honor, the National Journalism Award, in recognition of her 40-year career that, according to the award committee, “has honored the profession” and “supported the return of freedom of expression and democracy in Chile.”

—Peter Kornbluh

Peter Kornbluh: One of the dominant battle cries of the dramatic protest movement in your country is “¡Chile Despertó!” (Chile Awoke!) Can you share with us what that means?

Mónica González: It means just that. People have made a connection between the quality of their lives and the systematic corruption of Chilean businesses and the multinational corporations and the systematic fraud in Congress that involves all politicians—which is why there are no political party flags waving in the demonstrations.

The eyes of the Chilean people have opened; they are acting accordingly. Some are protesting. Others are involved in permanent town hall meetings [cabildos]. This last week I have been invited to attend 25 cabildos in Concepción, Antofagasta, and Valparaíso, and others in Santiago. The people are mobilized. They have found each other again, and they don’t want to go back to their homes alone. That is beautiful. Chileans have found their identity with people they didn’t even know. Some families, of course, have had conflicts and have broken apart. But this fracture is much less ideological than in 1973 [when the US-backed military coup took place]. Now it is the people against the elite.

PK: How do you think President Sebastián Piñera has handled this crisis?

MG: Piñera is completely paralyzed, overwhelmed, and outnumbered. He does not have the capacity to deal with this. But I don’t know if there is anyone who would have that capacity.

Let’s be clear: This popular rebellion, whose dimensions we still do not understand, caught us all by surprise. This caught us completely unprepared, some more than others.

PK: So, the fact that all hell broke loose in Chile in mid-October was completely unexpected?

MG: Yes and no. First, I’ll tell you why it wasn’t a surprise. I have been working intensely over the past 12 years, since we founded CIPER [Chile’s leading online investigative news outlet], on corruption. I knew that it was a problem, but I had not realized how systematic the problem was, and how profoundly Chile’s institutions were corrupted across the board.

The corruption of the system is the mother of what is happening to us now. The relationship between politics and private money has corrupted the republic and our democracy, and, finally, the very soul of this country. People believe in nothing, and they believe in no one. That’s where we are.

PK: And the depth of anger among Chilean citizens? Did that surprise you?

MG: The level of discontent does not surprise me. Since 2011 there have been a series of huge, multimillion-dollar financial scandals involving the major economic actors in this country. These scandals have resulted in no jail time for anyone. So you have this series of scandals that shook people, and the impunity provoked great indignation. The cumulative effect of that indignation resulted in this current social explosion.

What I didn’t realize was that people had reached such a level of clarity about the putrefaction of Chile’s economic system. I underestimated the indignation and frustration of the people of Chile. Santiago in some areas looks as if it has been bombed, and getting from one sector of the city to another is incredibly difficult.

There is a tremendous level of violence—rioting, looting—which provokes great fear. But that fear is much less than the anger and the rage that people feel; much less than the desire to say “Enough!”

PK: Share with us some of the specific grievances of the Chilean public that have fueled the protest movement.

MG: I’ll give you a list. The list has to do with the system, which is not a free-market system but a system of accumulation and monopolies where multinational economic groups play a huge role.

For example: One focus of discontent is the system of retirement pensions. Chile doesn’t have a social security system like the majority of Europe. We had a social security system before the [1973] coup. But the dictatorship [of Augusto Pinochet] eliminated it, and in subsequent decades of democracy we have not been able to recover that social security system. The majority of the accumulation of capital is held by seven private AFPs [Administradoras de Fondos de Pensiones, five of which are controlled by US banks and insurance companies, including Prudential and Metlife]—the creation of the military dictatorship which [the Pinochetistas] tout as one of its greatest economic successes. That’s a total lie.

This privatized retirement system is one of obligatory savings; it is not voluntary. It was created in the 1980s and was implemented by force. The system currently has over 10 million participants. All workers must participate. It was sold to the Chilean public on the claim that people would retire with 75 percent of their most recent salaries. A lie.

In fact, the pensions that people receive are truly miserable. An average pension for a man is $492 per month. For women, on average, $295 per month. It’s lunacy!

Education is another problem. In 2011, there was a huge [student] uprising to protest the poor quality of education and the profits being made off of university students. Eight years have passed and there is still no legislation addressing those issues. At CIPER, we exposed how each university was taking money from profiteers, how their educational systems were substandard, how the universities purchased their accreditation, and how students were becoming deeply indebted to pay for tuition, in order to obtain a degree that is worth absolutely nothing. But the prosecutors who undertook that investigation were not able to punish anyone because, in the end, it is legal fraud.

A third, widespread grievance is the crime of collusion—price-fixing. There has been price-fixing in the supermarkets, on the cost of chicken, and collusion in fixing inter-urban bus fares. There was the major scandal of the Matte Group, which controls paper production in Brazil and in Chile, where they colluded with a Swedish company for years to artificially raise the price of diapers and toilet paper.

In the middle of the Matte Group scandal in 2016, the Chilean Congress passed a law to increase the punishment for those who engaged in price-fixing, but of course no one from the Matte Group was sent to prison. Indeed, since that law was passed, not a single criminal case has been brought forth to the National Economic Prosecutor. Zero! Not one.

But the most egregious criminal price-fixing cases involve the pharmaceutical industry. Three multinational companies dominate the Chilean market. And they have colluded to keep the prices of medicine extremely high. This scandal provoked a high level of public indignation. Just in the past 48 hours the Fiscalía Nacional Económica released a new report stating that the cartel of pharmaceutical corporations that control the Chilean market allocates $200 million per year to bribe doctors to prescribe their products. Because of the lack of penalties and regulations, you have medications that go from 100 percent more than their value up to 400 percent more.

Only now, in the middle of this uprising, has the Chilean Congress focused on approving a law enabling the government to regulate the prices of medications.

PK: One concrete result of the demonstrations has been an agreement between the government and the political parties to replace Chile’s Pinochet-era Constitution, which safeguards the privatization of the economy and impedes socioeconomic change. The accord calls for a referendum in April for the Chilean people to vote on how to proceed in drafting a new Constitution. How do you see this process and the success of accomplishing it?

MG: I see it as very dangerous and uncertain, and also as hopeful. Everything related to the chastity belt they—the military regime—put around this democracy is spelled out in the Constitution. For example, the AFPs [that control retirement funds] are tied to the Constitution. All labor union activities were destroyed during the dictatorship, and the Constitution prohibits them from reorganizing. Collective bargaining is prohibited.

For the first time, the Chilean people are making that connection, but they also see the long process of arriving at a new Constitution as distant from their needs and demands. They want action now! They want to see the electric bills go down, they want to see water bills go down, they want to see pensions increased.

But I also see the rich as very fearful, I see the economic groups as very fearful, and so I imagine there is forceful pressure on the government to restore order in the streets.

PK: Let’s talk about the government’s attempts to restore order in the face of daily rioting and looting. The shadow of Pinochet’s human rights atrocities hangs over Piñera’s efforts to confront the social upheaval. At the same time, the Chilean police, known as the Carabineros, have engaged in egregious human rights violations, including shooting young protesters in the face with rubber bullets, deliberately blinding or partially blinding hundreds of them. These abuses have become a worldwide symbol of Chile’s new repression.

MG: It is a very powerful symbol of the repression, but of course it is much more than a symbol. When you see young people who have lost an eye, in some cases both eyes, it’s a brutal thing. So we are talking about 60,000 Carabineros stationed throughout Chile, and they are very dangerous. Because they feel free to kill.

What is clear is that the police knew that they weren’t supposed to shoot the pellets at a range of less than 20 meters, but they have violated that policy over and over again. Not only do we have 220 people who have lost an eye, we also have over 1,000 people who have been severely injured and hospitalized as a result of the pellets. On top of that, there are an additional 400 people injured by bullets. If you add all this together, this is huge catastrophe. These abuses must be punished.

PK: What will the impact of this protest movement be on Chile? Is this a turning point in Chilean history?

MG: Chile will not, for better or for worse, be the same as it was before. We are used to earthquakes, and they usually last a maximum of five minutes. We say OK, it’s over, and we begin to rebuild. This situation, however, is like a hurricane. Chile will never be the same because this hurricane is not ending anytime soon, and I don’t know where it will take us.

I believe that this explosion of protests—which reminds us of the dictatorship because of the violence involved—has shown us a face of Chile that we didn’t recognize. I never witnessed anything like this during the Popular Unity government [of Salvador Allende in the early 1970s] or even under President Eduardo Frei in the 1960s.

As we are speaking today, the hurricane has become harsher; it has developed more powerful winds. We are in a very delicate period, because the social violence has become even harsher, and much of it is orchestrated by organized crime. In order to rob gun factories, the looters used weapons typically used by organized crime. They set off fireworks in [Santiago’s] Plaza Italia, and these are typically used by narco-traffickers to announce that a shipment is arriving or leaving. The narcos are one of the main winners of this month’s protests, because not every burned-out and looted supermarket, pharmacy, and bank will be rebuilt in those peripheral poblaciones, where poor people reside. That vacuum will be filled by the narcos. I am sure that they are there and they are present in all those lootings. It’s become a territorial and very unequal struggle, because we are fighting for more democracy, not for destruction. So we don’t know where this will lead us.

This is the first time we are confronting a power that is different from what we have confronted in the past. Today, there is an “elite” that represents the real power of the multinationals, which are complicit with those who hold local economic power [the 1 percent]. Piñera is one of 11 billionaires in Chile. Essentially, we have multinational corporations and the 1 percent of the richest against the majority of the people.

I have watched the rich put on their war paint, because they are terrified. They’re not buying anything. They’re taking their dollars out of the country, because they also do not know where this will end. We are in uncharted territory, where everyone is trying to measure their strength, but no one knows what they will ultimately confront.

PK: Historically, Chile has been a pioneering nation. Are Chileans capable of creating a new model for change that addresses the problem plaguing so many nations—economic inequality? What is your hope for a model that Chile could create for the rest of the world?

MG: You know, yesterday I heard the song of the Chilean music group Prisioneros called “El baile de los que sobran” (“The Dance of the Leftover People”) being sung during protests in another Latin American nation, Colombia. [This song, which became popular in Chilean protests against the Pinochet regime in the 1980s, has now been revived as an anthem of the current protest movement.] I shuddered. It reminded me that after the [1973] coup I started hearing “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido” [“The People United Will Never Be Defeated,” the 1973 song by Sergio Ortega and Quilapayún that was an anthem of the Allende government] being sung in so many other countries. And that I don’t want. But I like “El baile de los que sobran” because of that phrase, “No one really wanted to help us.” In truth, that’s how it is. Now these young people sing these lyrics: “No one really wanted to help us. Join the dance of the leftover people. Take my hand, look at me, touch me, we are together.”

We will see if we are capable of constructing and engaging in dialogue, of finding each other, and to have the patience to engage in dialogue to achieve a new Constitution, and to strongly press for a new social agenda so that people do see actual change.

I see three scenarios:

1) The rich will say, OK, it’s over, the narcos and thugs are in control of the streets, this is no longer feasible, we will declare a state of emergency and bring the military back into the streets in order to ensure order for as long as necessary. So I see the possibility of a military coup, but one where nobody could say, “Yes, there was a military coup.” That is the worst-case scenario.

2) Things calm down, with continued isolated incidents. Young people become tired, and older people have to go back to work, because people have to eat. Everything gets postponed until March, when we have a new explosion because of capital flight and the dire poverty that results from the collapse of the economy amid this ongoing upheaval. That is a very possible scenario.

3) We start to rebuild. Despite the fact that we will continue to see isolated incidents because young people have lost their fear, we start to advance in preparations to vote in April to change the Constitution, with a constituent assembly—an independent elected body voted for with 100 percent of the citizenry participating—and progress in setting a new social agenda. In other words, a democracy with all its ups and downs, but constructing a true democracy.

In Chile today you find many young people participating in the protests who say, “I am doing this for me and my parents, or for me and my grandparents because they don’t make enough to eat or to cover their medication.” And that is the truth. I have never heard of anything like this in my entire life, even when I was a young girl, the daughter of a worker. We have actually seen cases of grandparents committing suicide. They don’t make enough to survive. And that is why I have a seen a rebirth of a word that my father, who was an important labor leader in railroads, used—that is the word “dignity.”

That is a word we lost in 1973, when the military coup took place. And we have not been able to recuperate that term again. But now “dignity” reemerges in its glory and majesty. In other words, we will continue to struggle until that word becomes the norm, and the reality.

When Ambassador Héctor Hidalgo Solá was abducted off a busy Buenos Aires street on July 18, 1977, his family had lit tle idea what had happened to him. Unlike many of the estimated 30,000 Argentine desaparecidos—the people disappeared by agents of the country’s military dictatorship—Hidalgo Solá was not a liberal, a leftist, or an armed militant opposed to the regime. He was, in fact, the military government’s appointed diplomatic representative to Venezuela.1

In that capacity, however, Hidalgo Solá opened his embassy doors to prominent exiles, including labor leaders, politicians, and relatives of the disappeared seeking answers on the fate of their loved ones. When Emilio Mignone, whose daughter was one of the victims, met with Hidalgo Solá in Caracas, the ambassador told him he would go to Buenos Aires to persuade the military government to change its repressive policies. If he tried that, Mignone warned him that they would kill him.2

This past spring, nearly 42 years after Hidalgo Solá’s disappearance, the Trump administration declassified some 47,000 pages of secret US intelligence files on the “Dirty War” that Argentina’s military government waged against its own people. More than 7,000 CIA, FBI, Pentagon, and National Security Council (NSC) records—now posted on a specially created US government website at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—shed considerable light on the state of terror that existed in Argentina from 1976 to 1983, when the military held power. The detailed documents provide extensive new evidence on the infrastructure of repression, Argentina’s role in the international terrorism campaign known as Operation Condor, and most important, the fate of hundreds of desaparecidos who were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered—among them Hidalgo Solá.3

“Suspicion will fall on military hardliners who were upset last year when Hidalgo Solá received at his embassy a labor leader ousted after the March 24, 1976 coup,” states one secret intelligence assessment filed just eight days after the ambassador disappeared. FBI sources believed he had been eliminated because the military suspected him of providing passports to exiled opponents of the regime in Venezuela, according to another report. “Hidalgo Solá was kidnapped and assassinated by a special group which has worked for the State Intelligence Secretariat (SIDE),” asserts a secret CIA intelligence cable, which identified the agents responsible and provided an address for the secret torture center where he was allegedly held.4

On April 12, these documents were included in the thousands of declassified records formally turned over to Argentina during an official presentation at the National Archives in Washington, DC. Along with Argentine diplomats and US officials, several family members of victims attended the solemn ceremony. Among them was the ambassador’s granddaughter Azul Hidalgo Solá.5

“DECLASSIFICATION DIPLOMACY”6

he Argentina Declassification Project, as it is officially known in US government circles, is one of those rare cases in which Donald Trump completed rather than reversed a policy initiated by his predecessor. When Fernando Cutz, then the NSC’s senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs, briefed the new president in preparation for the April 2017 state visit of Argentine President Mauricio Macri, he explained to Trump that Macri personally requested the special declassification when Obama visited Buenos Aires a year earlier. Trump had personal ties to Macri: Decades before, they bar-hopped together while their fathers negotiated real estate deals in New York; more recently, the Trump Organization sought Macri’s assistance in its plans to construct a Trump Tower in Buenos Aires. “It helped to be able to present the project as a Macri ask rather than an Obama initiative,” Cutz recalled.7

The real genesis of the Argentina Declassification Project, however, started with a presidential scheduling faux pas. In the spring of 2016, the Obama administration arranged a historic two-day trip for the president to Havana and, from there, a three-day trip to Argentina. The timing of the high-profile state visits was determined, in part, by the fact that it was spring break for Obama’s two daughters, and he wanted them to vacation in Cuba as well as in Patagonia in southern Argentina.8

But the White House announcement that the US president would be in Buenos Aires on March 24, 2016—by coincidence the 40th anniversary of the bloody military takeover—sparked an outcry from human rights groups in Argentina. The United States was still viewed, in the words of Argentine Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, as “an accomplice of coups d’état in this region.” Massive protests, with banners declaring “Day of Memory: Obama Get Out,” were threatened. In meetings with Macri, human rights activists, led by the famed Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, demanded that he ask Obama to declassify intelligence records that might help them to locate their missing sons and daughters, and even the grandchildren who had been born in secret detention centers and then adopted by military families after their mothers were executed.9

To redress this serious affront to the victims’ families, the White House and the Macri government orchestrated a round of what I call “declassification diplomacy”—the use of secret US documents to advance bilateral relations. On the morning of March 24, Obama and Macri visited the Parque de la Memoria (Remembrance Park) in Buenos Aires to pay their respects to the victims of the Dirty War. “Today, in response to a request from President Macri, and to continue helping the families of the victims find some of the truth and justice they deserve, I can announce that the United States government will declassify even more documents from that period, including, for the first time, military and intelligence records,” Obama stated in a poignant speech. “I believe we have a responsibility to confront the past with honesty and transparency.”10

In June 2016, the White House issued a “tasker” to all US national security agencies; titled “Argentina Declassification Project,” it mandated an 18-month file search and review of relevant records. “The Administration continues to support efforts to clarify the facts surrounding human rights abuses, acts of terrorism, and political violence in Argentina during the ‘Dirty War’ period from 1975 through 1984,” the directive stated, and it called on the national security agencies “to prioritize support for this effort.” According to John Fitzpatrick, who directed the NSC’s Office of Records Access and Information Security Management at the time, almost 400 archivists, analysts, Freedom of Information Act officers, and records managers drawn from 16 different government agencies participated in finding and processing the documents, expending more than 30,000 work hours to complete the project.11

Before Obama left office, his administration released the first two tranches of records. And during an April 2017 summit, Trump handed Macri a pen drive containing the third tranche. Predictably, Trump marked the final release of these documents in April by proclaiming it the biggest ever. “The release of records,” Trump wrote in a letter to Macri, “constitutes the largest declassification of United States Government records directly to a foreign government in history.”12

NAMING NAMES13

hen intelligence documents are declassified, they’re usually replete with heavy redactions—swaths of information blacked out in the name of national security or to protect covert “sources and methods.” But because of the meticulous quality control exercised by an unheralded NSC records manager named John Powers, the released CIA, FBI, and Defense Intelligence Agency records on Argentina are far less censored than previous special declassifications. This unique transparency has rendered them far more valuable to historians, as well as to the legal investigators who continue to prosecute these crimes against humanity.14

As a collection, the documents constitute a gruesome and sadistic catalog of state terrorism. For example, one CIA cable reports that several months after the 1976 coup, federal police rounded up and murdered 30 militants en masse and then scattered their body parts—through the use of dynamite—in an open field “as a warning to leftist extremists.” Another FBI report provides details of how security forces intercepted and stole a funeral hearse carrying the remains of Marcos Osatinsky, a leader of a leftist guerrilla group called the Montoneros, “to prevent the body from being subjected to an autopsy, which would have clearly shown he had been tortured.” At least two dozen FBI and CIA cables record a SIDE operation to kidnap, torture, and execute two Cuban Embassy officers suspected of aiding militants in Argentina. After the Cubans were murdered, according to one FBI report marked “secret/eyes only,” “their bodies were cemented into one large storage drum and thrown into the Rio Lujan” near Buenos Aires. One State Department cable describes how security agents detained and tortured a wheelchair-bound psychologist for the purpose of gaining information about one of her patients.15

Torture was routine, reported Patricia Derian, then the assistant secretary of state for human rights, after a fact-finding trip to Argentina. “The electric ‘picana,’ something like a supercharged cattle prod, is still apparently a favorite tool, as is the ‘submarine’ treatment (immersion of the head in a tub of water, urine, excrement, blood, or a combination of these),” she said in a declassified summary of abuses. “There is no longer any doubt that Argentina has the worst human rights record in South America.”16

