When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

In 2019, Michael Bustamante of the University of Miami was critical of the first Trump administration’s maximalist approach toward Cuba. Six years on, as successive presidential administrations have not significantly altered America’s approach toward Cuba and a second Trump administration has taken power, Bustamante reassesses his argument. Image: Cuban state mediaYou wrote your 2019 article, “Chronicle of a Failure Foretold: Trump Turns the Screws on Cuba,” shortly after Miguel Díaz-Canel became Cuba’s head of state during heightened U.S.-Cuban tensions. Looking back, how accurate was your assessment that the Trump administration’s increased economic pressure would empower those within Cuba “most averse to change” rather than facilitating reform?The fundamental assessment holds up, in my view. The first Trump administration’s unilateral “maximum pressure” strategy toward Cuba, especially during 2019, did nothing to incentivize economic or political reform. If anything, it compelled Cuban authorities to dig in further, reverting to a posture of resistance that historically has not been conducive to out of the box thinking and where, to a certain point, Cuban authorities feel comfortable maneuvering, economic stressors notwithstanding.What I could not have predicted — what no one could have predicted — was the onset of the pandemic in 2020, which forced Cuba to close its borders completely, devastated the non-U.S. part of its tourist industry (particularly visitors from Europe and Canada), and tanked Cuba’s GDP by 10 percent that year. The pandemic did change the internal calculus. By the summer of 2020, the economic situation was so bad, and hard currency reserves were so depleted, that the government was forced to revive its economic reform agenda. Cuba announced a three-pronged, if still gradual strategy: expanding areas of the economy in which the so-called “self-employed” could work, implementing monetary reform (essentially a currency devaluation), and eventually legalizing small- and medium-sized private enterprises.Some suggest this