If you remember the trash compactor scene from the original Star Wars, then you’ll understand the predicament faced by Cuba’s communist rulers: Slowly, but inexorably, they are being crushed by massive external pressures on one side and rising internal instability on the other. Their revolutionary zeal is gone with the wind. Charismatic leaders are in short supply. Few care about Cuba’s fate—even leftist governments in Latin America would be relieved to see this embarrassment of a regime vanish from history. All that is left in the toolbox of the regime is naked repression. For the first time in 67 years, however, it isn’t clear whether that will be enough.
The external threat has a face and a name: President Donald J. Trump. Trump seems determined to erase what he considers to be the strategic mistakes of the post–Cold War era. Venezuela first, now Iran, tomorrow Cuba. By spiriting Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro from his bedroom to a detention center in New York, Trump deprived the Cubans of their strongest ideological patron and primary supplier of energy and hard currency. In the wake of what happened in Venezuela, Cuba’s communist economy, already moribund, has virtually collapsed. The government can’t feed its people, keep the lights on at night, or collect the mounds of garbage accumulating on the streets.