Of course, details about such atrocities have been in the public domain for years, as surviving victims have stepped forward and hundreds of human rights trials in Argentina have presented evidence and testimony. But in a break from the strictures of secrecy, many of the recently declassified documents go beyond a description of the human rights violations and identify the violators. “These documents name names. They name the names of the perpetrators and the names of their victims,” observes my colleague Carlos Osorio, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, who provided extensive expertise and support to the Argentina Declassification Project. “And because they name those names, they provide a level of truth and accountability that many other declassification projects have failed to achieve.”17

Moreover, hundreds of reports by FBI agent Robert Scherrer, who consistently provided the most detailed intelligence on the operations and abuses of the Argentine security forces, contain the unredacted identities of his confidential sources, thereby providing a master list of the individuals who witnessed, knew about, or were directly involved in the apparatus of repression. Although many of his sources are now deceased, the uncensored records will allow human rights investigators to pinpoint who inside the Argentine military, intelligence, and police were privy to details about specific atrocities—information that will advance a number of ongoing human rights investigations.18

CONDOR 119

ased in Buenos Aires, Scherrer became the lead FBI investigator of the September 21, 1976, car-bomb assassination of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his 25-year-old colleague Ronni Moffitt at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. Scherrer’s famous “Chilbom” report was the first—and for years the only—partially declassified document that mentioned Operation Condor, identifying it as a “recently established [organization] between cooperating intelligence services in South America.” The intelligence Scherrer gathered suggested that the Letelier-Moffitt assassination was a possible “third phase” of the Condor mission spearheaded by Gen. Augusto Pinochet of Chile and his secret police, the DINA.20

Scherrer’s Chilbom cable has now been declassified completely unredacted, and the identity of his source has been revealed as an Argentine Army intelligence operative involved in death squad efforts in Europe. “Source is Dr. Arturo Horacio Poire,” the document states, “who is a member of the Argentine special group, which will possibly participate in the third phase of ‘Operation Condor.’” The identification of the source has opened the door to renewed investigation into Condor’s efforts to extend its repression abroad.21

But the unredacted version of Scherrer’s cable is only one of dozens of exceptionally detailed FBI and CIA records on Operation Condor found in the Argentina collection. They provide a far more comprehensive history of Condor’s infrastructure and operational capacity than was previously known. Among the substantive new revelations:22

§ Argentina—not Pinochet’s Chile, which came up with the idea of a Murder Inc. in the Southern Cone—was designated Condor 1. Declassified CIA records make it clear that the numerical call signs for member nations were alphabetical: Argentina was Condor 1; Bolivia, Condor 2; Chile, Condor 3; Paraguay, Condor 4; Uruguay, Condor 5; etc. These designations were used in encrypted communications among the Condor nations.23

§ Argentina hosted the operational headquarters for a special Condor program code-named Teseo—Spanish for Theseus, the mythical Greek king who slew the fearsome Minotaur and other foes of the social order—whose mission was “to liquidate selected individuals” abroad. Secret CIA cables describe Teseo as “a unit established by the Condor cooperative organization of South American intelligence services to conduct physical attacks against subversive targets,” first in Paris and then in other European cities.24

§ In September 1976, the Condor nations signed an agreement, titled “Teseo Regulation, Operations Center,” to ratify their cooperation in planning, financing, logistics, communications, and “selection of targets.” The CIA obtained a copy of the accord, which describes, in banal detail, how each intelligence service would contribute to the international assassination program. The operations center would be staffed by “permanent representatives from each participating service.” Their daily work schedule would run from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm and from 2:30 pm to 7:30 pm. Each country would make a contribution of $10,000 for operational expenses, with monthly dues of $200 paid “prior to the 30th of each month.” Assassination teams dispatched to Europe would be made up of four individuals, “with a female eventually being included”—presumably to help provide cover for the mission. “Operational costs abroad are estimated at $3,500 per person for ten days,” the agreement stated, “with an additional $1,000 the first time out for clothing allowance.” Under the key section titled “Execution of the Target,” the accord stated that the operational teams would “(A) Intercept the Target, (B) Carry out the operation, and (C) Escape.”25

§ CIA officials viewed these Condor murder plots as a potential scandal for the agency and proactively moved to thwart them in Europe. “The plans of these countries to undertake offensive action outside of their own jurisdictions poses new problems for the Agency,” wrote Ray Warren, the head of the Latin America division, sounding the alarm to the CIA’s acting deputy director in late July 1976. “Every precaution must be taken to ensure that the Agency is not wrongfully accused of being party to this type of activity.”26

A month later, Warren again warned his superiors of the “adverse political ramifications for the Agency should ‘Condor’ engage in assassinations and other flagrant violations of human rights.” But he also reported on the “action” that CIA agents were taking to “preempt” those ramifications “should the ‘Condor’ countries proceed with the European aspect of their plans.” That section of Warren’s memorandum is still redacted. But another declassified document based on Warren’s memo and other CIA records—a top-secret sensitive Senate report on Condor researched and written by Senate legal counsel Michael J. Glennon—was released unredacted. “The CIA warned the governments of the countries in which the assassinations were likely to occur—France and Portugal—which in turn warned possible targets,” states that uncensored report. “The plot was foiled.”27

As revealed in these records, the CIA’s ability to countermand Condor’s murderous missions in Europe renews questions about its failure to detect and deter a similar mission in downtown Washington—the September 1976 car bombing that took the lives of Letelier and Moffitt. Until now, “Operation Condor has been somewhat of a deadly mystery,” says investigative journalist John Dinges, who is using the declassified records to revise his pioneering book The Condor Years. “For decades, both the CIA and FBI kept us in the dark about what they knew and when they knew it.” But with the newly released documents, “that central question can be answered, and it’s embarrassing for the US government,” Dinges concludes. “There was an intimate liaison with Condor officials and ample early intelligence of Condor plans that could have prevented the assassination in Washington.”28

THE CONTRIBUTION OF DECLASSIFICATION29

ike so many records in the Argentina Declassification Project, the Condor papers provide names, dates, meeting places, and vivid descriptions of the clandestine programs undertaken by the intelligence and security services of the Southern Cone. This trove of new evidence will assist human rights investigators in the former Condor countries who are continuing to pursue the state-sponsored crimes of terrorism committed during the era of military rule.30

Indeed, since the documents were released in April, teams of Argentine officials have been assessing them for their evidentiary value in human rights prosecutions. In mid-September, according to Argentine Embassy officials, the country’s justice ministry transmitted a set of inquiries and requests for clarification to Washington. US officials who worked on the declassification project are currently addressing those questions.31

The documents are “already contributing to ongoing cases that are both in the investigative and trial phases,” according to a statement from the Office of the Public Prosecutor in Argentina provided to The Nation. They have revealed “new data on how institutions [of repression] functioned under the dictatorship” as well as “data on the responsibility of officials who participated in massive human rights violations.”32

Human rights organizations, as well as the families of victims for whom the documents can provide a sad but poignant closure, are also reviewing these materials. Much of Argentina’s archives of repression has been disappeared—burned, buried, or perhaps thrown into the ocean—as were so many victims. “In a number of cases,” as Carlos Osorio told the audience at the April 12 release of the records, “these documents will provide those families with the only evidence they have ever had on the fate of their loved ones.”33

The family members of Héctor Hidalgo Solá are among those reviewing the records. “The declassification process and results have been an emotional journey,” affirmed Azul Hidalgo Solá, who never had a chance to know her grandfather. But “the documents have helped me construct a full narrative of my family’s history.”34

In an annual ritual of repudiation, the United Nations next week will vote overwhelmingly to condemn the 57-year-old US economic embargo against Cuba. Last year the vote was 189 nations to just two—Israel and the United States. This year the results are expected to be the same.

But even as the world community once again demands an end of the embargo, the Trump administration is ratcheting up economic pressure on Cuba. On October 25, the president announced the cancellation of all commercial air service between the United States and regional Cuban airports. While flights to Havana will continue, air service to provincial cities such as Santa Clara, Holguín, Santiago de Cuba, Camagüey, and Cienfuegos will end as of December 10—just as holiday travel to the island gets underway.

The flight cutoff marks another milestone in Trump’s effort to dismantle the Obama administration’s bridge of reconciliation with Cuba, in which the restoration of commercial air traffic in 2016 has played a major role. While the freedom of all US citizens to travel will be curtailed, the flight cancellations predominantly affect Cuban-Americans, who fill most of the seats in JetBlue and American Airlines flights as they travel to visit their relatives across the island.

By sacrificing the interests of Cuban-American families, Trump is following in the footsteps of his most recent Republican predecessor, George W. Bush. In June of 2004, Bush issued a new, and gratuitously cruel, restriction on travel to Cuba: Cuban-Americans who wanted to visit their families on the island could go only once every three years, and then could stay for a maximum of only 14 days. As the November 2004 election approached, Bush’s strategy was to appeal to hard-line anti-Castro voters in Florida—the state, we must recall, to which Bush owed his contested presidency—by implementing a family separation policy to look tough on Cuba.

Bush won Florida, but he lost the exile-rich county of Miami-Dade by more than six percentage points. Indeed, within the Cuban-American community, Bush’s travel restrictions proved to be deeply unpopular. When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, his campaign promise to that community was that if elected, he would immediately lift all restrictions on family travel to Cuba; they could visit the island as many times as they wanted. Obama won Florida by a significant margin. Now, approximately half a million Cuban-Americans travel to the island annually for family reunions with their loved ones.

Those travelers carry with them not only the intangible bonds of family but also tangible support in the form of kitchen equipment, television sets, auto parts, linens, soap, and other appliances and household goods that are difficult or impossible to obtain in the Cuban hinterlands. And they carry informal remittances—funds that allow relatives to refurbish their homes, start and sustain small private enterprises, and simply survive Cuba’s deteriorating economic situation. “It’s sickening to be witness to another heartless and counterproductive act that will do nothing but hurt families and good people,” says Linda Delgado, Oxfam’s director of government affairs. “These measures will greatly harm a lot of people,” agrees Collin Laverty, president of Cuba Educational Travel. “Ending flights to cities that are mostly frequented by Cubans traveling to see loved ones is another blow to Cuban families on both sides of the Florida Straits.”

To get to Cuba this Christmas and thereafter, family travelers will have to expend far more time and resources. They will have to fly into Havana and then pay for additional transportation—domestic flights, state buses, or private taxis—or else pay steeper fares to US charter air companies, which dominated air services before Obama restored commercial flights. The costs will deter some Cuban-Americans from traveling; others will resentfully foot the bill because family-to-family relations are a priority. All will be potential voters for a Democratic candidate in 2020 who promises to end Trump’s Cuba policy of family separation and restore unrestricted air services to the island.

Indeed, the political logic of the new restrictions is unclear. Nationally, polls show overwhelming approval for free travel to Cuba; an ABC/Washington Post poll conducted in 2014 after Obama’s historic decision to reestablish diplomatic relations found that 74 percent of the general public supported lifting all restrictions. But free travel is also popular in the hard-line stronghold of Miami-Dade County. A comprehensive Florida International University poll of Cuban-American opinion on Cuba policy conducted in November 2018 showed that “a strong majority of respondents”—57 percent—“favors the lifting of travel restrictions impeding all Americans from traveling to Cuba.”

“If the calculus behind [the October 25] announcement is that it will help shore up Cuban-American support for the president’s reelection campaign,” said Ricardo Herrero, executive director of the moderate Cuba Study Group, “he would be well advised to think again.”

Trump officials seem to understand that the Cuban-American community will hold them accountable. “We want to make sure that Cuban Americans do have a route to their families,” claims Carrie Filipetti, deputy assistant secretary of state for Cuba and Venezuela. “Havana is currently carved out for this,” she stated, with a hint that flights to Cuba’s capital city might be in jeopardy at some point in the future.

The flight cancellations are just the latest step in Trump’s assault on the freedom to travel—a basic civil liberty supported by the US Constitution. In his first Cuba policy initiative as president, Trump rescinded an Obama-era authorization for individual US citizens to travel to the island under the category of “people-to-people” engagement; last June, the administration banned people-to-people group tours, one of the most popular ways conscientious US travelers have explored the island. The administration also abruptly terminated cruise ship visits to Cuba, preventing some 800,000 US citizens who had already booked passages from visiting the island.

“The White House has imposed onerous restrictions on travel by Americans who want, and have a right, to visit Cuba as they can to every other country except North Korea,” Senator Patrick Leahy pointed out in a recent floor speech on Cuba. “It is absurd that this administration is taking away the freedom of American travelers to fly wherever they want,” said Representative Jim McGovern, who denounced the latest effort to restrict travel as “a stupid political stunt.”

In response to Trump’s encroachments on the right to travel, Leahy and McGovern have jointly introduced the Freedom for Americans to Travel to Cuba Act. The bill currently has 48 bipartisan sponsors in the Senate. If brought to a vote and passed, the legislation would lift all past and current restrictions on the rights of US citizens to visit Cuba. And it would remove the ability of presidents to abuse the right-to-travel in order to look tough on Cuba in an election year.

As the 2020 election campaign begins in earnest, Trump is likely to ratchet up the pressure on Cuba, including ordering further impediments on US citizens who want to go to the island, whether to visit relatives or to explore a close US neighbor. It will be up to those who have traveled, and those who want to travel in the future, to stand up for their right to do so. Former Republican senator from Arizona Jeff Flake, who first introduced legislation in Congress to lift all restrictions on travel back in 2002, sums up our challenge: “It’s a freedom issue.”

he bipartisan bill I will introduce on Monday is about the right of Americans, not Cubans, to travel,” Senator Patrick Leahy stated, as he prepared to introduce the “Freedom for Americans to Travel to Cuba Act of 2019” this week. “Every member of Congress,” he declared, “especially those who have been to Cuba, should oppose restrictions on American citizens that have no place in the law books of a free society.”

In the House, Congressmen James McGovern and Tom Emmer introduced identical legislation last week, setting the stage for Congress to debate President Trump’s ongoing efforts to restrict travel in order to score electoral points in Florida. Although congressional proponents of free travel to Cuba have tried, and failed, to lift existing restrictions in the past, Trump’s recent flagrant assault on freedom to travel, along with the natural constituency of millions of citizens who have flocked to Cuba over the past few years, may combine to give this latest legislative initiative a better chance of success.

Few people are aware that Cuba is the only nation in the world to which a congressional statute prohibits US citizens from traveling for a simple vacation. From the end of the Eisenhower administration to the mid-1990s, restrictions on travel, like the trade embargo itself, fell under executive authority; the restrictions were imposed by the president and could be rescinded by the president. That changed in 1996, when President Clinton signed the punitive Helms-Burton Act, which codified the embargo into law, along with restrictions on travel. After Clinton moved to create exemptions that would allow travel to Cuba for specific, non-touristic, purposes—journalism, education, religious activities, business transactions, professional meetings, etc.—Congress amended the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000 to read: “the Secretary of the Treasury may not authorize travel-related transactions for travel to, from, or within Cuba for tourist activities.”

That language was used first by President George W. Bush as the legal basis for restricting the constitutionally supported right of US citizens to travel to the island and see its complex realities for themselves. Now it is being used by Donald Trump.

In between Bush and Trump, President Obama creatively attempted to circumvent the legal restrictions on “tourist” travel by redefining its meaning and expanding the categories under which US citizens, including Cuban-Americans, could visit the island. Whereas Bush had imposed severe limitations on Cuban-American “family” visits, Obama lifted all restrictions and broadened the definition of “family” so that just about anyone with a Cuban heritage could go whenever they wanted. As part of his policy of positive engagement, Obama authorized individual travelers to go under the “people-to-people” category of “purposeful travel” and made it easier for tour organizers, such as this magazine, to arrange “people-to-people” excursions. After the historic breakthrough in relations with Raúl Castro in December 2014, Obama reestablished commercial airline service between the United States and Cuba and authorized cruise ships to dock in Cuba. And in March of 2016, he became the first US president since Calvin Coolidge to travel to Cuba—generating widespread public interest in visiting the island.

Since then, millions of US citizens have done so. According to Cuban government statistics, in 2012, approximately 98,000 non-Cuban-Americans traveled to the island; since the first commercial airline flight in August 2016, however, more than 2.2 million people have flown from the United States to Cuba, and hundreds of thousands more have disembarked in port cities such as Havana, Cienfuegos, and Santiago from massive cruise liners that arrived daily in Cuban harbors. The influx of US travelers has had an overwhelmingly positive impact on the island’s growing private sector that caters to American tourism, as well as on US-Cuban cultural and socioeconomic relations.

On June 4, however, President Trump abruptly banned cruise liners from docking in Cuba, denying 800,000 passengers who had already booked a trip to the island their right to travel. The administration also abolished people-to-people tours, through which tens of thousands of US citizens have ventured to the island for a unique educational experience. At the same time, the State Department expanded its so-called “Cuba Restricted List”—over 200 hotels, restaurants, shops, businesses, rum distilleries, and other official entities administered by the Cuban military where US travelers are prohibited from spending money.

“As a result,” according to Senator Leahy, “the number of Americans traveling to Cuba this year is projected to plummet by half, due to the policies of their own government.” And, he adds, “thousands of private Cuban entrepreneurs, the taxi drivers, the Airbnb renters, restaurants, and shops that depend on American customers are struggling to survive.” Indeed, a survey of 200 Cuban cuentapropistas—private entrepreneurs—conducted by Cuba Educational Travel last May found that 97 percent of them reported that US travelers “bring their business more earnings,” and 96 percent believed that “decreased American travel would harm their businesses.”

To be sure, US citizens can still travel legally to Cuba. Tour providers that have used the people-to-people category are now reconfiguring their trip itineraries to meet the criteria of a different category—“support for the Cuban people.” But Trump’s assault on the right to travel has sown confusion and created additional hoops for travelers to jump through, while cutting off the most popular route—the cruise ships. For the average tourist, the threat of customs interrogations, government audits, and potential fines for violating the arcane travel regulations serves as a deterrent to travel—as do prohibitions on booking a hotel room on a Varadero beach and taking a seaside vacation.

Passage of the “Freedom for Americans to Travel to Cuba Act” would end Trump’s ability, as well as that of future presidents, to sacrifice the right to travel on the altar of electoral politics. The concise legislation states that “the President may not prohibit or otherwise restrict travel to or from Cuba by United States citizens…or any of the transactions incident to such travel.” Upon enactment, it would explicitly supersede all existing regulations, policies, and laws, including the provisions in the Helms-Burton bill that currently constrain free travel to Cuba.

After the historic Obama-Castro reset of relations in December 2014, a Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that 74 percent of US citizens supported free travel to Cuba. But even though it would have popular appeal, the bill faces an uphill battle. Already, majority leader Mitch McConnell has signaled he will not bring the legislation up for a vote in the Senate this year. Trump and his legislative enablers are clearly determined to destroy Obama’s successful model of positive engagement and to weaponize Cuba policy in the quest for hard-line votes in Florida.

But the political debate over exercising the fundamental rights of US citizens to travel remains imperative. “The right to travel is a part of the ‘liberty’ of which the citizen cannot be deprived without due process of law under the Fifth Amendment,” the Supreme Court held in 1958. “Freedom of movement is basic in our scheme of values.” Although the justices ruled during the Cold War that presidents could restrict travel to Cuba for clear-cut national-security concerns, those considerations from a long-gone era are no longer valid—if they ever were.

“The travel ban deliberately punishes the American people—our very best ambassadors—and prevents them from engaging directly with the Cuban people,” Representative McGovern argued when he introduced the legislation last week. “It is a Cold War relic that serves only to isolate the United States from our allies and partners in the region,” he concluded. “It’s time for us to listen to the majority of Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Cubans who do not support the travel ban, and get rid of it once and for all.”

On August 31, 2016, JetBlue Flight 387 became the first commercial US airliner to land in Cuba in more than 55 years. With great pomp and circumstance, including a water-cannon salute, the plane lifted off from Fort Lauderdale and an hour later landed in Santa Clara. It immediately became a symbol of a new opening in US-Cuban relations, and an economic and cultural bridge between two estranged societies seeking common ground.

