During the current year, a great deal of energy is being invested in trying to predict who will be the winner of the presidential elections next November in the United States, which party will win the majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate, allowing or not the President to have the necessary support to develop his agenda for the next four years.

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The 2025-2029 period will be one of the most complex in the recent history of that country and the world, so that, beyond finding a stable environment to implement his initiatives, whoever is elected to occupy the White House will have to react to a series of major national and international crises, which remind us of previous moments of peace as a distant and irrecoverable state of affairs.

For this reason, among others, no one could claim that a Biden 2.0, or a Trump 2.0, will be the automatic and exact copy of their first mandates. The world is different, the U.S. is different.

In the case of Cuba, two realities that moved in contradictory directions in the period 2021-2024 have already been demonstrated. The first is that Biden’s team took office inheriting an intelligence forecast that pointed to the end of the Cuban Revolution and decided to wait for the apple to fall by its own weight, according to the teachings of Isaac Newton.

For that reason, Biden acted more in terms of continuity than change in relation to Trump’s disposition towards the island.

The second reality is that, even though such an agenda was imposed, during late 2023 and early 2024 a return to the official bilateral conversation has been sought on issues considered to be of U.S. national interest, which have always been so for Cuba as well.

After applying the tactic of maximum pressure, not obtaining the expected results, receiving the impact of an unwanted mass of immigrants, and trying to understand and influence the latest internal changes in Cuba with a diminished diplomatic presence in Havana, it would make little sense to expect Biden’s team to retrace its steps as of January 2025, to place itself in the logic of the beginning of 2021.

Much less, if this variable is analyzed in the context of the infinite erosion of his credibility, which has meant supporting the Israeli genocide in Gaza, plus the impossibility of showing tangible progress against Russia in Ukraine. The recent announcement of the “retirement” of Undersecretary Victoria Nuland is a strong indicator regarding the second issue.

One could then ask the same question regarding an eventual return of Donald Trump, the businessman-politician who promised in his campaign to achieve a better deal with Cuba, but who approved a new presidential directive with negative changes regarding the Island in 2017.

According to what was said at the time, its purpose was more to dismantle initiatives of the legacy of the first Afro-descendant president of the United States, than to end the Cuban model. That directive did not have severe consequences until late 2018 and early 2019. So, what happened then?

Between April 2018 and September 2019, the position of National Security Advisor was occupied by someone named John Bolton, who had already had his own failures with respect to Cuba, like when under the government of George W. Bush he pretended to prove that biological weapons were being manufactured on the island and was publicly contradicted by former President James Carter.

Bolton replaced a pragmatic H. R. McMaster, who with his military background suggested to his boss to choose his objectives well and not to be distracted by issues such as Cuba, which contributed nothing to the agenda of Make America Great Again.

However, Bolton’s imprint would be marked by a larger project, Venezuela. In that regard, his contributions ranged from creating a fictitious government parallel to that of Nicolas Maduro, organizing a major provocation on the common border with Colombia in February 2019, to formulating the illusory argument that the Bolivarian government remained in power, thanks to the support of the presence of 20,000 Cuban military troops in Venezuelan territory. 

To sell his recipe, Bolton had the support of, among others, Elliot Abrams, a veteran of the disasters of the Dirty War in Central America under Ronald Reagan, who occupied an opaque office in the State Department for some months, using his time to try to frighten third parties, announcing the apocalypse.

As the great orgies are always described in threesomes, both were accompanied by an unnamed head of the Latin America office in the National Security Council, who provided the perfect connection with former Batista, Playa Giron losers, former Escambray rebels and white-collar opportunists based in South Florida.

The task of this desk conspirator did not have a strategic scope, he limited himself to list all those companies, institutions, or individuals, who once had some kind of positive relationship, or simply neutral with Cuban issues, to send to the door of their place of residence a couple of officers from the FBI, or any agency in uniform, to recommend the immediate cutting of their relations with Cuba, or else face the consequences. The list ranged from farmers’ associations to renowned academics and experts on Cuban issues.

