A brief history of US-Cuba relations

Lillian Guerra:In 1933, there was a revolution in Cuba that was extremely popular, and we found our man in Fulgencio Batista, who staged a coup in January 1934. We immediately recognized his government, and then he became our “strongman” in Havana and ruled the place from 1934 to 1944. So, in the fifties, when he staged another coup, March 10, 1952, he’s once again a known quantity. He’s a very good friend of US diplomats, who are looking for stability and looking to see that the Cuban government represented US investors’ interests at the cost, in fact, of Cuban sovereignty, and often at the cost of citizens’ demands for a constitutional, democratic and accountable regime.

Well, yes, they did. In fact, there was a kind of reality check at the [US] State Department. They realized that they had no real contacts or reach into the opposition because their ambassadors in Havana had been so close and in bed with Batista since ‘52. There was recognition of the need to [build] a better relationship, and ‘59 was going to do it. That was the goal.

There was a specific moment. Since the 1940 constitution, the Cuban people had wanted agrarian reform, which was effectively a law that would take away, or at least limit, how much any individual or corporation could own. And so, in May of ‘59, that land reform was passed. It was extraordinarily well-received by the majority of Cubans. And, of course, sugar investors from the United States had been lobbying the US government to prevent that from happening. Then, they wanted the United States, frankly, to invade Cuba, as it had done in previous moments of Cuban history, in order to prevent this reform from taking hold.

There was a fight between the US State Department under [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower and his intelligence community over whether to [attempt] subversion. And the intelligence community of the US that wants to invade, they win that argument.

Yeah, so, I would say that a lot of Cubans, incredibly, because they saw this standoff between Castro and Washington as an unfair kind of a game, they saw themselves as sort of David and the United States as Goliath. By the time everything is nationalized and the government has 80% of the economy in its hands in December 1960, the United States is going to pull back its diplomatic representation. And it looks like both countries are on a war footing. So, between January and April of ‘61, you get a mass mobilization of hundreds of thousands of militia on the island to defend against a possible invasion. And the Cubans, or rather the United States, is recruiting Cuban exiles to create a kind of surrogate army that is to invade, which failed miserably at the Bay of Pigs. So, you know that it’s after that that the embargo becomes permanent

Yeah, no doubt it was a safety valve for Fidel Castro to rely on any time there was mass discontent or increasing opposition to this unanimous kind of mandate of loyalty to his regime and his leadership. So, you get the Mariel boatlift, so that people who want to go pick up their relatives who are discontented on the island can do so. And you have 125,000 Cubans, if not more, lined up to leave the island. Over the next five months, they do leave. He demonizes those folks because more than 70% of them are under the age of 30. It really showed what would look to be from a lot of people’s perspective on the outside, you know, a still very popular regime, that it wasn’t, and that it was not legitimate in the eyes of its youth. So, this exodus has been a means by which the state stabilizes itself. No doubt the last few years, during which we’ve seen about 2.8 million people leave the island more than ever before in the history of Cuba, have been a huge boon to the government in terms of stability. But at this point, it’s got no legs left to stand on.

Obama radically changed the policies regarding who could visit the island. That category came to include more than 100,000 Americans annually who were not just researchers or family members. But Americans who honestly wanted to go to Cuba and see it for themselves on cultural exchanges, just as individuals. He also put no limits on how much money Cubans could send their family members on the island. And that really, really began to move things in so many visible ways. There was a dramatic change. And Obama’s visit itself was stunning. Nobody expected that a US president would ever visit … let alone that he would be a Black president, and let alone he would allow to freely speak to the Cuban people in utterly inspiring ways, and that were about, not just how both in the United States and Cuba, societies and nations were built by slaves, but that both of our societies were committed to democracy and that they could work together citizen to citizen. So, this kind of speech, in particular, that he gave when he was there, really for the first time silenced and sidelined the dictators.

Yes, I want to say that I think on the island there has been so much despair that has been a product of the economic policies that the [Cuban] state implemented during and after the pandemic, which just impoverished the Cuban state, coupled with a really devastating collapse of infrastructure. Cuba had five nationwide blackouts in 2025. Nobody had ever experienced that. I mean, they had had timed blackouts, blackouts that were caused by hurricanes … but never had the entire island gone black. All of this has generated so much outrage. And frankly, on the social media I’ve been looking at over the last couple of weeks, one of the things Cubans rely on is their dark humor to get through tough times. It was really kind of disturbing that many people, when we started bombing Iran, they reacted to that by saying, “Hey, we were supposed to be the next in line after Venezuela. Where are you guys?”

That it speaks to just how desperate a lot of islanders, maybe the majority of islanders, are, for any kind of change … because they have spent really literally decades in scarcity and austerity. I have to recognize that one of the results of the opening, the expansion of entrepreneurialism in Cuba that Obama created, was that, for the first time, young people saw a future on the island. And their goal was not simply to leave. And then that all went away.

So, we heard from President Miguel Diaz-Canel on the island that for a month, the Cuban government has been negotiating with the American government. Now, what we’re hoping for, I think, those of us on the island, those who are abroad like myself, is that there would be a release of political prisoners — because there are more than a thousand who are being held, most of whom were arrested in 2021, for protesting on the streets when there were millions of people protesting on July 11, 2021. We’re hoping that there will be a legalization of multiple political parties, and that there would be some transitional council state that hopefully will include things like the civil society that has, against every possible odds, managed to rise from the ashes of its own criminalization under communism.

There’s a possibility of seeing an international intervention towards democratization that would entail excluding the communist regime, especially the armed forces, which are not neutral in this. My fear is that Trump and his folks are interested in working with the armed forces in Cuba precisely because they control the keys to the economy. So, to see them remain in power with no movement towards a real control and consolidation of accountability from their state and participation, representation of the people, that would be extraordinarily, not just disheartening, it would be devastating to the hopes and dreams and destiny of Cuba.