Since then, more than 2.2 million people have visited the island aboard around 13,500 flights from the United States, according to Department of Transportation statistics. Many have come as part of the popular “P2P” educational tours like the ones run by The Nation—people-to-people group trips authorized by President Obama as part of his historic policy of positive engagement with Cuba. Additionally, more than half a million US citizens have come to Cuba via cruise ships, which as the Associated Press reports, have “become the most popular form of U.S. leisure travel to the island.” Indeed, of approximately 630,000 US travelers who visited Cuba in 2018 (not counting Cuban-Americans who went on family visits), the majority traveled via cruise ship. And, until yesterday, those numbers were surging. In the first four months of this year, cruise lines such as Carnival and Royal Caribbean transported over 143,000 people to the island, an increase of more than 300 percent over the same period last year.

As of June 5, however, the basic freedom of millions of US citizens to easily visit a destination of their choosing no longer exists. Less than a day after Trump’s Treasury and Commerce departments declared new prohibitions on people-to-people tours and passenger-ship voyages to Cuba, Carnival Cruise Line announced that “due to changes in U.S. policy, the company will no longer be permitted to sail to Cuba effective immediately.” Royal Caribbean and Norwegian Cruise Lines also said their ships that were due to dock in Cuba this week would be rerouted. According to the Cruise Lines International Association, an estimated 800,000 passengers who had already booked trips to see Cuba will now be deprived of the opportunity to do so.

Within 24 hours, more than 50 percent of the US travel market to Cuba has simply evaporated. And the fallout is likely to increase as the Trump-provoked turmoil ripples through the travel industry, affecting educational tour providers, commercial airlines, and other tourism-related companies, not to mention the entire Cuban economy, made up of a growing number of private-sector entrepreneurs who have recently built businesses dependent on escalating US tourism. “This is a tragic blow for US citizens’ freedom to travel,” says Christopher Baker, who leads National Geographic tours as well as motorcycle and photography trips to Cuba, “and an even greater blow to the people of Cuba, a huge percentage of whom rely on income from US visitors under the people-to-people license.”

rump officials have justified these new punitive sanctions in the coldest of Cold War terms. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Cuba “continues to play a destabilizing role in the Western Hemisphere, providing a communist foothold in the region and propping up US adversaries in places like Venezuela.” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross added that it was Obama’s policy of positive engagement that had necessitated the new restrictions. “Cuba remains communist,” he said, “and the United States, under the previous administration, made too many concessions to one of our historically most aggressive adversaries.”

But the crass political calculus of rolling back the Obama-era effort to normalize relations has been clear since National Security Adviser John Bolton traveled to Miami in April to give a speech to the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association on the anniversary of the failed CIA-led 1961 invasion. Pandering to hard-line voters in the Cuban-American community, Bolton forecast the new restrictions, announcing that the administration would soon shut down “veiled tourism” to Cuba as part of a regime-change effort to purge socialist governments in the region. Since the administration is courting votes, so far it has refrained from impeding the half-million or so Cuban-Americans who annually travel to the island to see their relatives—a privilege that has been unrestricted since the first year of the Obama administration.

For the rest of us, however, the right to travel has been sacrificed on the altar of electoral politics—and not for the first time. With an eye on his reelection, in 2003 and then again in May 2004 George W. Bush similarly clamped down on a previous opening of travel under the Clinton administration in an effort to mollify the hard-line exile community and mobilize them to vote Republican in the battleground state of Florida. Between 2003 and 2005, according to Marazul Tours, travel to Cuba, at that point around 250,000 US visitors a year, fell by an estimated 80 percent.

Cuba remains the only country in the world where US citizens face such capricious restrictions on a constitutionally protected right to travel from their own government. The ability of multiple presidents to use Cuba travel as a political piñata derives from the failure of Congress over the past two decades to lift the travel ban in its entirety. Since 2002, legislation known as the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act has been introduced in the Senate and House several times but failed to advance.

Senator Patrick Leahy—who, along with Senators Mike Enzi and Democratic presidential contender Amy Klobuchar, introduced legislation in February to end the embargo—plans to reintroduce the Freedom to Travel bill in the coming days. Trump’s egregious violation of citizens’ rights and sabotage of a sane Cuba policy may make the bill more compelling to legislators on both sides of the political aisle.

“These regulations are an insult to every American and a disgrace to a free society,” Senator Leahy stated in a sharply worded speech on the Senate floor this week. “Freedom to travel is a right. It is fundamental,” Leahy said. “It is part of who we are as Americans. We travel. We explore. We meet people. We share our values.… Are we willing to stand by and let the right to travel of private Americans be trampled this way?”

That, of course, is the key question US citizens face. To be sure, Trump’s travel restrictions portend severe economic hardship for the Cuban people—thousands of artists, drivers, busboys, maids, and small-enterprise entrepreneurs who have built businesses that cater to US travelers. Their livelihoods, and ability to put food on the table for their extended families, depend on US tourism. But Trump’s attack also targets the freedom of US citizens to explore the world and see its realities for ourselves.

Certainly, the 800,000 people who booked passage on cruises to Cuba, only to be told they are now prohibited from going, must make their voices of protest heard. Thousands of other US citizens who have previously gone on cruises and people-to-people tours but now will have a harder time revisiting the island also form a natural political constituency to lift the travel ban once and for all. The political pressure would-be travelers can bring must be magnified by multiple business interests, ranging from Airbnb to US airlines to the Marriott Hotel corporation to the travel agencies that will hopefully instruct their highly paid lobbyists to push for passage of the Freedom to Travel to Cuba legislation.

Cuba watchers predict, however, that Trump’s rollback of Obama’s policies of positive engagement and people-to-people programs will continue unabated until the November 2020 election, as he attempts to mobilize his hard-line base in Florida. Already, the Treasury Department has let it be known that more punitive sanctions will be announced in the coming months.

For now, the advocates of engagement with Cuba and the right to travel have vocally committed to pushing back against Trump’s efforts to return to the failed policies of the past—and assisting citizens to protest with their feet by continuing to go to Cuba. “We will take a major hit on some types of business, but we will continue to operate and navigate these new regulations,” says Collin Laverty, who heads Cuba Educational Travel, one of the largest travel providers to Cuba. “We will figure out the way to get as many people as possible down to Cuba. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

n the early hours of April 17, 1961, a CIA operative placed a beacon on the beach known as Playa Girón, to literally light the path for a paramilitary assault on Cuba. The infamous Bay of Pigs invasion has become an enduring symbol of US aggression against the then-fledgling Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro. For Cubans, Playa Girón remains a proud symbol of their David-versus-Goliath triumph over the Colossus of the North. For imperially minded US policy-makers and a diminishing but still politically powerful generation of hard-line Cuban exiles, the defeated invasion remains a symbol of unfinished business.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the imperious administration of Donald Trump chose the 58th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs to launch another round of US aggression against Cuba. On April 17, the State Department announced that it would, for the first time, implement a section of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act that opens the door to tens of thousands of lawsuits against international companies doing business in Cuba, in an effort to deter much-needed foreign investment on the island. The same day, National Security Adviser John Bolton traveled to Coral Gables, Florida, outside Miami, to speak at a commemorative luncheon of the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association, where he denounced “the disastrous Obama-era policies” of peaceful coexistence and promised to “finally end the glamorization of socialism and communism” by levying new sanctions against Cuba.

Those sanctions will be aimed not at the Cuban military or government but at the Cuban people and US citizens. The Trump administration will cap remittances—unlimited under Barack Obama’s policy of encouraging the growth of Cuba’s private sector through informal support from relatives in the United States—at $4,000 per person a year. And, Bolton said, the administration would soon gut Obama’s policy of people-to-people engagement by cracking down on what Bolton called “veiled tourism” and restricting the freedom of US citizens to travel to the island.

The speech marks his second foray to the Cuban exile stronghold in less than six months—a pattern that smacks of political pandering to potential Trump voters among Florida’s exile community. The votes of native-born Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans, Politico reports, “could prove pivotal in November 2020 in a state that’s essential to Trump’s reelection fortunes.” Bolton’s April speech was a sequel to his November 2018 “troika of tyranny” presentation in Miami just days before the midterms, when he declared economic war on Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua in an avowed effort to rid the hemisphere of those he calls the “Three Stooges of socialism.”

Like Trump in his February State of the Union address, when he blasted the failure of socialism in Venezuela and segued into an attack on the Democratic Party for its alleged socialist tendencies, Bolton all but called on his audience to get out the vote for Trump. “We will need your help in the days ahead,” he declared. “We must all reject the forces of communism and socialism in this hemisphere—and in this country.”

At the heart of Trump’s new attack is an effort to roll back the foundation of Obama’s policy of engagement: travel. To advance his efforts to normalize relations, the Obama administration expanded the categories under which US citizens could legally conduct “purposeful travel” to Cuba. To facilitate the flow of visitors, he restored commercial flights and authorized US cruise-ship operations. Nearly 500,000 Cuban Americans traveled to Cuba last year, along with over 600,000 US citizens who traveled as individuals, in cruise ships, or on educational tours—including trips organized by The Nation—to see for themselves what is happening in that country.

“We condemn these newest attacks on Cuba and on the freedom to travel of the American people,” said the leaders of Marazul Tours, the veteran Cuba travel company, who noted that Bolton’s threat to “restrict” non-Cuban-American travel remained vague. Indeed, not only are the constitutional rights of US citizens to travel in potential jeopardy, but so are the livelihoods of thousands of self-employed Cuban entrepreneurs and small businesses that cater to US travelers and survive on the economic support that such “veiled tourism” provides to Cuba’s growing private sector.

“Since the U.S. re-established diplomatic ties with Cuba, thousands of Americans, including many families from my own community, have visited, and numerous businesses have explored new markets,” Representative Kathy Castor (D-FL) pointed out. “These activities have not only opened new economic opportunities for Americans and Cubans alike; they serve as an integral part of our efforts to promote the spread of democracy and ensure the security of our region.”

“Unfortunately,” Castor concluded, “the Trump administration has once again doubled down on its return to Cold War policies that have failed for the past 60 years and have done nothing to help the Cuban people.”

But the administration’s regression takes US policy much farther back in history than the Cold War. “Today,” Bolton asserted, “we proudly proclaim for all to hear: The Monroe Doctrine is alive and well.” The doctrine, enunciated by President James Monroe in 1823, designated the Western Hemisphere as the dominion of the United States and warned European powers to stay away. For well over 100 years, Washington repeatedly invoked the doctrine to justify gunboat diplomacy against and protracted military occupations of nations like Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras, Haiti, and Cuba. By invoking it now, the Trump administration appears to be setting the stage for escalating US intervention in the region.

“Cuba will be next,” Bolton declared last week, after predicting that the embattled government of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro would soon collapse under the weight of US sanctions. “Together,” he told the cheering audience of aging Bay of Pigs vets, who paid $100 a plate to hear him speak, “we can finish what began on those beaches, on those famous days in April, 58 years ago today.”

In a forceful reaction, Cuban officials reminded the world of the realities of history: On those beaches, Cuban militias defeated the CIA-led brigade in less than 72 hours. “Aggressive escalation of #US against #Cuba will fail,” Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez responded via Twitter. “As in Girón, we shall overcome.”

Last November, just days before the midterm elections, National Security Adviser John Bolton traveled to the anti-Castro stronghold of Miami to give his “troika of tyranny” speech—a retrograde, Cold War–style assault on Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. “The troika will crumble,” Bolton predicted brashly. “We know their day of reckoning awaits. The United States now looks forward to watching each corner of the triangle fall: in Havana, in Caracas, in Managua.”1

At the time, the speech was perceived as little more than posturing to turn out the right-wing vote in Florida. In retrospect, however, Bolton was signaling the administration’s determination to restore US hegemony in Latin America. Advancing Trump’s MAGA mantra, it is clear, now requires flexing interventionist muscle in Venezuela. The administration’s endgame, though, appears to be Cuba—the island nation that has challenged US hemispheric domination since the anti-imperialist triumph of the Castro-led revolution 60 years ago. Indeed, as Washington ratchets up its efforts to topple the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, we are witnessing what The Miami Herald has called “the Cubanization of Venezuela policy.”2

The crisis in Venezuela has provided the “low-hanging fruit,” in the words of journalist Jon Lee Anderson, for the resurrection of a bygone era of gunboat diplomacy, when Washington could dictate the fate of regional governments. Maduro’s abuses of power have brought widespread misery to a once-prosperous nation that, under his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, seemed poised to supplant Washington’s economic and political influence in the region. The Venezuelan people have every reason—and every right—to demand an end to an incompetent government that has transformed their oil-rich nation into a failed state.3

But from the start of his presidency, Trump has had regime change in Venezuela on his policy agenda—as a step toward fulfilling his campaign promise to “end the deal” that President Obama made with Raúl Castro for a historic peaceful coexistence with Cuba. On only his second day in the White House, Trump “asked for a Venezuela briefing,” one former administration official recently told The Wall Street Journal, “to explore how to reverse Obama-era policies toward Cuba.” Options for getting rid of Maduro and ending Venezuela’s alliance with Cuba included cutting off the billions of dollars that the United States pays for Venezuelan oil imports—a major sanction that the administration has now imposed.4

In his Miami speech, Bolton announced additional sanctions against Cuba, promising that “even more would come as well.” Indeed, as part of what US officials portray as a broader and more aggressive approach to the region, details are being leaked to the media on forthcoming measures to roll back the Obama-era policy of positive engagement with Havana. First among them is redesignating Cuba as a sponsor of international terrorism. In 1982, amid the bloody US counterinsurgency campaigns in Central America, the Reagan administration placed Cuba on the State Department’s list of “state sponsors of terrorism”—a flagrant effort to portray Havana’s support for revolution as support for international terrorism. Despite the lack of any evidence that Cuba backed terrorism and the abundant evidence that it was, instead, a target of such activities, one administration after another kept Cuba on the list. Obama finally removed it as part of the negotiations to restore normal diplomatic ties in 2015.5

In the coming weeks, the White House also plans to announce that Americans can sue in US courts to regain properties in Cuba expropriated after the Cuban Revolution—a punitive provision contained in the 1996 Helms-Burton Act that every president since Clinton has waived to avoid the chaos of litigation against companies from allied nations with investments in Cuba.6

Both of these policy changes will eventually deter much-needed foreign investment in Cuba; more immediately, however, putting Cuba back on the list of terrorist states will scare off US tourists. At the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which monitors and implements regulations on travel to Cuba, officials have strongly hinted that an announcement on travel restrictions is expected soon.7

These sanctions and restrictions are designed to squeeze Cuba’s growing private sector, which caters to US travelers, and further destabilize the country’s already struggling economy. Of more immediate concern to Cubans, the regional community, and conscientious US citizens, however, is the administration’s threat of open intervention in Venezuela, and the potential spillover effect it would have on Cuba policy. At a press briefing on January 28, Bolton held a yellow pad with the words “5000 troops to Colombia” visible for journalists to see—and report. In a subsequent CBS interview, Trump called military action against Venezuela an “option” still under consideration.8

Such threats could be a bluff. But behind a president who prides himself on being a bully is a team of committed regime-changers: Senator Marco Rubio, who is now acting as a shadow secretary of state for Latin America and for whom rolling back the Cuban Revolution is a top priority; Mauricio Claver-Carone, the leading hard-line Cuban-American lobbyist against Obama’s policy of engagement, who is now a special assistant to the president and senior director at the National Security Council’s Western Hemisphere Affairs division; Elliott Abrams, the former assistant secretary of state during the Reagan years who became infamous for enabling and covering up crimes against humanity in El Salvador and Guatemala, and who was convicted (but pardoned) for crimes relating to the Iran-contra scandal; and Bolton, who, as George W. Bush’s UN ambassador, spread the canard that Cuba’s medical-research programs were a cover for biological-weapons production. This formidable group has a Captain Ahab–like obsession with regime change in Cuba, according to former NSC staffer Benjamin Gedan. For Bolton et al., “Cuba is a foreign-policy white whale.”9

“I’ve made it clear that the United States has neither the capacity nor the intention to impose change on Cuba,” President Obama stated during his history-making speech at the Alicia Alonso Grand Theater in Havana in March 2016. “I want you to know,” he reiterated, looking across the auditorium at then-President Raúl Castro, that “my visit here demonstrates that you do not need to fear a threat from the United States.”10

Three short years later, those assurances are no longer valid.11

This week, Cuba’s new post-Castro president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, arrived in New York to address the UN General Assembly. Making his debut on the world stage, Díaz-Canel repudiated the “failed” US embargo against Cuba. Soon, the UN will issue its annual, and overwhelming, condemnation of the embargo—as it has done every fall for the past 27 years. Last year, 191 nations voted to denounce the bloqueo, as the Cubans call it. Only two—the United States and Israel—voted to support it.

But while the embargo remains a well-known obstacle to normal economic relations, diplomatic relations, which were fully normalized during the Obama administration, now face a far more amorphous challenge: the still-unexplained health problems suffered by more than two dozen US covert operatives and diplomatic officials in Havana between November 2016 and August 2017.

A year ago, the State Department virtually shuttered the US embassy in Havana—and expelled the majority of Cuban personnel from Cuba’s embassy in Washington—in response to the rash of ailments reported by embassy personnel, which included hearing loss, headaches, dizziness, insomnia, and cognitive impediments. The dramatic downsizing of staff—from over 50 embassy employees to around 15—was accompanied by a dire warning to US travelers to steer clear of Cuba, leading to a significant falloff of tourism to the island.

The State Department recently rescinded the travel alert, but not before the nascent private sector in Cuba, which caters to US tourism, suffered significant economic losses. Cuban entrepreneurs, as well as thousands of other Cubans with family in the United States, have been hit hard by the closure of the consulate section of the embassy, which has prevented them from obtaining visas in Havana to travel to the United States on business or to visit relatives. They are now forced to bear the expense of traveling to countries such as Mexico, Colombia, or Guyana to apply for a visa.

Moreover, as Cuba transitions into the post-Castro era, “the staff reduction at the embassy has made it more difficult for U.S. diplomats to cover significant economic and political developments in Cuba,” according to a recent impact assessment by the Congressional Research Service. “With recent developments such as a new Cuban president, new regulations on Cuba’s private sector, and the Cuban government embarking on a process to update the country’s constitution,” the CRS study advised, “U.S. policymakers may benefit from a fully staffed embassy with the ability to analyze these and other ongoing developments in Cuba.”

But the Trump administration appears to have no intention of re-staffing the embassy and restoring normal diplomatic relations until the mystery of the health problems is resolved. For more than a year, multiple US agencies, among them the CIA, the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control, and an elite military science advisory team known as the JASON Group, have undertaken major inquiries into the origins of these mysterious maladies—with no discernible conclusions. Doctors who have examined the victims have referred to their brain injuries as “the immaculate concussion.” “There is no known cause, no known individual or group believed to be responsible at this time,” a State Department spokesperson conceded earlier this month. “They have a few theories,” says one Capitol Hill staffer who has received classified briefings on the ongoing investigations, but they “are no closer to knowing how this happened or who was responsible then they were over a year ago.”

he initial theory was that the embassy personnel fell victim to some sort of acoustic aggression—a “sonic attack,” as the mainstream media summed up the phenomenon after victims reported hearing grinding chirps, or high-pitched buzzing and squealing sounds, along with a sensation of pressure and pulsating vibrations in their ears. The allegation of an “attack” derives from the commonality of the initial group of those affected: Most were either members of the CIA station in Havana or US diplomats living in residencies previously used by intelligence operatives. The CIA believed its operatives were being targeted, either by the Cuban Intelligence Directorate or by a foreign intelligence service operating in Havana, and, as The Nation has previously reported, recalled them in the summer or early fall of last year.

But investigators have dismissed the theory of a “sonic” weapon. Acoustic specialists as well as medical experts have pointed out that the symptoms could not be caused by noise. “We think the audible sound was a consequence of the exposure, because audible sound is not known to cause brain injury,” said Dr. Douglas Smith, director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania, who co-authored a controversial study in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the US personnel stricken in Cuba. In a still-classified report earlier this year, FBI investigators formally dismissed the possibility that a “sonic attack” caused the health problems.