This underworld script was staged outside the media, public debates and rallies. It was done at night, with escalation and malice aforethought.

Meanwhile, what transcended for the public was the famous argument of the so-called “sonic attacks” or “health incidents”, which served as the main pretext to minimize the diplomatic presence in the respective capitals, to damage consular procedures and to try to demerit Cuba’s transparent attitude towards the foreign diplomatic corps based in Havana.

None of the sources that generated the campaign could ever prove the existence of alleged weapons or equipment, of any kind, that would generate the kind of energy required for the alleged effects that were cited repeatedly. The fable did not stand up to the weight of science.

This pretext eventually entered the long list of science fiction scripts, along with UFOs and gremlins sitting on the wings of airplanes.

Despite this, the frontal and definitive blow to affect relations with Cuba and all that had been done in preceding years did not come until June 2019, when a senator of small stature, whose second language is first grade Spanish, ran at full speed between the Hill of Congress and 1600 Pennsylvania Street, to explain:

“If travel to and from Cuba (air and cruise ship) continues to occur at the current magnitude, the counterrevolution’s business is over. No one else will believe that Cubans are our enemies and there will be no arguments to approve regime change projects.”

And why would anyone listen to his message; what emotional bond did he have with a president he repeatedly mocked when he was a pre-candidate; what money had he invested in his campaign; how many people did he mobilize in Miami to vote for him?

None of that, he had only come to propose a deal to the president who was the victim of an impeachment process by his Democratic enemies. The negotiation was very simple: the process would be prevented from going through the Intelligence Committee if the president would drop his executive prerogative in determining and conducting policy towards Cuba. “Make Marco Rubio happy,” was the top executive’s judgment and strategic vision.

To any connoisseur this may be an oversimplification of the processes that took place at the time, and indeed it is. The problem lies in the fact that it was a decision taken so lightly, without inter-agency consultations, without congressional or public debate or cabinet meetings, as were other policies defined by Trump during those days, whether they were related to the abandonment of international organizations or the familiar embrace of historic rivals in Europe or Asia.

And in the midst of all that could be predictable, or almost predictable, someone named Sars-Cov-2 and its main creation, the COVID19 pandemic, made its appearance. We know the rest of the story and its impact on Cuba’s economy.

If one were to agree on the common thread of what has been described so far, the question would then be, how would the agenda of a Trump 2.0 resemble the 1.0? In order to get closer to the answer, the following partial conclusions could be drawn:

1.- A good part of the closest advisors of the former first term regret having served him, doubt his intellectual capacity, and have reneged.

2.- All those who explained to him in front of graphs and banners that the United States could stop in the short term the advance of its main rivals on a global scale have failed.

In no case would Trump be reelected “with the decisive vote of the citizens of Cuban origin” in Florida, a state that is considered a safe gain for the Republicans.

4.- There may be new attacks against Venezuela, but it is unlikely that the battered US diplomacy will embark on reproducing the Lima Group fiasco.

5.- It was demonstrated that all the arguments used to damage relations with Cuba were false and counterproductive.

6.- There are new economic actors in Cuba, to whom the U.S. institutions give special attention as supposed “agents of change”. The blockade measures kill this creature in its own birth.

Part of the US fiscal deficit is explained by the approval of regime change programs, which only contribute to the reelection of those who propose them, a tiny group in Congress.

8.- Important U.S. businessmen of Republican militancy saw their finances considerably damaged by the unjustified attack against Cuba, starting in the second half of 2019.

9.- More and more astonished U.S. scientists and institutions look at Cuba’s survival in the face of COVID19 and celebrate its capacity to face new biological risks.

The half-built anti-immigrant wall, if completed, would be to stop the entire irregular flow, not just a part of it.

It is true that politics in the United States is not a rational exercise, and if it were, that country would have had a different type of relationship with Cuba a long time ago. But it is worth reflecting on whether the same anti-Cuban actions of the past can be repeated with the same design and, if so, how to deal with them.

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