Trump understands what Washington forgot: Cuba is a threat to America

On May 20, 1902, the Cuban flag flew over an independent country for the first time. One hundred and twenty-four years later, the Cuban people are still not free. Every president before Donald Trump has either done nothing on Cuba, done too little, or done too much for the regime. Trump was the first to recognize that the regime was a threat to America and decided to confront it once and for all.

It is not only the tragedy of the Cuban people that their predecessors failed to do so. It’s ours. Cuba’s communist regime has been designated as a State Sponsor of Terrorism. He conducted two of the most damaging espionage operations against the United States in modern memory. Maduro was the intelligence backbone of the narco state. It has served as a coordinating center for immigration flows and drug routes into American communities. The trouble with Havana exports cost the lives of Americans.

How was it that a small island nation run by communists, who had been unable to operate its own power grid for sixty-six years, was allowed to cause so much trouble for the world’s most powerful country? Because the USA allowed this. The freest, most prosperous and most powerful nation in history could have solved the Castro problem decades ago. Those in power in Washington had no will.

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Consider the record. John F. Kennedy betrayed Cuban American freedom fighters at the Bay of Pigs. Ronald Reagan and the elder Bush viewed Cuba as a secondary file in the Cold War, which ended unresolved. The only reason Bill Clinton signed Helms-Burton was because the regime shot down two Brothers to the Rescue planes in 1996, killing four American citizens and forcing Congress’s hand. The younger Bush accepted the status quo.

For decades, American presidents did little to end the Castro regime. Barack Obama did the opposite: he tried to save it.

From 2014 to 2017, the Obama administration conducted the most reckless engagement experiment in the history of U.S.-Cuban relations. Embassies were reopened. Direct flights and cruises were started. Cuban-American billionaires and millionaires sipped daiquiris in Havana hotels, while ordinary Cubans were barred from entering. A sitting American president mocked Raúl Castro at a baseball game. The theory was that the opening would strengthen the reformers. The theory was a fantasy. The regime treated the Obama administration and their businessman friends as useful idiots, pocketing their money, jailing José Daniel Ferrer, the Women in White, and San Isidro artists, presiding over the largest Cuban exodus since Mariel, and crushing the July 11 protests with Soviet brutality. Every dollar flowed through GAESA, the military conglomerate that controls nearly seventy percent of the Cuban economy. The Obama team was warned. Yet they continued.

Then came Donald Trump.

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When American special operators staged a flawless raid in January that left Cuban security personnel dead on Maduro’s bodyguard and the dictator himself in a Manhattan federal courtroom, the world learned that America could do things over again.

President Trump’s years of patient pressure on Venezuela ended in two hours and twenty-eight minutes. The same methodology is currently being applied in Havana. Cuba again became the State Sponsor of Terrorism. The Cuban Restricted List blocks transactions with GAESA. Title III of the LIBERTAD Act was reinstated. Executive Order 14404 authorized blocking sanctions against GAESA and foreign companies that support it; On May 7, the State Department designated GAESA itself and the Sherritt joint venture at Moa Nickel. Raúl Castro is now indicted. Raúl Castro, Miguel Díaz-Canel and the GAESA generals will soon learn the same lesson that Maduro did.

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Former Obama-era officials, lobbyists who pocketed inauguration fees, and a small chorus of academics who have made careers advocating inclusion continue to argue for repealing the crackdown and trying again. They are not impartial observers. They are the architects of a failed policy. Their experiments enriched GAESA, filled Cuban prisons, and led to the biggest immigration crisis on the American border in a generation. They want to do it again. We don’t owe them another chance.

What is offered in New Cuba is already available ninety miles away in Florida and beyond the Caribbean. Ordinary Cubans own restaurants or open banks. Citizens publish newspapers. Complaining is not a crime. Voters who can replace a government that has failed them. No transition supported by the United States in modern history has had what this one does: a Cuban-American Secretary of State, a Cuban-American congressional delegation, a diaspora ready to lead reinvestment, and a legal framework designed for this exact moment.

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Donald Trump is the first president to see the Castro regime as the threat it always has been to America, and he has chosen the right man as Secretary of State to help put an end to it. The Trump Doctrine that ended Maduro’s reign now turns ninety miles south. One hundred and twenty-four years after the Cuban flag flew over an independent country, this president will ensure that the flag flies over a free country.

Alberto Martinez is Managing Partner of Continental Strategy in Washington, DC