Armed with a tape recorder, at least one US official was able to capture the sounds associated with the injuries. The recording, leaked to the Associated Press last October, underwent a rigorous acoustical analysis by a team of computer scientists and engineers at the University of Michigan and Zhejiang University. They provided a second theory focused on ultrasound: The metallic grinding noises could be the result of an accidental collision of ultrasound waves emanating from separate devices such as eavesdropping and jamming technologies. “If ultrasound played a role in harming diplomats in Cuba,” their study states, “then a plausible cause is intermodulation distortion between ultrasonic signals that unintentionally synthesize audible tones. In other words, acoustic interference without malicious intent to cause harm could have led to the audible sensations in Cuba.”

It’s unclear whether the scientists and doctors involved in the investigations have tested this theory to see if such a “collision” of ultrasound frequencies might result in the victims’ medical symptoms. Instead, a far more sinister theory is now generating much media attention—that a secret microwave gun, supposedly developed by the Russians, was pointed at US officials in Cuba, and perhaps in China as well, where at least one US consulate officer was stricken with similar symptoms this summer. On September 1, The New York Times ran a story, “Microwave Weapons Are Prime Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers,” which provided an overview of the history of efforts by both the US military and the Russians to build radio-frequency weapons that could “invisibly beam painfully loud booms and even spoken words into people’s heads. The aims,” according to the article, “were to disable attackers and wage psychological warfare.” The article speculated, but provided zero evidence, that the injuries suffered in Cuba were the result of such weapons.

NBC News soon followed up with a report that US intelligence agencies had intercepted communications indicating that the Russians were behind the “attacks” in Cuba. According to NBC sources, “the evidence is not yet conclusive enough, however, for the U.S. to formally assign blame to Moscow.” In a variant of this theory, on September 7 The Miami Herald reported that a team of neuro-technology experts working with the State Department believed that the Havana victims had been hit by “directed energy weapons”—electronic devices using ultrasound or electromagnetic pulses “which can cause injury by creating ‘cavitation,’ or air pockets, in fluids near the inner ear.”

A number of doctors have already cast doubts on the microwave-weapon theory. “Microwave weapons [are] the closest equivalent in science to fake news,” University of Cincinnati neurologist Alberto Espay told The Washington Post. His opinion is shared by a team of Cuban neuroscientists who traveled to Washington earlier this month, at the invitation of the State Department, to meet with US officials and doctors familiar with these cases. At a press conference at the Cuban embassy, Dr. Mitchell Joseph Valdés-Sosa pointed out that the level of microwaves needed to injure the brain would likely turn it into mush. “You’d have to practically vaporize the person before microwave can damage the brain,” he told NBC News.

The Cuban team articulated another theory, supported by a number of doctors from around the world, that the ailments are the result of what Valdés-Sosa calls “psychogenic factors” and a contagious anxiety syndrome among the embassy corps. There was no doubt that the US personnel were sickened, he emphasized, but, he argued, psychogenic disease—physical ailments that derive from emotional or mental stresses—needs to be seriously considered as a potential cause.

With CIA operatives, Russians, and ultra-secret ultrasound, microwave, and electromagnetic weaponry alleged to be involved, it is no surprise that a dark cloud of mystery overshadows this diplomatic impasse in US-Cuban relations. And as the impasse enters its second year, notes Emily Mendrala, who directs the Center for Democracy in the Americas, “the ambiguity of the situation is being used by those who want to undermine policies of engagement between the US and Cuba,” which have advanced US business, cultural, and political interests in Cuba’s socioeconomic transition. Concerned that the bilateral gains made during the Obama era are being sabotaged, Cuba has called on the United States to restore normal functions of both the US embassy in Havana and the Cuban embassy in Washington. But the State Department maintains that there will be no return to “business as usual” until Cuba takes unspecified steps to guarantee the security of US personnel on the island.

“The new US government has devoted itself to artificially fabricate under false pretexts, scenarios of tension and hostility that serve nobody’s interests,” President Díaz-Canel asserted in his speech to the UN General Assembly—an apparent allusion to the embassy health issues. But he also reiterated that Cuba “stands ready to develop respectful and civilized relations with the US government on the basis of sovereign equality and mutual respect.” The Trump administration, as he told reporters with a degree of pessimism that is undoubtedly shared at the UN, is “an administration with which it is difficult to form an equal relationship.”

Editor’s note: This article was updated on October 1 with a new penultimate paragraph.

ur business is down 70 percent,” Havana restaurateur Niuris Higueras told a group of Nation magazine travelers who were spending their final evening of a weeklong spring tour in Cuba at her renowned eatery, El Atelier. “We may have to reduce staff,” she sadly noted, after a major boom in US-generated business following Barack Obama’s history-making rapprochement with Raúl Castro.

Culinary entrepreneurs such as Higueras, along with other Cuban businesses catering to US tourists, have been hit hard by the sharp shift in relations under the Trump administration. In the first quarter of 2018, travel from the United States to Cuba dropped by more than half the numbers from the year before—a reaction to widespread confusion over Trump’s harsh rhetoric, tweaks to travel regulations, and alarmist travel “alerts” issued by the State Department in the wake of health problems suffered by US personnel in Havana. Major tour providers, such as National Geographic, whose groups often frequent better eating establishments such as El Atelier, have been forced to cancel trips.

The Cuba travel industry is scrambling to convince potential travelers that going to Cuba remains perfectly legal and absolutely safe, and to implement colorful marketing strategies to attract US tourists. The State Department’s August 23 decision to soften its travel advisory from “level 3” (reconsider travel) to “level 2” (exercise increased caution), putting Cuba in the same category as popular destinations like France, Germany, Italy, and Denmark should prove useful in the campaign to revive US travel to the island.

But so too will the publication of an enticing new book, A Taste of Cuba: A Journey Through Cuba and Its Savory Cuisine. Compiled by photographer Cynthia Carris Alonso, A Taste of Cuba is really three books in one: first, a photography book filed with eye-catching images of places, people, and tasty-looking traditional and modern dishes such as malanga fritters, ropa vieja, and sweet guava shells with cream cheese; second, a visual travel guide through Havana’s enchanting neighborhoods, as well as Cuba’s other main cities and provinces which highlights the best culinary stops along the way; and third, a comprehensive recipe book of both well-known and lesser-appreciated Cuban cuisine that includes beverages such as the classic mojito and the famous Hemingway daiquiri.

Carris Alonso, along with her co-authors José Luis Alonso and Valerie Feigen, have tested all 75 of the recipes in this book, translating Cuban cooking traditions and longtime family recipes into doable dishes. They also tried to replicate the inventive techniques that Cuban chefs often use in a country where traditional cooking tools and appliances are scarce, and where creating virtue out of necessity when cooking is an ever-present challenge. It was “our job,” Feigen writes in a chapter titled “The Test Kitchen and the Cuban Pantry,” “to really decode each chef’s process and passion, while recording it clearly and faithfully.”

Number one on my list of memorable meals I have had in Cuba is the lobster-in-pineapple—a popular dish at a number of Havana’s best private restaurants, called paladares. The recipe in A Taste of Cuba, provided by the chef at Los Mercaderes in Old Havana, combines chunks of sautéed lobster tail with pineapple, brown mustard, onion, cream, and rum. Another recipe, from the Finca Agroecologica El Paraíso, in the picturesque province of Pinar del Rio, reveals the ingredients in the finca’s popular “Anti-stress drink”—a blend of coconut milk, pineapple juice, anise, basil, lemongrass, and peppermint—to which a splash of rum can always be added.

El Paraíso, as Carris Alonso’s exquisite photos aptly demonstrate, is one of the most beautiful locations in the world to eat a meal; and for dessert it serves the best flan I have ever had in Latin America. With the recipes featured in this book, I can try to recreate the flan, and so many other meals from Cuba, in my own kitchen. “The photographs in this book will take you on a journey through Cuba,” notes the book’s introduction. “The recipes will bring Cuban cooking into your home.”

he late, great Anthony Bourdain journeyed to Cuba twice to get a sense of its people and a taste of its food. “It is said around here, quietly no doubt, that the only three things the revolution actually got right are sports, education, and healthcare, and that the three things it does worst are breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” Bourdain observed during his first trip in 2011. During his second trip, in 2015 for his CNN show Parts Unknown, Bourdain marveled at the culinary evolution of privately owned restaurants. “Last time I was in Havana a meal at a paladar would have been rice and beans. Now…sushi!” he reported, while consuming fresh fish at a rustic bayside cafe. “Looks like we will be eating well,” Bourdain predicted, as he devoured a meal of pig’s-head soup, roast pork, and tamales.

To be sure, Cuba is not acclaimed for its cooking. The island has become a tourist attraction because of its vibrant music scene, vintage American cars, colorful colonial architecture, world-class rum and cigars, ocean vistas, and the allure of an improbable revolution that stood up to the Goliath of the North—and survived. “The food was almost universally forgettable, but this is not why you come to Cuba,” the writer Reif Larsen advised in the New York Times travel section last spring. “You come to be transported. To dance, to twirl your toes in the dust.”

A Taste of Cuba aims to change that perception and add a unique culinary experience in Cuba to the long list of reasons travelers should choose the island as their next destination. The Cuban restaurant industry, the authors readily note, faces numerous obstacles, among them chronic shortages of fresh ingredients and kitchen equipment, and a dearth of service-oriented restaurant workers. “Many of the owners and chefs who contributed to A Taste of Cuba,” Carris Alonso writes, “told me that they spend their days resolviendo problemas, solving problems.” And those problems can be particularly aggravating in a Communist Party–run economic system that is largely unsympathetic to Cuba’s new and growing private sector. Just this summer, government authorities passed yet another wave of regulations to further restrict the ability of Cuban cuentrapropistas—self-employed entrepreneurs—to acquire foodstuffs for their restaurants and fully deploy their talents and energies to expand their businesses.

But it is the “creativity, determination and survival skills” of Cuba’s culinary entrepreneurs, so vividly recorded in this book, that make the eating experience so delicious in Cuba—even if a Michelin-level meal is currently hard to find. The men and women behind the restaurants featured in the book bring vision, energy, and tenacity to their culinary art, as well as to the tables in their restaurants. “If one looks deeper, into the soul of Cuba today,” says Carris Alonso, “one finds a rapidly changing and developing culture of entrepreneurship bubbling with hope, excitement, and opportunity.” Cuban chefs are in the vanguard of this movement. Indeed, it is impossible to appreciate Cuba’s evolving culture, and the broader socioeconomic transition this proud nation is undergoing, without eating at the restaurants and sampling the cuisine featured in this book.

“My goal with this book is to provide a visual entry into Cuba’s culture, neighborhoods, and food through photographs, history, and recipes from the country’s top chefs,” Carris Alonso concludes, and to share what she calls “the life-affirming character of the Cuban people,” which is “ever more evident in the eating establishments showcased [here].” A Taste of Cuba accomplishes that mission with its inviting presentation of the island’s new and exciting food scene.

Most important, this delectable book reminds us that through the universally shared experience of eating, Cuban cuisine has a leading role to play in bringing our societies together, regardless of the obstacles Trump has created. “Let this be the beginning of closer relations between the people in Cuba with the people abroad,” as the book quotes El Atelier owner and chef Niuris Higueras. Getting A Taste of Cuba is a savory place to start.

For decades, Cuban schoolchildren were taught a slogan about the kind of pioneers of Communism they should aspire to be: “Seremos como el Che!” (We will be like Che!), that is, like the Argentine insurgent Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who played a leading role in the 1959 Cuban revolution and later sacrificed his life in pursuit of revolution in Bolivia. In the wake of Fidel Castro’s death at age 90 on November 25, 2016, however, the school curriculum now includes songs and posters that state “Yo Soy Fidel.” Indeed, “I am Fidel” has become a new mantra of revolutionary commitment heard and seen throughout the island.

History will record Fidel as the undisputed comandante of the Cuban revolution, the charismatic and grandiose former guerrilla leader who transformed a Caribbean island that had served as a playground for wealthy Americans, the mafia, and other malevolent US interests into a proud nationalist country with an outsize role on the world stage. But it is the legacy of his younger brother, Raúl, who officially steps down as president this week, that may prove to be even more compelling for Cuba’s future.

Over the dozen years that Raúl led the country—he replaced his ailing brother in July 2006 and officially assumed the role of president in February 2008—Cuba has slowly evolved away from a tightly controlled, hyper-state-centric system toward a more dynamic and modern, if still fundamentally socialist and authoritarian, society. Raúl Castro opened the door to many basic necessities that Cubans had been denied—access to cell phones, the Internet, freedom to travel, the sale of private property such as homes and cars, and a functioning private sector, among other needed freedoms that affect the daily lives of many average citizens. He also achieved a historic modus vivendi with the United States—no small feat given the years of US aggression and perpetual hostility to bilateral relations.

Raúl Castro’s agreement with the Obama administration to reestablish normal diplomatic ties certainly ranks as one of his greatest accomplishments. He assigned his son, Alejandro Castro Espín, a high-ranking intelligence officer, to lead 18 months of secret negotiations with President Obama’s representatives—and secured a deal that not only fulfilled Fidel’s promise to obtain the return of Cuba’s imprisoned spies, known as the Cuban Five, but also bring bilateral relations into the realm of normalcy, with more open commerce, travel, and diplomatic interaction. Despite pushback from wary hard-liners in the Communist Party, including Fidel himself, Raúl hosted President Obama’s historic March 2016 trip to Havana. “To destroy a bridge is easy and takes little time,” Castro presciently stated during their joint press conference in Havana. “To reconstruct and fortify it is a much longer and more difficult task.”

Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to sabotage that bridge of better relations, Cuba and the United States remain connected economically, culturally, and diplomatically. In recent weeks, the two governments have approved an expansion of US commercial air and cruise-ship travel to Cuba. Some 620,000 US travelers—among 4.7 million international tourists—visited Cuba in 2017, despite Trump’s travel warnings, restrictions, and hostile rhetoric. “We’re, as you know, very tough on Cuba,” Trump told reporters in Florida yesterday, commenting on Raúl Castro’s departure. His administration, Trump vaguely claimed, is “taking care of Cuba.”

The expansion of Cuba’s tourist sector has contributed to Raúl Castro’s efforts to create a functioning private sector—again, despite forceful opposition from doctrinaire Communist Party officials who oppose the economic inequalities that moving toward a more mixed economy inevitably brings to Cuban society. His nonsocialist economic reforms created categories for licensed self-employment that have resulted in close to 600,000 private-sector small businesses. Those cuentapropistas, as Cuban entrepreneurs are called, are in turn employing tens of thousands of other Cubans. According to some estimates, four in 10 Cuban workers have a foot in the private-sector work force. “Raúl’s legacy in economic policy lies in breaking once forbidding ideological barriers,” points out Richard Feinberg in a study for the Brookings Institution, even though those reforms have failed to end the crisis-level stagnation of Cuba’s socialist economy. “Regardless, these changes have paved the way for the successor generation of leaders—if they dare—to push Cuba forward into the 21st century.”

The post-Castro era now begins; at least that is the conventional narrative of the US media. In reality, Raúl Castro’s tenure as first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party—arguably a more powerful position than the office of the president—will continue for several more years, and he is retaining his role in the Cuban military, which he has commanded since 1959. His continued power is likely to be used to advance the agenda of his handpicked successor, Miguel Díaz-Canel, who assumed the presidency on April 19. “You can look at Raúl Castro and Díaz-Canel as mentor and disciple,” notes Carlos Alzugaray, a former Cuban diplomat and political observer. Indeed, in his acceptance speech to the Cuban National Assembly, the newly inaugurated president made it clear he was still a disciple. “Raúl Castro, as first secretary of the Communist Party, will lead the decisions about the future of the country,” Díaz-Canel stated. “Cuba needs him, providing ideas and proposals for the revolutionary cause, orienting and alerting us about any error or deficiency, teaching us, and always ready to confront imperialism.”

Díaz-Canel will be the first non-Castro to lead Cuba since the revolution, as well as the first non-member of the original July 26 revolutionary movement. His legitimacy, therefore, will depend on the discernible changes he can deliver to ease the struggle of daily Cuban life, end the brain-drain of highly educated Cubans who continue to exit the country in droves, and modernize the economy and society at large. During his steady rise to the pinnacle of the Cuban Communist Party, he has gained a reputation as a listener, a consensus builder, a hands-on manager, a non-elitist, and an accessible administrator. At 58, he is approximately 30 years younger than the few surviving leaders from the generation of the revolution who have governed Cuba up until this point. International observers assume he’s modern and forward-thinking because he carries a computer tablet and is often seen working on it during meetings.

For Cubans, this generational change in leadership carries high expectations for a different, if not better, future, instead of the nationalist nostalgia for the heyday of Cuba’s revolutionary past that tends to dominate the propaganda of the Communist Party. Díaz-Canel faces the daunting challenge of providing both continuity and change to address competing social, economic, and ideological pressures as Cuba moves forward. To succeed, he will have to lead the country through this historic political transition toward a far more significant socioeconomic transformation. Raúl Castro often said his reforms would continue sin prisa pero sin pausa—without hurry but without pause. As the cachet of the Castro era fades into history, the country’s new leadership may well decide to pick up the pace of change.

When the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) recently published a preliminary clinical evaluation of health problems suffered by US embassy personnel in Havana, the State Department seized the opportunity to reiterate a countrywide “health alert” on Cuba. “Discuss the JAMA article with a doctor if you have concerns prior to travel,” the department advised on February 14. “We encourage private U.S. citizens who have traveled to Cuba and are concerned about their symptoms to share this article with their doctor.”

The alert reflects an ongoing effort by President Trump’s State Department to frighten US travelers away from Cuba. Last September, when the administration announced a drastic 60 percent embassy staff reduction in Havana in response to the mysterious health maladies, the department issued a categorical warning to US citizens “not to travel to Cuba.” In early January, when the State Department issued a new safety ranking system for all nations, Cuba received a “level 3” designation—“Reconsider Travel: Avoid travel due to serious risks to safety and security.” In late January, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs told The Miami Herald that, following the September alert, 19 US citizens had called to report health problems after traveling to Cuba—out of close to 620,000 travelers who visited the island in 2017—even though officials at the Bureau of Consular Affairs who fielded those calls readily admit that they took no steps to determine when, where, and how those illnesses occurred, and simply passed the callers on to the FBI. And last week, when the State Department determined that the embassy would not be restaffed and will “continue to operate with the minimum personnel necessary to perform core diplomatic and consular functions,” the department posted a long list of warnings for anyone thinking about traveling to Cuba—even though the island remains among the safest countries anywhere in the world for US citizens to visit.

The highly technical JAMA study, titled “Neurological Manifestations Among US Government Personnel Reporting Directional Audible and Sensory Phenomena in Havana, Cuba,” certainly sounds scary. The article summarizes initial medical findings on 21 of the 24 members of the US embassy community in Havana—diplomats, family members, and intelligence agents—who suffered a range of neurological-related symptoms from a still-unidentified source between late 2016 and August 2017. “Persistent cognitive, vestibular, and oculomotor dysfunction, as well as sleep impairment and headaches, were observed among US government personnel in Havana, Cuba, associated with reports of directional audible and/or sensory phenomena of unclear origin,” a team of doctors from the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Brain Injury and Repair reported. “These individuals appeared to have sustained injury to widespread brain networks without an associated history of head trauma.”

The report, however, was accompanied by an editorial warning that the findings remain preliminary and incomplete. “At this point, a unifying explanation for the symptoms experienced by the US government officials described in this case series remains elusive and the effect of possible exposure to audible phenomena is unclear,” states the JAMA editorial. “Before reaching any definitive conclusions, additional evidence must be obtained and rigorously and objectively evaluated.”

Nevertheless, the JAMA study has helped to clarify the murky and misrepresented events that the Trump administration has characterized as “sonic attacks” against US personnel in Havana—and a potential threat to US travelers. The journal article contains several important takeaways:

• The “sonic attack” meme has been scientifically laid to rest. The doctors determined that the sounds heard by those who were hurt—described as a “high-pitched sound,” “buzzing,” “grinding metal,” “piercing squeals,” and “humming”—could not have caused the symptoms they experienced. “We actually don’t think it was the audible sound that was the problem,” says Dr. Douglas Smith, MD, a co-author of the study who directs the Center for Brain Injury and Repair. “We think the audible sound was a consequence of the exposure, because audible sound is not known to cause brain injury.” At the same time, the JAMA study casts doubt on viral or chemical sources of the symptoms. While the JAMA editorial alludes to “mass psychogenic illness” as a possible explanation—a theory that Cuban investigators have also advanced—after a year of serious investigation by multiple US agencies, the cause of the health problems remains unidentified.
• Sensational reports of brain damage turn out to be fake news. Based on leaks by anonymous US officials briefed on the medical-study findings, the Associated Press circulated a seemingly explosive scoop in December that the doctors had “discovered brain abnormalities” among the US embassy personnel. “Medical testing has revealed the embassy workers developed changes to the white matter tracts that let different parts of the brain communicate,” the AP reported. But now those claims have been revealed to be incorrect at best—and malicious spin at worst. According to the JAMA study, all 21 patients underwent MRI testing, and “most patients had conventional imaging findings.” Only three showed “multiple T2-bright white matter foci”; of those, two were “mild in degree and 1 with moderate changes.” The study made it clear that there was no way to know if those few cases had anything to do with events in Havana or “could perhaps be attributed to other preexisting disease processes or risk factors.”
• Those who experienced health problems in Havana hotel rooms were US personnel. The JAMA study refers to government patients who experienced an “onset of symptoms in their homes and hotel rooms,” offering official, if inadvertent, confirmation that reported incidents in the Hotel Nacional and the Hotel Capri involved US employees, not tourists. Other than the names of the hotels, the State Department has refused to provide any details about three incidents that took place at the Nacional and Capri. But when the administration announced the virtual shutdown of the embassy last September, the State Department pointed to the hotels as evidence of a potential threat to US tourists and categorically warned them not to travel to the island. “Because our personnel’s safety is at risk, and we are unable to identify the source of the attacks,” the travel warning stated, “we believe U.S. citizens may also be at risk and warn them not to travel to Cuba. Attacks have occurred in U.S. diplomatic residences and hotels frequented by U.S. citizens.” An updated travel advisory posted on the State Department’s website last week specifically instructs US travelers to “avoid Hotel Nacional and Hotel Capri.”

Predictably, these travel warnings have led to significant cancellations at the Capri and the Nacional, as well as a significant drop-off in overall US visitors to the island. That might not have been the case if the Trump administration had been transparent, and honest, about what happened in Cuba, instead of exploiting this troubling situation to sabotage normalized relations. “Leaks of intentionally misleading and false information by US government officials have distorted the truth and made it harder to get to the bottom of the mystery,” points out Collin Laverty, who runs Cuba Educational Travel (CET) and tracks the impact of Trump’s policies on tourism and the tourist sector in Cuba. The administration, he suggests, is “hiding many of the facts.”

CIA: The Elephant in the Embassy

 The JAMA study evaluated 11 women and 10 men who were vaguely identified as “US government personnel serving on diplomatic assignment in Havana, Cuba.” The mainstream press has often referred to those who reported injuries as “diplomats,” while US officials have referred to them as “members of the Embassy community.” Not a single member of this “community” has been named, let alone stepped forward and publicly identified themselves. It has fallen to intrepid investigative reporters at CNN, the AP, and most recently ProPublica to reveal the missing link in this mystery: A critical number of those affected were members of the CIA station in Cuba.

The ProPublica article, based on a lengthy investigation by reporters Tim Golden and Sebastian Rotella, appeared on February 14, the same day the JAMA study was published. While the JAMA article was picked up by major news outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, the revelations of the lengthy ProPublica story have received little mainstream circulation. The article, “The Sound and the Fury: Inside the Mystery of the Havana Embassy,” offers the first credible and comprehensive time line on how the health crisis unfolded and, most importantly, breaks through the Trump administration’s cover-up of who was initially affected. “The first four Americans to report being struck by the phenomenon,” according to Golden and Rotella, “were all CIA officers working under diplomatic cover, as were two others affected later on.” (The latter two are widely rumored to include an agency doctor who was sent to Havana to evaluate what was happening to CIA colleagues and reported acoustic-related injuries while staying in one of the hotels.) CIA officers saw “a pattern that was anything but coincidental.”

Indeed, the article makes clear that both senior embassy and intelligence officials believed that the acoustic episodes were part of a long, nasty history of “spy vs. spy” in Cuba. Between late December 2016, when the first CIA operative reported his symptoms, and late March 2017, when the health problems were shared with the embassy community, “both the intelligence officials and senior diplomats guessed that the noises were ‘just another form of harassment’ by the Cuban government,” ProPublica reported. In March, the de facto US ambassador, Jeff DeLaurentis, told a diplomatic colleague who wanted a full embassy meeting on the issue that “he and others who knew about the incidents believed they were confined to a ‘small universe of people’ whom the Cubans probably suspected of doing intelligence work, whether they were CIA officers or not.” Top CIA officials became so convinced that their agents were under attack, The Nation has learned, that they apparently ordered the closure of the CIA station in Havana—a move that contributed to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s decision in September to effectively shutter the consulate and reduce embassy operations to a skeleton staff.

Only after DeLaurentis briefed the entire diplomatic corps at the Havana embassy in late March 2017 did something akin to mass hysteria break out. Some 80 members of the US diplomatic community, including family and non-diplomatic personnel, took a leave to Miami to be tested for symptoms. Of those, about a dozen were found to have traumatic experiences similar to the more serious cases of the initial four CIA personnel. Between April and August, another eight cases were reported, including the three at the Capri and Nacional hotels, at least one of which involved a CIA employee. In total, 24 cases have been identified as part of this health mystery. None involve US tourists.

“Duty to Inform”

 The fact that a “small universe” of CIA personnel is at the center of what has evolved into a major impasse in US-Cuban relations explains the secrecy surrounding this mystery; to publicly admit that a “CIA station” exists anywhere in the world is taboo for US officials. The Top Secret nature of CIA operations restricts the release of information by the administration, and by senators and representatives who have received multiple classified briefings on the situation. It limits access to information that both scientists and doctors need to fully evaluate what could have created this mysterious situation.

Indeed, the sensitivity around spy-vs.-spy technologies at use in Cuba may also impede a much-needed consultation between the US and Cuban intelligence communities over whether espionage-related equipment may have inadvertently combined to create these health conditions. A comprehensive acoustical study released last week by a team of computer scientists and engineers from the University of Michigan and Zhejiang University in China concluded that the metallic grinding noises experienced by US personnel in Cuba might have been caused by an accidental combination of ultrasound waves, raising the possibility that multiple ultrasonic carriers, including eavesdropping and jamming technologies, collided to create the conditions for harm. “If ultrasound played a role in harming diplomats in Cuba,” the study states, “then a plausible cause is intermodulation distortion between ultrasonic signals that unintentionally synthesize audible tones. In other words, acoustic interference without malicious intent to cause harm could have led to the audible sensations in Cuba.” It is hard to imagine how this potentially promising theory can be tested without a formal, and candid, dialogue between the appropriate US and Cuban authorities.

By hiding this part of the story, however, the Trump administration has created a false impression that a broader threat to travelers exists in Cuba, when the threat, if there was one, appears to have evolved around a specific group of US personnel. Without this context, the official travel alert—mandated by the State Department’s “duty to inform” procedures when there is a drawdown of embassy staff—is grossly misleading for the traveling public.

Indeed, if the administration fulfilled its “duty to inform” honestly, it would advise potential tourists that the health problems have been specific to US government personnel, that no cases have been reported since August 2017, and that overall, Cuba remains one of the most secure nations in the world to visit. An honest travel advisory would note that in January the International Travel Fair in Madrid voted to give Cuba an excellence award as the “safest country for tourism.” A recent survey by the Center for Responsible Travel (CREST) of 42 agencies that arrange travel to Cuba found that not a single one of the travelers they hosted in 2017 had reported any health issues related to those of the embassy community. “We have brought more than 10,000 Americans to Cuba over the last few years—including thousands in 2017 and 2018—and not one has reported any similar health issues during or after their visit,” notes Laverty of CET, who also handles The Nation’s trips to Cuba. “On the contrary, a leading response on post-trip surveys is how safe travelers feel in that country.” 

CREST and CET are among almost three dozen travel agencies and educational groups calling for Secretary Tillerson to change the travel advisory and begin to restaff the embassy. Similar requests have come from senators and congressional representatives, including Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy and Florida Representative Kathy Castor, who visited Cuba in late February and met with Cuban officials to discuss how to move US-Cuban relations forward. In a February 28 letter to Secretary Tillerson, Congresswoman Castor urged him to “return consular officials and diplomatic personnel to the embassy as soon as possible” so that the United States could advance its political, cultural, and economic interests at a time of major leadership transition in Cuba, as well as to support the growing Cuban private sector, which depends on commercial interaction and US tourism. “It is also time to reverse the overreaching travel warning by the State Department that it is unsafe to travel to Cuba,” her letter continued. “There is nothing in recent history to show that Cuba is unsafe for American visitors.”

On March 5, however, the State Department began implementing a new staffing plan that will keep the embassy community at minimum levels—transforming a temporary reduction into an indefinite one. The embassy “will operate as an unaccompanied post, defined as a post at which no family members are permitted to reside,” the department declared last week. The decision was accompanied by yet another lengthy warning against traveling to Cuba.

But at time when the Trump administration seems determined to undermine better US relations with Cuba, travel to the island has become all the more important. If the State Department is unwilling to engage in the mission of diplomacy, it will be left to the citizen-diplomats to fill the void and, at the people-to-people level, advance the cause of positive relations.

About 10 years ago, I traveled with the producers of the Hollywood film on Che Guevara—starring the actor Benicio del Toro and directed by Steven Soderbergh—to Miami to obtain further information for the movie about the circumstances of Che’s execution. At a restaurant in Little Havana, the stronghold of the anti-Castro exile community in the United States, we met with Gustavo Villoldo, who had been the senior Cuban-American CIA operative assigned to Bolivia in 1967 to assist in tracking down and capturing the iconic revolutionary. Villoldo arrived carrying a thick white binder, filled with memorabilia of Che’s execution on October 9, 1967—original photographs, secret telexes, news clips, and even the official fingerprints taken from Che’s dead hands. The scrapbook recorded the historic results of the CIA’s covert efforts to train and assist the Bolivian special forces in eliminating Che and his small band of guerrilla fighters.

In macabre detail, the retired covert agent described his discussions with Bolivian military officers when Guevara’s body arrived, via helicopter, from the pueblo of La Higuera, where he had been captured and shot, to the Bolivian town of Villegrande. The Bolivians wanted to cut off Che’s head, he said, and preserve it as proof that Guevara was dead and gone. According to Villoldo, he convinced them instead that they could create a “death mask” of plaster, and that cutting off and preserving Che’s hands would be sufficient evidence. Villoldo explained how he arranged to secretly bury the body where it would never be found. Indeed, for 30 years Che’s remains were “disappeared”; in July 1997, his bones, minus hands, were located in a makeshift grave alongside an airstrip on the outskirts of Villegrande.

At one point during the conversation, Villoldo opened the binder and pulled out a white envelope. Inside was a clump of brown hair. As the ultimate souvenir of this Cold War victory, Villoldo proudly stated, he had cut off strands of Che’s hair before disposing of his body. “I basically took it because the symbol of the revolution was this bearded, long-haired guy coming down the mountain,” Villoldo later explained. “To me, I was cutting off the very symbol of the Cuban revolution.”

ifty years ago, US officials shared that sentiment. They considered the capture and execution of Che Guevara as arguably the most important victory of the United States over Cuba and Latin America’s militant left during the era of US intervention and counterinsurgency warfare in the 1960s. Top CIA and White House officials drafted numerous secret documents analyzing the significance of Che’s demise—for Fidel Castro and Cuba, and for US interests in blocking the spread of revolution in Latin America.

This memorandum—classified SECRET-SENSITIVE/Eyes Only—was prepared for President Lyndon Johnson five days after Che’s death. It transmitted a short summary from CIA director Richard Helms confirming the details of Che’s final hours. Helms’s attached report, “Capture and Execution of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara,” confirmed that Guevara had not died from “battle wounds” during a clash with the Bolivian army, as the press had reported from Bolivia, but rather had been executed “at 1315 hours…with a burst of fire from an M-2 automatic rifle.”

The White House memo also confirmed that the Bolivian government was covering up its role in Che’s execution by claiming his body had been cremated and could not be repatriated to his homeland of Argentina, or to Cuba. Che’s brother, Roberto, had traveled to Bolivia to ask that his corpse be turned over to the family; the socialist senator from Chile Salvador Allende had formally requested that the body be turned over to Chile, which Washington interpreted as an effort by Fidel Castro to recover Che’s remains. “The Bolivians do not want an independent autopsy to show that they executed ‘Che’ and they are intent on not permitting the remains to be exploited by the communist movement,” President Johnson was informed.

Guevara’s death “represents a serious blow to Castro,” according to the report to President Johnson. The CIA had intercepted clandestine messages from Havana to Bolivia that revealed that Fidel had intended the insurrection in Bolivia to be “a Cuban show designed to spark a movement of ‘continental magnitude.’” Castro had even summoned ranking members of the Bolivian Communist Party to Havana to advise them not to present the insurrection as a nationalist movement, according to these intercepted messages. Rather, he referred to it as an “internationalist movement.”

“The death of Guevara carries these significant implications,” White House aide Walt Rostow reported to Johnson in a separate memo to reinforce this point.

• It marks the passing of another of the aggressive, romantic revolutionaries like Sukarno, Nkrumah, Ben Bella—and reinforces this trend.
• In the Latin American context, it will have a strong impact in discouraging would-be guerrillas.
• It shows the soundness of our ‘preventative medicine’ assistance to countries facing incipient insurgency—it was the Bolivian 2^nd Ranger Battalion, trained by our Green Berets from June-September of this year, that cornered [Guevara] and got him.

How would Fidel react? US officials worried that “he might try to recoup lost prestige” by undertaking a dramatic act against the United States—“such as bombing one of our Embassies or kidnapping of diplomatic personnel.” The State Department sent a precautionary security alert to US ambassadors in the region.

The Cuban revolution, however, was not known to engage in international terrorism; no bombs were detonated at US embassies and no diplomats were targeted. Fidel’s initial reaction was to give a fiery, solemn, and poignant speech during a memorial rally for Guevara on October 18, speaking directly to some of the points raised in the classified reports circulating at the highest levels of the US government.

Che’s death, Fidel declared, was “a hard blow, a tremendous blow for the revolutionary movement.” But, he added, “those who boast of victory are mistaken. They are mistaken when they think that his death is the end of his ideas, the end of his tactics, the end of his guerrilla concepts, the end of his theory.”

Insurgencies continued, as did US-led counterinsurgency operations, particularly in Central American countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Indeed, with Cuban logistical and training support, within a decade of Che’s execution the Sandinista National Liberation Front had become a formidable movement and would eventually overthrow the Somoza dynasty. Officials in Washington were mistaken if they believed Guevara’s ideas, concepts, and committed resistance would be buried along with his body. His failed guerrilla-warfare tactics may not have been inspirational, but his martyrdom at the hands of the CIA certainly came to be.

n Cuba, the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Che’s death underscored a continuing effort to energize the revolution and its commitment to stand up to the United States. At a rally in Santa Clara, where Guevara is buried, Cuban Vice President Miguel Díaz-Canel quoted the revolutionary’s admonition that “imperialism can never be trusted, not even a tiny bit, never.” In the face of Trump’s bullying rhetoric and punitive policies against Cuba, Díaz-Canel reiterated that “Cuba will not make concessions to its sovereignty and independence, nor negotiate its principles.”

The fate of Gustavo Villoldo’s memorabilia also illustrates Guevara’s iconic and romanticized legacy. Villoldo eventually decided to auction off his scrapbook on the execution of Che; the auction was conducted on October 25, 2007, by Heritage Auction Galleries of Dallas.

Initially, the minimum required bid was $50,000. But after the auction company received an inquiry of interest from the government of the late Hugo Chávez in Venezuela—Chávez presumably intended to acquire the hair and return it to Che’s family in Santa Clara, Cuba—the minimum bid was doubled to $100,000. When the scrapbook went on the auction block, however, there was only one bidder—a Texas bookstore owner named Bill Butler, who agreed to pay the $100,000 plus a $19,500 sales commission.

Butler said he intended to display the binder in his Houston bookstore. He had made this unique and expensive purchase, he told reporters, because Che Guevara was “one of the greatest revolutionaries in the 20th century.”

Havana—“Thank you for joining us at this truly historic moment as we prepare to raise the flag…symbolizing the restoration of diplomatic relations after 54 years,” then–Secretary of State John Kerry stated as he presided over the reopening of the US embassy in Havana in August 2015. After two dynamic and dramatic years of normalization, which have brought an unprecedented degree of bilateral cooperation, economic interaction, and travel, Kerry’s successor, Rex Tillerson, has begun the process of shuttering the embassy once again.

On September 29, Tillerson announced that he would reduce embassy personnel in Havana by 60 percent, effectively closing the consulate that provides visas to Cubans traveling to the United States and terminating all but emergency services for US visitors to the island. The State Department also issued a “Cuba Travel Warning,” advising citizens “to avoid travel to Cuba”—even as it conceded that “we have no reports that private U.S. citizens have been affected” by a mystifying pattern of health ailments that have struck members of the US and Canadian diplomatic community in Havana.

“Over the past several months, 21 U.S. Embassy employees have suffered a variety of injuries from attacks of an unknown nature. The affected individuals have exhibited a range of physical symptoms, including ear complaints, hearing loss, dizziness, headache, fatigue, cognitive issues, and difficulty sleeping,” reads the Tillerson press release, titled “Attacks Taken in Response to Attacks on U.S. Government Personnel in Cuba.” The release continues, “Until the Government of Cuba can ensure the safety of our diplomats in Cuba, our Embassy will be reduced to emergency personnel in order to minimize the number of diplomats at risk of exposure to harm.”

The travel advisory and the severity of the embassy reductions have set off alarms that the Trump administration has begun a concerted rollback of the Obama-initiated rapprochement. Although the State Department affirmed that “we maintain diplomatic relations with Cuba, and our work in Cuba continues to be guided by the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States,” suspicions abound that the White House is catering to the political interests of Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who has been working behind the scenes to revert US Cuba policy to the aggression of the Cold War. Last week, Rubio demanded that the Trump administration further punish Cuba by expelling more than half of the staff at the Cuban Embassy in Washington. He appears to have Trump’s ear. On October 3, the State Department sent a diplomatic note to Cuba ordering some 15 members of the Cuban embassy to leave Washington in the next seven days.

A Foreign-Policy Whodunit

There was a “big problem” in Cuba, President Trump explained to reporters in impromptu comments on the embassy drawdown; the Cubans, he claimed, “did some very bad things.”

In fact, Trump administration officials firmly believe that the Cuban government is not culpable for the “attacks”—though it’s not clear the health problems were actually caused by such an event—and have carefully avoided accusing Cuba of generating them. Their assessment appears to be based on intelligence intercepts of conversations among high-level Cuban officials after the United States brought the disturbing pattern of health problems among US and Canadian embassy personnel to their attention last January. As a “former senior American official” told The New York Times, “there was information that the Cubans were rattled by what had happened and were desperate to find the cause.”

That assessment was supported by the actions of Cuban President Raúl Castro. Last February, during a reception in Havana for a congressional delegation led by Senator Patrick Leahy, Castro pulled the head of the US embassy, Jeffrey DeLaurentis, aside and emphatically told him that Cuba had no knowledge of, nor any role in, the health problems among the US diplomatic corps. Castro pledged Cuba’s full cooperation in identifying the cause of the mysterious maladies, and even invited the FBI to come to Havana to investigate, as two officials with knowledge of the conversation told The Nation. “You have to cooperate with us, you have to cooperate with us” to resolve this problem, Castro urged DeLaurentis.

Since then, a team of FBI investigators has traveled to Havana at least three times—in June, August, and September—conducting their own forensic analysis in the search for a culprit and/or cause. To date, the FBI “has nothing that points to anyone,” as one Senate staffer whose office has received classified briefings summed up progress in the investigation. In Tillerson’s September 29 statement, the secretary of state conceded that “investigators have been unable to determine who is responsible or what is causing these attacks.”

US officials have told the Cubans that they suspect the health problems were the result of some sort of targeted “sonic attack”—a phrase the media have seized on—perhaps conducted by a third country. But that theory has been challenged by the medical and scientific community, as well as former members of the intelligence community. Doctors and psychoacoustics experts consulted on the case have stated that the wide variety of symptoms is unlikely to have been caused by any known sonic or surveillance device. “No one has a device that could do this. Because no such device exists,” says Fulton Armstrong, a retired CIA officer who worked on Cuba policy in the Clinton White House. The idea that agents of a third country, like Russia or North Korea, could “lug special ray-gun technology around Havana, aim it at diplomats’ homes and tourist hotels undetected and unfettered, and get away with it all,” according to Armstrong, appears equally implausible.

The investigation has been shrouded in secrecy, compounding the mysterious nature of these health problems. None of the 21 “members of the Embassy community,” as State Department press officials describe the affected personnel (some were intelligence agents in Cuba working under cover as diplomats), have identified themselves or spoken out publicly on the issue. Nor has the FBI formally released any of its preliminary findings. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who are also investigating what happened to several members of their diplomatic staff in Havana, have remained silent. Cuban authorities who are actively investigating the crisis have yet to release formal reports on what they have, or have not, found.

The lack of transparency has fostered conspiracy theories and widespread speculation. In Cuba, for example, one of the leading political columnists, Fernando Ravsberg, has accused the CIA of mounting “un “Maine acústico,’” or “an acoustic Maine”—a reference to the 1898 sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor by an unexplained explosion, which was used by US warmongers to swing public opinion in favor of military intervention during Cuba’s fight for independence from Spain. According to Ravsberg, the “sonic attacks” are a CIA psychological operation designed to set the stage for yet another US invasion.

Such theories have the capacity to increase tensions further between Washington and Havana and sabotage the progress in reconciliation that has been made since December 17, 2014, when Raúl Castro and President Obama announced a breakthrough in relations. And that may well be the intention of the whole operation, if indeed the health problems are the result of a dirty-tricks department of an as-yet-unidentified country or entity. Ben Rhodes, the former deputy national-security adviser who was chief architect of Obama’s successful rapprochement efforts, tweeted that “The Trump Administration is playing right into the hands of perpetrators who want to harm US-Cuba ties.” “Whoever is responsible for the attacks on US diplomats in Havana—if it was an intentional act—did it in order to damage US-Cuban relations,” says American University professor William LeoGrande. “The Trump administration’s disproportionate response hands them a victory.”

The Fallout

In a clear effort to keep this diplomatic crisis from escalating further, the Cuban government has reacted with relative restraint. Initially, Josefina Vidal, the Foreign Ministry official in charge of US affairs, called Tillerson’s decision “hasty” and reiterated that Cuba would continue to cooperate in the investigations to determine what, or who, caused these maladies. On October 3, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez held a press conference in Havana to reiterate “that Cuba has never perpetuated, nor will it ever perpetuate, attacks of any sort against diplomatic officials or their relatives.” The foreign minister urged the Trump administration “not to continue politicizing this matter, which can provoke an undesirable escalation and would [further] reverse even more bilateral relations.”

Average Cubans, who now face a de facto US immigration ban since the US consulate is no longer processing visa applications—and who will take an economic hit if US visitors are scared away by Trump’s travel advisory—have been even more vocal. “Just as the re-establishment of Cuba-US relations was a positive influence, now this will be very negative,” one Cuban who rents out an apartment through Airbnb told a Reuters reporter. Three of his renters have already canceled since September 29. Trump’s decisions, he said, “are creating a mood of insecurity for those who want to travel to Cuba.”

“The United States must prioritize the safety of our diplomats serving overseas. At the same time, this must be balanced with policies that serve US national interests, such as a functioning US embassy in Havana and travel in both directions,” said Collin Laverty, who runs Cuba Educational Travel, one of the leading travel providers to the island (CET has helped coordinate The Nation’s Cuba trips). As tour companies like Laverty’s CET field a flood of calls from anxious travelers about whether it is safe, and still legal, to go to Cuba, the industry is leading the pushback against Trump’s decision. Major airline carriers such as American and United, which initiated direct commercial flights to Cuba a year ago and have ferried almost half a million US citizens to the island this year, have publicly declared that their transportation services will continue unchanged. So have the travel providers. “We believe that its decision is unwarranted, and we are continuing to organize travel to Cuba and encourage others to do so,” said Bob Guild, vice president of Marazul Charters and head of a recently formed association of over 100 travel providers known as Responsible & Ethical Cuba Travel (RESPECT).

“Cuba continues to be one of the safest places in the world for visitors,” Laverty emphasizes. Out of the tens of thousands of travelers that have gone to Cuba under the auspices of CET, he says, there have been no reports of any such incidents affecting their health.

But perhaps the most significant, and courageous, voice for maintaining normal diplomatic relations comes from the diplomatic corps—the very people whom the Trump administration claims to be trying to protect. As the health crisis evolved this year, diplomats posted at the US embassy have resisted leaving; instead, they have let it be known that they want to stay. “It’s a complicated question regarding what is actually causing the health issues in Cuba, but our members are clear that they have a mission to do,” the president of the American Foreign Service Association, Barbara Stephenson, said in a strong statement opposing the embassy drawdown.

Stephenson made it clear that she was “speaking on behalf” of the US embassy community in Havana. To conduct diplomacy, she said, US diplomats “need to remain on the field and in the game.”

In a reversal of the Obama administration’s historic effort to normalize US-Cuba relations, on June 16 President Trump announced his new, antagonistic policy—which includes restrictions on the abilities of US citizens to freely visit the island. As Trump’s Treasury Department drafts the new regulations on travel to, and in, Cuba, The Nation asked four leading veterans of the travel-to-Cuba movement to comment on the new restrictions and their impact on the rights of US travelers and Cuban society at large. The participants include:

• Christopher Baker, a photojournalist and leading guide for National Geographic Expeditions, as well as a popular guide for motorcycle and photography tours to Cuba. His books include the Moon Cuba guidebook, Mi Moto Fidel: Motorcycling Through Castro’s Cuba, and Cuba Classics: A Celebration of Vintage American Automobiles.

• Bob Guild, vice president of Marazul Tours, Inc., founded in 1979 and one of the original Cuba travel agencies. He is also a coordinator of the new professional travel association RESPECT—Responsible and Ethical Cuba Travel.

• Collin Laverty, founder and president of Cuba Educational Travel, one of the leading travel providers of cultural and people-to-people tours (including The Nation magazine’s) to the island. With its mission “to connect the people of the United States and Cuba,” CET has also facilitated the travel of Cuban dance troupes, hip-hop artists, students, and entrepreneurs to the United States.

• Sandra Levinson, a founder and executive director of the Center for Cuban Studies in New York. Since 1973, the center has organized hundreds of professional tours to Cuba oriented toward artistic, cultural, and sociopolitical interaction.

Peter Kornbluh: In one way or another, you are all pioneers of, and participants in, the evolution of travel to Cuba over many years. After decades of travel bans, what was most important about this past year, after President Obama’s history-making decisions to authorize direct commercial air flights and cruise ships and allow individual US citizens to visit the island on self-designated “people to people” and educational trips?

CL: Finally, there was a sense of normalcy in traveling to Cuba! Americans finally felt like it was OK, normal, and legal to book a flight and go. That psychological element has had a tremendous impact on how many people actually visit the island. President Obama led by example when he visited Cuba last year with his whole family. He sent a message that we should visit, engage, and make friends as well.

CB: It’s hard to underestimate the impact of Obama’s travel opening. First, the increase in the volume of US citizens in Havana—the prime destination for Americans—was noticeable, including for the first time the arrival of a significant body of African-American travelers and younger independent travelers, including spring-breakers. There’s no doubt this has been a godsend for Cuba’s burgeoning private entrepreneurs, notably owners of private-room rentals, but also artists and, of course, owners of convertible classic cars.

CL: That’s right. Obama’s relaxed travel regulations promoted organic and unfettered interaction between visiting Americans and Cubans. The country’s safety, combined with the openness of the Cuban people, meant Americans were getting off the beaten track and spending time with average Cubans. Additionally, the growing private sector in Cuba improved its products and services to receive increased numbers of Americans, leading to great economic growth and innovation to adapt to new market conditions.

BG: This last period of time was certainly unlike anything I had experienced since first sending groups to Cuba in 1977! The fight for our right to travel has always met fierce resistance, including violence, bombings, and murders. Last year we seemed to be winning—but then came Trump!

PK: What do you think will be the impact of Trump’s new restrictions?

SL: I think we’ve already seen some of the impact. What Trump has done, despite its being mostly smoke and mirrors, is make people think that, once again, it is going to be difficult to travel to Cuba—that there will be hoops to jump through. Trump’s message is that our government doesn’t like the Cuban government, and that going to Cuba might mean trouble with the US government’s Treasury Department. Travel to Cuba is now a kind of no-no—at least rhetorically.

CL: I completely agree. The new restrictions are going to reduce the number of Americans traveling to Cuba. The rhetoric surrounding the announcement about audits, fines, and banned hotels scares law-abiding Americans who don’t want to look over their shoulder for going on holiday. Moreover, it will affect Cuban entrepreneurs serving visiting Americans and the average Cuban worker in the hospitality sector, which survives off tips. Americans happen to be the best tippers in Cuba at the moment!

BG: While Trump trumpeted his so-called support for the private sector in Cuba, his approach is actually a frontal assault on the owners of private restaurants, bed-and-breakfast homes, and on Cuban artists who have depended on US travelers in the “individual people to people” category for a disproportionate share of their sales and sustenance. And any lessening of group travel due to revised rules and threats of “audits” will also negatively impact the entrepreneurs whose privately owned businesses are increasingly incorporated into group programs and arrangements.

CB: I recall when Presidents Obama and Castro announced the accord on December 17, 2014, and Cubans erupted in spontaneous cheers on the street. I was in Cuba the week after Trump’s announcement, and the mood was far less sanguine. Almost every Cuban I met expressed concern that Trump’s setback will harm their pocketbooks as well as US-Cuba relations. Cubans want warmer relations. They delight at having US visitors, whom they welcome with genuine smiles and expressions of affection. This comes from the heart, not necessarily from the fact that US travelers are big spenders.

PK: Well, let’s talk about broader US-Cuban relations. Besides restricting travel and future US business ventures in Cuba, Trump has clearly abrogated the foundation of the 2014 accord to pursue normal, civilized relations with the Cuban government of Raúl Castro in favor of a return to an imperial, bullying policy approach.

BG: For most of the past 50 years, the US government, under both Democrats and Republicans, has maintained a policy of regime change toward Cuba—implemented via invasion, assassinations, sabotage, the economic blockade, and through millions and millions of dollars spent on subversive programs funding programs run through US AID, Radio and TV Martí, and other agencies.

Finally, after more than half a century, President Obama recognized the sovereignty of Cuba and its government and Cuba’s right to determine its own future. This was no small victory for Cuba and the vast majority of the people of the world who supported Cuba. Obama announced his opposition to the “embargo” and he opened travel as much as he thought he could do without Congressional action.

Then on June 16, Trump renounced this historic change and resumed the policy of regime change—emphasizing his support for the economic blockade and extending the travel ban. I believe we must add this to the list of historic horrors from Trump.

SL: Obama was making a huge difference psychologically for the people of Cuba, and those in countries that relate to and admire Cuba. For the first time, they were being treated almost equally to the big guys. The affection shown Obama by ordinary Cubans was completely out of proportion to what he was really accomplishing. But it meant the world to Cubans—and the fact that Obama arrived in Cuba with his family suddenly made every norteamericano seem within reach. Cubans in the street were like butterflies coming out of their cocoons, or flowers opening to the sun—they seemed so grateful to at last be treated with decency.

Now, what Trump has done is destroy that beautiful, fragile awakening. The way Trump spoke, lectured, and lied about Cuba in front of his fawning right-wing Cuban-American audience was truly sickening, and hurtful for the Cubans who were so ready to believe in change.

CB: Trump’s move is purely cynical and has zero positive benefit. It’s clearly a backroom deal with Florida Senator Marco Rubio to serve the latter’s emotionally driven distaste for open relations with Cuba, and because Rubio sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating the Russian connection.

Trump’s policy sets our relations back throughout the hemisphere. Plus, Cuba understandably refuses to negotiate under duress. Trump now makes it more difficult to advance bilateral negotiations on a wide range of topics of mutual interest and benefit.

CL: And there is another issue: Cuba is undergoing its most important transition in 50-plus years, as Raúl Castro and colleagues from his generation will step aside and a new set of leaders will take place. This coincides with an ongoing economic reform process and significant changes in Cuba’s international relations (e.g., with Venezuela and Brazil). The United States has the opportunity to be an ally and an influence in this process of change rather than an enemy and impediment. What President Trump has done is make things more complicated for those inside Cuba who are pushing to turn the page.

PK: Trump’s Treasury Department is currently writing new regulations that will govern how people can go to Cuba and where they can and cannot stay and spend money while there. The new regulations will include a list of hotels, shops, tour buses, and other businesses that are administered by the Cuban military-led Business Enterprise Group (GAESA); those will now be off-limits to US travelers. Presumably the new regulations will also detail how the Trump administration plans to “audit” travelers and prosecute them if they violate the new restrictions. What do you see as the best-case and the worst-case scenario?

CL: A worst-case scenario is that the Treasury Department’s interpretation of military-related companies is exaggerated to the point that a majority of the hospitality sector in Cuba becomes restricted, making it near impossible to visit the country without violating the rules. Hard-liners in Miami would like to see this happen, but it appears that sobering voices inside the White House have encouraged a balancing act that won’t hurt US airlines, cruise companies, and other economic interests.

At the end of the day, the money from GAESA entities goes to Cuba’s federal budget, just like the money from non-GAESA entities. The idea of pushing US tourists from the GAESA-run Hotel Saratoga to the non-GAESA Hotel Nacional will have absolutely no practical implications.

CB: Certainly, Trump could have walked back the travel and trade restrictions much further. But the devil is in the details, which we won’t know the full impact of until the new regulations are actually published. The best-case scenario is that the restrictions will continue to permit group people-to-people programs to utilize GAESA-run hotels and facilities via third-party entities, and that only independent travelers will be restrained. This isn’t wholly bad, as many such group experiences provide for a more whole understanding of Cuba (a very complex nation to comprehend!), such as on my own motorcycle and photography programs and those I lead for the National Geographic Expeditions.

PK: Determined travelers have been protesting, and circumventing, the travel restrictions to Cuba for decades. What is your message to US citizens who want to assert their right to travel to Cuba in the future?

BG: From the very first announcement of travel prohibitions to Cuba, in 1961, thousands of people have come forward to challenge the restrictions, among them student delegations, women’s groups, trade unionists, and of course the Venceremos Brigade contingents and Pastors for Peace Caravans, which challenge the ban every year—including this July and August. But now, the groups opposed to these restrictions are so much larger and diverse than ever before. In 2016, more than 600,000 US citizens visited Cuba. Polls indicate 75 percent of the people in our country—including majorities of Cuban-Americans and Republicans—are opposed to any restrictions on travel. Multinational companies and trade groups, travel agencies and tour operators, cruise ship and airline companies, all lobbied Trump prior to his announcement to keep the door to travel open.

Our job now is to reach out to past and current travelers, and to those who want to visit Cuba in the future, to join in an organized campaign to pass the “Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act”—recently introduced with 55 Senate co-sponsors—to finally end all the restrictions on travel, as well as other legislation to finally lift the economic blockade.

SL: We must organize to oppose Trump’s policies and the mentality behind them. Every single person who has traveled to Cuba should be writing his/her congressperson, calling offices, protesting what Trump has done. I hope our phones, Facebook, Instagram, and the rest of social media hasn’t turned our legs to jelly and that we can still participate and not just observe and comment on what others are doing. In short, we must resist.

But I would also remind everyone that individuals can still travel to Cuba legally if they’re professionals going for professional reasons, if they’re going for religious reasons, or humanitarian reasons, or attending conferences…in other words, if they fit into one of the 12 categories of exemptions to the travel prohibitions. If they don’t fit into one of those categories and they hate group travel, they might go (illegally) through Mexico, Panama, Canada, the Bahamas, or the Dominican Republic. If they’re smart, they’ll travel with one of the terrific tours planned by The Nation or the Center for Cuban Studies! What’s challenging about that option, however, is the cost—we have to work on that with our friends in Cuba so we can make it possible for people without much money to learn about Cuba. The hotel prices will have to come down, and the casas particulares will have to be made more available to groups.

CB: Independent travelers have always sought to sidestep legal restraints on travel to Cuba. During the past few years this has been facilitated by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control’s turning a blind eye. But Trump has now instructed OFAC to police travel more assiduously, and while he specifically focused on ensuring that people-to-people travelers are in compliance, undoubtedly there will also be stepped up policing of illegal travel via third countries, as happened in the George W. Bush era. To be safe, travelers interested in visiting Cuba should do so with an organized people-to-people program. The range of options has expanded in recent years to suit every budget and taste.

CL: Here is the message: It’s OK to visit Cuba! Even with Trump’s new restrictions, a full tour is not the only way to do it. There are many options that are cost-effective and flexible on the ground in Cuba. Reach out to a specialist for advice, compare options, read the regulations, talk to friends who have gone, but ultimately, go ahead and go. It is worth it!

Imagine this utopian scenario: On Friday afternoon, President Trump walks up to the podium at the Manuel Artime Theater in Miami, where he is scheduled to announce his new, draconian, US policy toward Cuba. “I know you expect me to roll back my predecessor’s historic breakthrough on Cuba policy,” he tells an audience of hardline Cuban-Americans, including veterans of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. “But let me tell you about that long, drawn-out Cuba policy review my administration has been conducting since January. They tell me the policy of normalization is actually working! It is advancing US business and strategic interests, helping Cubans become independent of the Communist state. No kidding. Who knew? It’s working!”

“Just this week,” Trump could say, “I have heard from Google executives how well their effort to connect Cubans to the Internet is going. And AirBnB has told me that over the past two years they have put $40 million into the pockets of average Cubans who are renting their homes to US tourists. $40 million! People, that is a helluva lot more than our pathetic USAID democracy programs are doing for the Cuban people, believe me.”

“And guess what, this week my daughter, Ivanka, received an appeal from 55 female Cuban entrepreneurs thanking her for, and I quote, ‘your interest in and dedication to women.’ They informed her that Cuban women have fueled the growth of the private sector in Cuba. They invited her to come to Cuba to ‘support travel, trade, and exchanges between our two countries.’ So if I restrict travel now, then Ivanka and Jared will not be able to go to Havana and scout future hotel sites for the Trump organization. Also, I have just received a letter from the CubaOne Foundation, an organization of young Cuban-Americans who are building bridges to their families and younger Cubans on the island. They pointed out that the ‘better deal’ with Cuba that I promised you during the campaign ‘means advancing US interests and improving the quality of life of the Cuban people, not returning to Cold War policies.’”

“I hate to say it folks, but this policy of positive engagement really, really looks like a winner, absolutely, 100 percent! That old policy of aggressive hostility? It’s lame…such a loser.”

Of course, Donald Trump will say none of the above, since he is not, to use a political-science phrase, a “rational actor.” Instead, the president plans to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to discredit the Obama policy of positive engagement, denounce the Castro government, and demand that Cuba take specific actions as a quid pro quo for improved relations. In a sure-to-be-futile attempt to coerce Cuba, Trump intends to announce new restrictions on the freedom of US citizens to visit the island, as well as on future commercial interaction.

The president’s new, eight-page executive order on Cuba, which Trump plans to sign in Miami tomorrow, will once again unleash US harassment of citizens traveling to the island, subjecting them to a Treasury Department “audit” of the purpose of their travel. US travelers will also be banned from staying at, eating at, or going to cultural events at most state-owned hotels. The new restrictions will effectively limit lodging options for hundreds of thousands of visitors, bringing a halt to the growth in the number of travelers who have taken advantage of the Obama administration’s open-door policy on travel to the island. The new directive also bans the ability of US companies to do business with any Cuban entity controlled by Gaesa, the conglomerate of tourism-related agencies administered by the Cuban military.

In both tone and substance, Trump’s new policy will undercut the Obama administration’s meticulous efforts to open a new era of civil and respectful bilateral relations between Washington and Havana. By resurrecting the decades of perpetual hostility that dominated the US approach to the Cuban revolution until December 17, 2014—the day Obama and Raúl Castro announced an agreement to reestablish diplomatic ties—Trump is set to sabotage a historic foreign-policy achievement that has indisputably advanced US national and international interests, and contributed significantly to major socioeconomic changes on the island.

A Better Deal?

Let’s be clear: There is no compelling logic to rolling back a strategic approach that has proven so successful, nor is there any real constituency for changing the policy. Poll after poll shows that about 75 percent of the American public supports the rapprochement with Cuba. That includes the Cuban-American community in Miami, which Trump will be addressing on Friday. Some 69 percent of Cuban-Americans support the diplomatic opening to Cuba, according to polling done by Florida International University; among younger Cuban-Americans, that figure rises to 87 percent. And 74 percent of the Cuban-American community favors full freedom of travel to Cuba—an unrestricted ability the community received in 2009, in one of President Obama’s first policy initiatives that Trump is now threatening to rescind.

Indeed, when it comes to the Cuban-American community, Trump’s decision to roll back the rapprochement appears to cater to only two members of the clique of hard-liners from Miami: Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, who has all but admitted to trading his vote on the American Healthcare Act for a Trump promise to roll back engagement with Cuba; and Senator Marco Rubio, who has parlayed his position as lead Trump protector on the Senate Intelligence Committee—yes, the very committee investigating the ongoing Trump/Russia scandal—into becoming the lead architect of the new, punitive policy. “I am confident that I will be very pleased with what the president will announce Friday,” Senator Rubio stated this week.

In Friday’s announcement, Trump will likely extoll his “Art of the Deal” philosophy, claiming that he—unlike many of his predecessors, who also issued demands and used coercion in their approaches to Cuba—can force the Cubans to capitulate. During the campaign, Trump repeatedly accused Obama of making a “bad deal” and conceding too much to the Castros. “If Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the US as a whole,” Trump declared three weeks after the election, “I will terminate the deal.”

But it is a major myth, as American University professor William LeoGrande has cogently argued, that the Obama administration did not significantly advance US interests in the accord to improve relations. Consider the positive dividends of normalization thus far:

• In the December 17, 2014, prisoner exchange that opened the door to better relations, the United States obtained the freedom of imprisoned USAID subcontractor Allan Gross, as well as Rolando Sarraff Trujillo, one of the CIA’s top moles inside the Cuban intelligence community, who had been imprisoned for over 15 years. Cuba also agreed to release 53 incarcerated political prisoners.

• The official reopening of a US embassy in Havana means that Washington has institutional representation in Cuba, helping to advance all its economic, political, security, and cultural interests.

• Among the bilateral structures established since 2014 is a joint task force to negotiate the many outstanding issues between Washington and Havana, among them compensation for expropriated properties and the issue of human rights.

• The restoration of civil diplomatic ties has resulted in 23 new accords and agreements between the United States and Cuba on fundamental issues such as counterterrorism operations, cyber-security, counter-narcotics collaboration, human trafficking, law-enforcement, environmental management, disaster planning, and migration control. Indeed, the final agreement that the Obama administration signed with Cuba ended the “wet foot/dry foot” policy that, for years, encouraged the type of uncontrolled migration to the United States that Trump has opposed.

• Rapprochement has facilitated US medical trials of Cuba’s anti-cancer vaccines, creating a potential for a new generation of pharmaceuticals accessible to US citizens for future treatments of this often-terminal disease.

• The opening to Cuba has allowed major US businesses to pursue economic opportunities on the island, among them Google, AirBnB, and Starwood Resorts and Hotels. The airline corporations—American Airlines, JetBlue, Southwest, and Delta among others—have made serious investments in opening routes, and the cruise-ship industry is running multiple trips per day to various Cuban ports. A recent economic impact study commissioned by Engage Cuba, a coalition of businesses focused on facilitating travel and commerce, estimates that more than 10,000 US jobs have been supported by the expansion of the travel industry, which will generate close to $3.5 billion in revenues in the coming years if travel to the island continues to expand.

• Despite existing US restrictions on simple tourism, the Cuba opening has facilitated the constitutional right of US citizens to travel. Travel to Cuba has increased by 73 percent over the last year; industry analysts estimate that the number of US visitors could reach 2 million over the next several years if the opening continues and Cuba is able to expand its infrastructure and tourist services.

These accomplishments were made possible by President Obama’s decision to abandon Washington’s imperial approach toward Cuba—a failed approach that Trump is about to renew. By adopting a noncoercive, civil, respectful tone in both open and secret talks with the Cubans before December 2014, Obama opened the door to normalized relations that are advancing both US interests and those of Cubans on the island who see, and are seizing, the opportunities for change that positive engagement offers.

Changes in Cuba

As the Obama administration predicted, the expansion of tourism, and the expanding presence of US businesses on the island, have also advanced socioeconomic change in Cuba. Raúl Castro had already moved to create a private sector before the accord with the United States, but the influx of tourist dollars and US economic interests has contributed to the rapid growth of private Cuban entrepreneurship, which now incorporates almost a third of the island’s work force. “Millions of Cubans have benefited from this private sector growth, including higher wages, better quality products and services, innovation, and the ability to dream about the future,” the 55 Cuban businesswomen wrote to Ivanka Trump this week. “Undoubtedly,” they added, “the restoration of relations between Cuba and the United States has been key to the success of the private sector,” with many businesses supported by “increased U.S. visits, improved telecommunications and the introduction of new U.S. products and services.” But a setback in relations, they wrote to Ms. Trump, “would bring with it the fall of many of our businesses and with this, the suffering of all those families that depend on them.”

In less than three years, US engagement with the emerging private sector has done more to help transform Cuban society than five decades of paramilitary interventions, assassination plots, democracy-promotion programs, and trade embargos. Indeed, economic independence from the state—and the daily individual freedoms it allows—represents a substantive advance for the human rights of tens of thousands of Cubans. Further normalization of relations has the potential to significantly expand the number of Cubans who can determine their own economic futures, and free their lives from state control.

That is one reason that both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch oppose Trump’s effort to justify his rollback policy in the name of human rights—a cause he appears not to give a damn about in other countries such as the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, or Russia. “The fact that Obama’s approach hasn’t led to political reform in Cuba after just a few years isn’t reason to return to a policy that proved a costly failure over many decades,” points out Daniel Wilkinson of Human Rights Watch. “The previous administration was right to reject a policy that hurt ordinary Cubans and did nothing to advance human rights.” According to Amnesty International, “More travel, more communications access, and more dialogue with Cuba are the way forward for human rights in Cuba.”

Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called on Trump to continue the process of normalization, and even to lift the embargo as a way of removing the threat of US aggression, which reinforces the hard-liners in Cuba’s Communist Party leadership. In a logical world, that is what Trump would do. He would acknowledge the model of foreign-policy civility that his predecessor established, and then take credit for expanding its successful contribution to both US interests and the interests of the Cuban people. That approach, however, would require a rational actor. Unfortunately for the future of US-Cuba relations, that is something Trump will never be.

At mid-day on May 29, the conservative media website The Daily Caller posted an “exclusive” story titled “Trump Set To Roll Back Obama’s Cuba Policies.” The article stated that the president was planning a June trip to Miami, where he would reimpose restrictions on the right of US citizens to travel to Cuba, as well as curtail business opportunities that Obama had authorized through executive decree. The Daily Caller credited Trump’s decision “to the behind-the-scenes efforts of Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez and Republican Florida Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart”—the trio of hard-line Cuban-American legislators who have pressed the president to rescind Obama’s history-changing policy of engagement toward Cuba.

The article immediately ricocheted around the Internet, was forwarded by CNN and picked up by a number of media outlets. Within 24 hours, other journalists began consulting their sources inside the Trump administration and publishing more comprehensive stories. On May 31, The Hill posted a detailed article on the internal debate within the foreign-policy bureaucracy on how much to alter a policy that has yielded clear benefits for US economic and security interests in the Caribbean and a new era of collaboration between Washington and Havana on key issues of mutual importance such as counternarcotics, counterterrorism, and migration. The New York Times followed up with a front-page report that “a split has emerged over rolling back a policy that many senior officials privately agree has been an improvement on the Cold War dynamic that shaped relations with Cuba in the past.”

The information in the original Daily Caller story did not leak from inside the Trump administration. Rather, the story was sourced to “an anti-embargo group.” An astute advocate of engagement, it appears, decided to sound a political fire alarm on Trump’s pending plans for Cuba, rather than sit by as a clique of right-wing Cuban-American legislators influenced the new administration to torch a successful policy.

Indeed, with the spate of news reports, the Cuba advocacy community—now made up of travel agencies, airline corporations, tech companies, agricultural interests and a growing number of politicians and political activists, among others—is mobilizing to defend recently expanded US-Cuba relations. “Cuba policy should not be determined by several hard-line Cuban-American legislators from South Florida,” points out Mavis Anderson, head of the Washington-based Latin America Working Group (LAWG), which is generating grassroots support to sustain engagement with Cuba. “Especially when the great majority of US citizens approve the changes President Obama made to Cuba policy, and want it to go further.”

AWG was one of the first advocacy groups to push back against the Trump administration’s plans to roll back Cuba policy. “Its Now or Never: Stop Trump from reversing travel to Cuba!” reads a LAWG posting on May 30. The posting included an image to share on social media that states in bold letters i support engagement with cuba, and it calls for ending the travel ban and the embargo. In less than two days, it had been viewed over 37,500 times on Facebook, and had some 300 shares.

The LAWG posting also exhorted readers to contact members of Congress and urge them to demand continued travel and engagement with Cuba. After years of efforts by advocacy groups such as the Center for Democracy in the Americas and the Washington Office on Latin America to educate both Republican and Democratic members of the House and Senate about Cuban realities, Congress is finally emerging as a potential player on Cuba policy. Last week, in anticipation of Trump’s decision, a bipartisan group of senators reintroduced the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act. When this bill was first introduced two years ago, it had only eight cosponsors; now it has 55—a reflection of how normalization, and the advocacy and lobbying interests it has unleashed, have dramatically changed the politics of the Cuba issue.

The legislation would lift remaining restrictions on travel and deprive Trump of his ability to interfere with the constitutional right of US citizens to visit whenever they want. “Recognizing the inherent right of Americans to travel to Cuba isn’t a concession to dictators,” stated Republican Senator Jeff Flake, who co-sponsored the bill with Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy. “It is Americans who are penalized by our travel ban, not the Cuban government.”

Opinion polls show that some 81 percent of the American public supports free travel to Cuba, and that 74 percent of Cuban-Americans do as well. “The current travel restrictions,” notes the Cuban Study Group (CSG), a Miami-based Cuban-American association of business professionals, “have no parallel for any other country and are vestiges of over fifty years of failed policy. Rather than catalyze political or economic freedom on the island, they have only served to hurt the Cuban people in a misguided attempt to weaken their government.” Moreover, according to the CSG’s statement supporting the travel bill, “lifting the travel ban will have a substantial and positive effect on the lives of ordinary Cuban citizens who have joined the country’s nascent private sector.”

Last week, 46 travel agencies made a similar economic argument in a letter to Trump—one timed to support the introduction of the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act. Organized by one of the leading travel providers, Cuba Educational Travel (which has helped coordinate The Nation’s Cuba trips), the signatories urged the new administration to consider the “benefits of increased travel to Cuba to both the American and Cuban private sectors,” and to continue the Obama-era relaxation of travel restrictions, which have led to a 73 percent increase in the number of US visitors to the island this year.

“Many US travelers visiting Cuba stay in privately run B&Bs, dine at private restaurants, hire independent taxis, and purchase goods and services from entrepreneurs,” the letter stated. And US jobs are also at stake. “Due to increased demand, our companies have brought on additional staff to handle the high volume of travel to Cuba,” the signatories noted. If travel to Cuba expands, the travel service providers will “hire more American workers,” according to the letter. But, the letter warned, “a rollback of the current policy would lead to significant layoffs at many of our companies.”

An “economic impact” analysis released yesterday by the leading US business lobby, Engage Cuba, attempts to quantify the significant employment and monetary costs of rolling back the policy. Based on average plane-ticket prices and cruise-ship fares, the study estimated that restrictions on travel could cost up to $3.5 billion in lost revenues and affect over 10,000 jobs in the travel industry over the next four years. Jobs and revenue streams in South Florida would be hardest hit, with loses of $212 million per year to the state economy, should Trump cut off cruise ship travel to the island. “Manufacturing companies are finalizing commercial contracts that will create $1.1 billion worth of exports from the U.S. to Cuba over the next five years,” according to the impact analysis. “Ending this process could diminish U.S. exports by $227.6 million per year, or $929 million over four years.” Ending those export deals in progress, the study predicts, would affect 1,359 jobs a year.

The Engage Cuba study is the latest salvo in the bitter battle to rescue Cuba policy, but it certainly won’t be the last. The stakes, as the pro-engagement advocacy community understands, go beyond job and investment losses; in both language and action, Trump is threatening to undermine years of concerted effort—inside and outside of government—to establish a civil, peaceful coexistence with an island neighbor after more than half a century of intervention, embargoes, and assassination plots. At stake is a model of responsible US foreign policy—to be emulated, not repudiated. “Now is not the time to backtrack,” Mavis Anderson told The Nation. “Now it is time to take our policy back.”

“I am pleased to join in marking two years of progress since the historic decision made by the United States and Cuba to begin normalizing relations after decades of conflict and isolation,” President Obama wrote in a private letter to participants of a recent White House meeting on Cuba. The off-the-record gathering—guests included Cuban officials, prominent Cuban-American community leaders, US business representatives, US politicians, and policy advocates—was held to commemorate the second anniversary of “17-D”—the iconic date of Obama and Raúl Castro’s dramatic announcement, on December 17, 2014, that Washington and Havana would end decades of estrangement and move forward toward normal bilateral ties.

As Obama enters his final days in the White House, the break-out policy of engagement with Cuba ranks as one of his administration’s signature achievements. In just 24 months, the two nations have reopened their embassies, renewed direct commercial air travel, re-established limited trade relations, re-instituted direct mail services, and fostered a formal diplomatic framework for ongoing negotiations on issues of mutual interest as well as on issues of complex differences, such as human rights and compensation for expropriated properties. The president has used his executive authority to poke substantial holes in the long-standing economic embargo, making it possible for major US companies such as Starwood Hotels and Resorts and, most recently, Google, to do business in Havana. Last spring, Obama became the first US president in almost 90 years to travel to Cuba; there he personally advanced the hand of friendship to both the government of Raúl Castro and the Cuban people.

After more than a half-century of cold war in the Caribbean, as Obama noted in his letter, the US-Cuba détente has ended “an outdated approach” of confrontation and opened a new era of peaceful coexistence. To the great benefit of both US and Cuban citizens, Obama’s Cuba policy has transformed the closest of enemies into regional neighbors, whose common interests and significant disagreements can now be addressed through normal dialogue rather than perpetual hostility. “Through diplomacy,” Obama proudly noted in his valedictory message to the nation released this week, the United States has “opened up a new chapter with the people of Cuba.” Indeed, a key foreign-policy legacy the Obama administration leaves will be a model for the creative use of diplomatic engagement—both open and back channel—to resolve seemingly intractable and entrenched conflicts in the global arena.

That is, if it can survive Donald Trump.

* * *

Since November 8, the president-elect “has proved more than once,” as David Remnick recently observed in The New Yorker, “that it is possible to deepen global anxiety armed with nothing more than a galling level of presumption and a Twitter account.” Indeed, Trump’s unexpected election has cast a dark shadow over the future of a number of dramatic international advances—particularly the promising future of US relations with Cuba.

As a businessman, Trump favored normal economic ties with Cuba. According to news reports during the campaign, in the 1990s he secretly dispatched emissaries to scout hotel and casino opportunities in Havana; as recently as last spring, he was still making quiet inquiries.

But as a politician, Trump has catered to the hard-line, anti-normalization contingent of Cuban-American voters in Florida. During one Miami campaign rally in September, he threatened to “reverse” Obama’s policy initiatives unless Cuba “meets our demands.” Vice president–elect Mike Pence went even further: “Let me make you a promise,” he assured a crowd in Miami just before the election, “when Donald Trump is president of the United States, we will repeal Obama’s executive orders on Cuba.”

After Fidel Castro died at the age of 90 on November 25, President-elect Trump seized the opportunity to denounce the Castro regime and issue an ultimatum for concessions on social change and political liberties. “If Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people, and the US as a whole,” Trump brashly tweeted three days after Castro’s death, “I will terminate the deal.”

But Cubans, and Cuban Americans, have already approved Obama’s “deal.” Trump lost to Hillary Clinton in Miami-Dade County, which is roughly one-third Cuban-American, by some 290,000 votes; and state polls show that the majority of the Cuban-American community favor US efforts to establish better relations with Cuba. A Florida International University poll conducted in September found that 70 percent of Cuban-Americans in Miami-Dade County backed Obama’s initiative to open diplomatic relations with Cuba; and 63 percent oppose the US embargo against the island nation.

Nevertheless, Trump appears to believe he owes his electoral votes in Florida to anti-normalization hard-liners and is paying them off with political patronage.

Last month, Trump promoted Yleem Poblete, a former House Foreign Affairs Committee chief of staff under Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, to his National Security Council team. Ros-Lehtinen, the most rabid congressional opponent of Obama’s policies, once publicly called for the assassination of Fidel Castro. In the wake of Castro’s death, Poblete took to Twitter to attack Cuba: “Lost in talk of #castrodeath is #cuba regime murder of Americans, safe haven 4 terrorists & US fugitives, #Iran ties, arms to #NorthKorea,” she tweeted.

Trump has also named the leading pro-embargo lobbyist, Mauricio Claver-Carone, to the transition team at the Treasury Department where the Office of Foreign Assets Control oversees licenses and regulations for trade and travel to Cuba. Claver-Carone now has the “one job,” according to USA Today, “that’s perfectly suited for him: undoing President Obama’s normalization efforts with Cuba.”

* * *

With the future of Obama’s détente with Cuba increasingly threatened, administration officials, along with advocates and beneficiaries of normal relations, are mobilizing to defend and protect the policy. A full-court press to convince the incoming administration to stay the course on Cuba—high-profile media interviews, opinion pieces, press conferences, Congressional lobbying, reports by moderate Cuban-American leaders, letters signed by Cuban entrepreneurs, and behind-the-scenes approaches to Trump appointees—is being launched around several key arguments:

§ Engagement with Cuba is good for US business. Major airlines, cruise lines, telecom companies, hotel groups, travel agencies, Hollywood studios, multinational banks, pharmaceutical firms, and agriculture corporations, among other US enterprises, are expanding commercial ventures in Cuba. By continuing normalization of relations, Washington will generate revenues, and much-needed jobs, in key states involved in transporting and selling commercial goods to Cuba. Cuba is an emerging market—a new tourist destination, a new port for commerce, and opportunity for development—only 90 miles off our shore. If the trade embargo was fully lifted, the US International Trade Commission predicts that US exports to the island could rise from $180 million to $2.2 billion.

There is much money to be made. But, to shut the door on better relations now risks losing hundreds of millions of dollars in US sales and investment opportunities in Cuba to international and influential competitors… such as China!

§ Engagement with Cuba is good for Cuban business. Under Raúl Castro’s economic reforms, nearly one-third of the Cuban workforce has moved off the state payroll and into the growing and increasingly dynamic private sector. US engagement with Cuba supports the transformative success of the cuentapropistas—small-business entrepreneurs such as taxi drivers, mechanics, hair stylists, tour guides, artists, chefs, and thousands of apartment owners who are listing their homes on AirBnB. Obama’s opening has led to a flow of remittances from Cuban-Americans to relatives on the island, underwriting small-business development; an influx of tourists who spend money on various private sector services in Cuba; and new business relations with US companies who want to buy Cuban goods or build a presence on the island. “Our new Cuba policy is helping real people,” according to Engage Cuba, a pro-business lobby for normal relations, “from entrepreneurs starting businesses for the first time to families that are being reconnected after 55 years of estrangement.”

In December, more than a hundred of those new Cuban entrepreneurs signed a letter to Trump appealing to his business acumen. “As a successful businessman,” it read,

we’re confident that you understand the importance of economic engagement between nations. Small businesses in Cuba have the potential to be drivers of economic growth in Cuba and important partners of the US business community. Additional measures to increase travel, trade and investment, including working with the US Congress to lift the embargo, will benefit our companies, the Cuban people and US national interests. We look forward to taking advantage of any openings that your administration makes to the Cuban private sector and the Cuban economy as a whole.

At a moving press conference on Capitol Hill on December 7, four Cuban businesswomen presented the letter and issued a personal appeal to Trump not to abandon the nascent private sector they are building. “This is important for Cuba, for the Cuban entrepreneurs and for all of our families,” stated Marla Recio Carbajal, who recently started Havana Reverie, a wedding and corporate events planning agency on the island. “All of our families are dependent on this…. [we’re] growing higher salaries, growing economically, growing more independent.”

Normal relations would have a positive impact on the society at large, the four women stressed, for generations to come. “A few years ago, a new era of dreams in Cuba began,” noted Yamina Vicente, who recently created her own decorating and events-planning company called Decorazon. “I hope that my children will be able to dream too.”

§ Engagement with Cuba is good for US Interests. On December 21, Washington and Havana signed an accord on seismic data sharing to better predict earthquakes—the latest of more than a dozen new agreements in environmental, economic, educational, disaster-management, health, law-enforcement, and security spheres. Obama’s opening has accelerated cooperation in many areas of mutual interest, among them: counterterrorism, university exchanges, counter-narcotics operations, and clinical testing for a promising cancer treatment being developed in Cuban laboratories.

In communications with Trump’s transition team, Obama administration officials have also stressed the positive impact the new Cuba policy has had on the Latin America. They cite the recent peace accord ending decades of guerrilla warfare in Colombia—the Cubans hosted the negotiations between the FARC and government representatives—as well as the move away from leftist populism in the region. The rapprochement with Cuba has demonstrated Obama’s willingness to “work with everybody,” according the Ben Rhodes, the White House point man on Cuba policy, and has “transformed the nature of US engagement” with the Latin American region as a whole.

“Our new relationship with Cuba has also removed an irritant in our relationships throughout the Western Hemisphere,” Secretary of State John Kerry wrote in a 21-page memorandum summarizing foreign-policy accomplishments released today—addressed to Obama but clearly directed at the incoming Trump administration. “Going forward, if we want to deepen the connections that bind our nations and our peoples, it is critical for Congress to lift the embargo on Cuba, an outdated burden on the Cuban people that continues to impede U.S. interests.”

* * *

“Given all of this progress over the past two years, the new administration should seriously weigh the consequences of reversing the new Cuba policies,” Carlos Gutierrez, the former Cuban-American secretary of Commerce under George W. Bush, recently wrote in The Hill after he summed up these arguments. “A reversal would harm American companies. It would disconnect families, make the region less safe.” As the new Trump administration settles in, Gutierrez predicts, “they will see the economic and national security gains to be made from increased trade and engagement with Cuba, and the dangers of not engaging.”

Indeed, proponents of continuing normalization hope that Trump will keep the Cuba issue off his Twitter feed long enough for the new administration to recognize the advantages of Obama’s approach—and the disadvantages to US interests of abandoning it. “In two years, Obama’s engagement with Cuba has produced more positive results than 50 years of hostility,” points out American University professor William M. LeoGrande. “The people of Cuba support it, the people of the US support it—including most Cuban Americans—and US allies abroad support it.”

For his part, President Obama has spoken directly to Trump on the phone about Cuba, and presumably presented these arguments for sustaining a policy of civil diplomacy and engagement. In the final phase of his presidency—as well as in his soon-to-be post-presidential life—Obama has ample opportunity to publicly defend the merits of reconciliation. “By continuing to work together, we can further change an outdated approach that has failed to advance either of our interests and forge a future of greater peace and security,” he reminded the Cuban officials, Cuban-American community leaders, and advocates of normal relations who gathered at the White House to celebrate progress in US-Cuban ties last month.

“I thank all those who have played a role in normalizing relations between our two countries for their dedication,” President Obama wrote. “I encourage you to carry forward the work of strengthening our partnership in the years ahead.”

“Our enemies should not delude themselves,” Fidel Castro declared in “After Fidel: What?” the appropriately titled last chapter of his autobiography, Fidel Castro: My Life. “I die tomorrow and my influence may actually increase. I said once that the day I really die, nobody’s going to believe it.”1

At 90 years old, Castro did appear destined to live forever. He had cheated death when most of his small guerrilla force was slaughtered by Fulgencio Batista’s military just after they arrived from Mexico on a small boat, the Granma, on December 2, 1956, to start the improbable Cuban Revolution. Over the next 60 years, he outlived six US presidents and outlasted another four, a number of whom had sought his demise through assassination attempts, paramilitary assaults, and economic embargoes. After Castro became gravely ill with diverticulitis in July 2006, he twice defied the grim reaper to survive another decade, living to see the institutionalized power of the Cuban Communist Party seamlessly transferred to his brother. He also lived long enough to see Raúl Castro and President Barack Obama dramatically announce on December 17, 2014, that Cuba and the United States would bury the perpetual hostility of the past and pursue normalized relations—a peaceful coexistence with Washington that Fidel himself had secretly sought since the early 1960s.2

Fidel Castro’s death on November 25 comes at a particularly delicate stage in the ongoing effort of normalization. President Obama has done his utmost to consolidate the process of reconciliation by using his presidential authorities to open the portals of diplomatic ties, commerce, and travel. But Cuba, like much of the rest of the world, remains anxious and uncertain as to what President-elect Trump portends for the future—and whether Trump will fulfill his campaign promise to “reverse” Obama’s executive orders to improve relations unless Cuba “meets our demands.”3

With the anti-Castro propaganda unleashed in the United States by Fidel’s passing—CNN, for example, broadcast endless footage of hard-line Cuban-Americans in Miami celebrating all night long—and pro-Castro homages in Cuba emphasizing how Fidel stood up to the Colossus of the North, any hope of a low-profile, non-rhetorical transition period with the new administration has been lost. The statements that Donald Trump and his top advisors make about Fidel in the coming hours and days could well set the tone for relations for the foreseeable future. Already Trump has taken to Twitter with this seemingly celebratory tweet: “Fidel Castro is dead!” His administration, according to a statement issued today, “will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty.”4

Rather than implicit threats, President Obama has sent condolences to the Castro family and the Cuban people. In a carefully worded statement, he noted that “History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him.” In the coming week, his administration will conduct a delicate dance between politics and protocol as the White House decides how the United States will be represented at Fidel’s memorial service on December 4.5

The Castro commemoration is sure to be attended by world leaders from around the globe, reflecting the stature Fidel achieved in the international community. In the confines of the Oval Office, then–Secretary of State Henry Kissinger disparaged Castro as “that pipsqueak,” but Castro rose to legendary status in the eyes of many by standing up to the United States and supporting anticolonial and social movements around the world. “From its earliest days, the Cuban Revolution has been a source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people,” Nelson Mandela stated in a 1991 speech expressing gratitude for the role Cuba played in the anti-apartheid movement. “We admire the sacrifices of the Cuban people in maintaining their independence and sovereignty in the face of the vicious imperialist-orchestrated campaign to destroy the impressive gains made in the Cuban Revolution.” Indeed, while the legacy of his authoritarian rule in Cuba will be debated for years to come, internationally his vision, action, and principles indisputably transformed his country from a small Caribbean island into a major player on the global stage, achieving an importance and impact far beyond its geographic size.6

“Soon I will be like all the rest,” as Fidel commented on his own mortality during the Cuban Communist Party Congress last April. “Our turn comes to all of us, but the ideas of the Cuban communists will remain.” He predicted that his ideas and revolutionary inspiration would remain, well after he was gone. “I may be carried around like El Cid,” Fidel noted in his autobiography. “Even after he was dead his men carried him around on his horse, winning battles.”7

With just under 100 days remaining in office, President Obama has launched a final offensive to assure that his administration’s effort to normalize relations with Cuba will outlast his presidency and be recorded as one of the most dramatic breakthroughs in the annals of US foreign policy. With great fanfare, on October 14 Obama issued a comprehensive directive as well as new regulations to further normalize relations and nullify key aspects of the 55-year-old economic embargo that, to date, the Republican-controlled Congress has refused to lift. Most importantly, the new presidential directive mandates positive engagement, as opposed to perpetual hostility, as the modus operandi of future US policy toward Cuba.1

“This new directive consolidates and builds upon the changes we’ve already made, promotes transparency by being clear about our policy and intentions, and encourages further engagement between our countries and our people,” said Obama as he summed up his purpose in a White House press release. His directive, the president noted, takes a “whole-of-government approach to promote engagement with the Cuban government and people, and make our opening to Cuba irreversible.”2

An Irreversible Policy Shift

Since Obama and Raúl Castro announced a breakthrough in relations on December 17, 2014, the reversibility of Washington’s rapprochement with Havana has been the central question. Could political, commercial, and cultural bridges between the United States and Cuba be constructed—and firmly reinforced—so that the process of normalization could withstand current and future enemies of reconciliation?3

Donald Trump is one such enemy. In September, he turned Obama’s Cuba policy into a campaign issue by threatening to roll back the advance in relations. “The next president can reverse them,” Trump declared to a largely Cuban-American audience in Miami, “and that is what I will do unless the Castro regime meets our demands.” Via Twitter last week, Trump reiterated that he would “reverse Obama’s executive orders and concessions toward Cuba until freedoms are restored.”4

Described by US officials as “the manual” for US government agencies to institutionalize a policy of engagement, the new Presidential Policy Directive will make it harder for the next president to reverse course. Titled “United States-Cuba Normalization,” the 12-page directive—referred to officially as “PPD-43”—describes “priority objectives for normalization” and “directs actions required to implement this PPD” for all government agencies to follow in the future.  5

The directive includes a report card on the considerable success of reconciliation efforts in less than two years: 6

We have re-established diplomatic relations and have made progress toward the normalization of our bilateral relationship. We opened our respective embassies, six U.S. cabinet secretaries visited Havana, four Cuban ministers visited the United States, and I became the first sitting U.S. President to visit Cuba since 1928. We established a Bilateral Commission to prioritize areas of engagement, and we concluded non-binding arrangements on environmental protection, marine sanctuaries, public health and biomedical research, agriculture, counternarcotics, trade and travel security, civil aviation, direct transportation of mail, and hydrography. We launched dialogues or discussions on law enforcement cooperation, regulatory issues, economic issues, claims, and internet and telecommunications policy.7

At the same time, Obama’s PPD is a repudiation of past efforts to roll back the Cuban Revolution. “We will not pursue regime change in Cuba,” it states categorically. “We will continue to make clear that the United States cannot impose a different model on Cuba because the future of Cuba is up to the Cuban people.”8

Beyond Cigars and Rum

The directive, along with new Treasury Department regulations that went into effect yesterday, have generated headlines for removing the $100 limit on the amount of cigars and bottles of rum US travelers can bring back from Cuba; “Obama lifts restrictions on Cuban rum, cigars,” read the USA Today coverage. But the new initiative opens the door to far broader economic, humanitarian, and cultural interactions. Moreover, it redefines some of the more contentious US programs, loosens sanctions, and circumvents the embargo on two-way trade with Cuba. Among its highlights: 9

For the first time, the United States will begin importing, marketing, and selling Cuban medicines and pharmaceuticals, once they are approved by the FDA.10

Cubans with access to the Internet and electronic payment options can now purchase a wide variety of US consumer goods—from auto parts to air conditioners—online.11

The Cuban government can now buy certain US agricultural implements on credit. Bush-era regulations required cash-in-advance purchases.12

To facilitate commercial shipping between the two countries, the Treasury Department has removed the onerous requirement that foreign ships carrying goods to Cuba have to wait 180 days to dock in US ports. 13

US contractors and specialists can now provide goods and services in Cuba to assist in the development and support of public housing, transportation, water management, waste management, non-nuclear electricity generation, hospitals, and primary and secondary schools in Cuba.14

Cubans students and scholars who want to study or conduct research in the United States will benefit from expanding grants, scholarships, and awards.15

The $400 ceiling on purchases by US travelers in Cuba has been removed. Travelers are now free to buy whatever they want during trips in the future—including rum and cigars!16

In defining future US policy, Obama’s directive also redefines, but doesn’t end, the congressionally mandated USAID “democracy programs” that, as quasi-covert regime-change operations, have created ongoing tensions with, and indignation in, Havana. “We will pursue democracy programming that is transparent and consistent with programming in other similarly situated societies around the world,” states the PPD. Transparency has become the new code word for Cuba policy. Unlike most presidential directives, which are highly classified, PPD-43 is unclassified. “We used to have secret plans for Cuba. Now, our policy is out in the open — and online — for everyone to read,” National Security Adviser Susan Rice emphasized as she rolled out the new initiative at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington last week. 17

In her speech, Rice quoted a Cuban expression: “Es el mismo perro con diferente collar,” meaning “It’s the same dog with a different collar.” “Well, esto es un perro diferente — this is a different dog,” Rice argued. “This is real change.”18

The Cuban View and the Embargo

After decades of multi-form US intervention, el mismo perro is what some Cuban officials continue to see. “We are not stupid,” Cuba’s ambassador to Mexico, Dagoberto Rodriguez, declared in harsh terms during an interview with the leading Mexican magazine, Proceso. “We realize that the policy of the United States continues to have the same objective” of subverting the revolution. From the foreign ministry in Havana, Cuba’s chief negotiator with the United States, Josefina Vidal, issued a somewhat more diplomatic response. Obama’s directive was a “positive step” toward normalization, she said, but “does not hide the purpose of promoting changes in the political, economic and social order, nor hide the intentions to further develop interventionist programs.” Overt or covert, the Cuban government objects to the democracy-promotion programs, and Cuban officials believe Obama can do more to gut the embargo than he has.19

As the new trade regulations went into effect this week, Vidal led a demonstration of several thousand students at the University of Havana to protest the continuation of the embargo and focus attention on the upcoming annual United Nations vote to condemn it. A number of students wore T-shirts with a new Twitter hash tag: #YoVotoVsBloqueo—I vote against the Blockade. While Obama’s directive calls on Congress to lift the trade sanctions and declares that “we will continue to work toward that goal,” the Cuban government is making the most of its yearly opportunity to rally the world community against the embargo and denounce US policy. For 24 years in a row, the UN has overwhelmingly voted to condemn the embargo and US violations of Cuba’s sovereignty. Last year’s vote was 191 to 2, with only Israel voting alongside the United States.20

Conceivably, this year’s tally could be 193 to 0—if Washington and Havana could agree on more temperate language for the resolution that reflects the ongoing process of normalization and Obama’s executive efforts to poke holes in the embargo. With the UN vote scheduled for October 26, the White House faces an opportunity to make a dramatic and unprecedented move against the Republicans in Congress. The United States could either abstain, or vote to support, a UN resolution against a set of sanctions over which President Obama officially presides, but politically opposes. “World opinion matters,” Obama noted during a recent interview with The New Yorker magazine about his Cuba policy. “It is a force multiplier.”21

Regardless of how the United States votes at the UN, Obama’s rapprochement with Cuba will become a case study in the history of US foreign policy. With the legacy of Obama’s presidency in mind, the White House positioned the new initiative as part of a broader model of diplomacy and negotiation in a dangerous world. To underscore that point, the rollout of the new PPD came on the 54th anniversary of the CIA’s discovery of intermediate-range Soviet missiles in Cuba—the beginning of the dramatic superpower crisis over a Caribbean island that nearly led to nuclear Armageddon. In the conclusion of his statement on his new Cuba initiative, Obama articulated the larger lesson he hopes to leave behind: “The progress of the last two years, bolstered by today’s actions,” he said, “should remind the world of what’s possible when we look to the future together.”

On the evening of January 21, 1987, the CIA’s deputy director for covert operations, Clair George, sent a secure pouch to the State Department filled with “top secret” intelligence cables from the agency’s station in Chile. The reports contained details from “extremely sensitive informants” on “the cover up directed by General Pinochet” of the September 21, 1976, assassination of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his 25-year-old colleague, Ronni Moffitt, in Washington, DC.

The documents were intended to help the State Department prepare a debriefing of Armando Fernández Larios, one of the officers of the Chilean secret police, or DINA, who had been sent to Washington to conduct surveillance on Letelier before his assassination, and who now wanted to confess and come to the United States. The CIA cables were so sensitive, according to Francis McNeil, the State Department official who received them, that “the CIA asked that they be summarized” rather than forwarded to Brazil, where the debriefing was scheduled to take place.

Eight months later, when the CIA prepared an intelligence review on the Letelier-Moffitt case—at the request of Secretary of State George Shultz, McNeil believes—the agency reviewed the same documents and others. Quoting the CIA review, Shultz reported to President Reagan that the CIA had “convincing evidence that President Pinochet personally ordered his intelligence chief to carry out the murders,” and that “Pinochet decided to stonewall on the US investigation to hide his involvement.” As Shultz concluded, “the CIA has never before drawn and presented its conclusions that such strong evidence exists of his leadership role in this act of terrorism.”

Shultz’s dramatic memo to Reagan was among the more than 280 documents declassified by the Obama administration last October as a special diplomatic gesture to the Chilean government of President Michelle Bachelet. Forty years after this act of state-sponsored terrorism in the streets of Washington, the historiography had finally, if not fully, arrived at Pinochet’s doorstep.

Washington officials, along with members of Letelier’s family and friends, had always assumed that Pinochet was the mastermind of this atrocity. “There was no way [DINA chief Manuel] Contreras could have ordered this without Pinochet’s approval,” McNeil recalls. In 1978, as the United States began pushing for the extradition of Contreras, his deputy Pedro Espinoza, and Fernández Larios, the CIA station in Chile began sending detailed intelligence on Pinochet’s personal efforts to block any investigation or extradition. In a June 23, 1978, report on Pinochet’s “strategy” with respect to the Letelier case, the CIA noted that the dictator would seek to “protect Manuel Contreras from successful prosecution,” “stonewall further requests from the US government,” and “continue to ‘lobby’ [Chilean] Supreme Court Justices” to reject all requests for extradition. After Fernández Larios was spirited out of Chile by US officials, they learned that Pinochet had personally ordered him to stay silent and remain in the country.

Yet neither Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, nor George H.W. Bush ever moved to formally investigate and indict Pinochet. Only after the former dictator was detained in London in 1998 under the European Anti-Terrorism Convention did the Clinton White House decide to open an official investigation. In April and May of 2000, a team of FBI, Justice Department, and State Department investigators and lawyers traveled to Chile to gather evidence. The FBI concluded there was enough to warrant an indictment, but the case was never pursued by the incoming administration of George W. Bush—even as the fight against international terrorism came to define his presidential tenure.

In lieu of the now-impossible prosecution of Pinochet, who died in 2006, the historical record is the only venue left in which to indict and judge him. But that record remains incomplete. The CIA still refuses to declassify its 1987 intelligence summary on Pinochet’s role. Nor have the FBI recommendations and the paper trail of evidence generated by the Clinton-era investigation been released. As family and friends, along with Chilean President Bachelet, gather at the site of the murders 40 long years later, the Obama administration also has the opportunity to commemorate Letelier and Moffitt—by releasing the still-secret documents that hold accountable those responsible for their murders.