Alejandro de la Fuente: ‘Cuba’s problem is not ideological, it is an unforgivable incompetence’

Constant blackouts, transportation grinding to a halt for lack of fuel, shortages of food and medicine, mass exodus, the loss of its strongest ally, and direct threats from its historic adversary. This is Cuba in the 67th year of the Revolution. From the outside, it may look as if the government in Havana could fall at any moment, but the regime built by Fidel Castro has weathered many crises. Its demise has been predicted countless times, yet that ending has never arrived.

Historian Alejandro de la Fuente — professor of Afro‑Latin American studies and director of the Cuba Program at Harvard’s Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies — has devoted his work to unraveling the dense history of slavery, race, and racism on the island, as well as dismantling the myth of racial democracy in Latin America. The author of landmark books such as A Nation for All, he combines academic rigor and art curation with sustained public engagement on the inequalities that shape Cuba, particularly those affecting Afro‑descendant communities. But there is also a personal dimension that informs his perspective and makes him a public voice: that of a Cuban in the diaspora who follows the country’s collapse with a mix of analytical distance and intimate urgency.

Question. Is the collapse we’re seeing in Cuba now already definitive, or can the regime still hold on? And when was the breaking point — the moment when this stopped being a manageable crisis?

Answer. The collapse didn’t begin with Trump’s executive order from this January. That order intensified a process that was already underway. My impression is that the collapse began perhaps around 2020 or 2021. Over the past five or six years, the Cuban government has been unable to meet the nation’s challenges and, faced with that reality, what it has done is repress.

There is perhaps a very clear inflection point with the July 2021 protests and the wave of repression that followed. Díaz‑Canel’s famous phrase — “the order to fight has been given” — came at a moment that could have been used to open a national dialogue. That was a missed opportunity. But the 2021 demonstrations are also the culmination of earlier processes: the San Isidro Movement beginning in 2018, born in opposition to Decree 349, an institutional gag on artistic creation. If you read their manifesto, at its core there is a single demand: dialogue. The Cuban government met those demands with troops, with repression.

Cuba never recovered after the pandemic. Tourism plummeted. Demographer Albizu Campos argues that Cuba has lost roughly 15% to 20% of its population. If a country loses 20% of its population without a war in between, that qualifies as a collapse — and that predates the current, more immediate crisis.

Q. Wasn’t Obama’s visit in 2016 also a turning point?

A. That’s where the regime’s unforgivable incompetence comes in — and notice I’m not talking about ideology, I’m talking about incompetence. Obama arrived with an agenda of openness. He was enormously popular in Cuba. The transformation Havana underwent in those months was immense: local entrepreneurs, together with their Cuban-American relatives, began investing and developing businesses in anticipation of closer ties with the U.S. market.

That very March, when Obama visited, Fidel Castro published El hermano Obama, in which he again spoke of imperialism and revived a rhetoric of war. A month later, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez described the visit as an attack on Cuba’s values. Months after that, Raúl Castro referred to the United States as the enemy. Cuban institutions reacted with fear, because they do not know how to deal with the United States in any dynamic other than confrontation.

A monumental opportunity was lost there. After so many decades denouncing the embargo, the U.S. president arrives and that chance slips away. Cubans tried to correct course at the last minute, but by then Trump had already won and it was too late. Imagine if the newly elected president had found that rapprochement already in place. It would have been much harder to dismantle.

Q. The regime continues to blame imperialism. Has this rhetoric not changed? How is the Cuban government responding to the threat posed by Trump?

A. If one pays attention to the rhetoric, it’s operating with the same logic that led to this collapse. Less than a week ago, Vice Foreign Minister Fernández de Cossío, on Meet the Press, when asked about political prisoners, said that this was not a topic Cuba was willing to discuss. But that’s precisely the mistake: the issue of prisoners is not an American issue — it’s an issue of the Cuban nation. Those who took part in the 2021 protests remain in prison. The rhetoric continues as if nothing had changed, which is astonishing, because the situation has changed dramatically and they now have, as you put it, a gun to their head. At the same time, the vice foreign minister did not deny that other conversations were taking place.

Q. Talks with members of the Castro family have been confirmed.

A. There have been conversations, through other channels, which says a lot about how power operates in Cuba and where the real power centers are. These conversations are not being conducted through President Díaz-Canel or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but through other structures.

Q. What has emerged is that Raúl Castro’s descendants are the ones handling these negotiations.

A. It is, in reality, a conversation with the Gaesa conglomerate, which is the real power in Cuba. The Trump administration is, in that sense, talking to the right people: those who have the decision-making power, a business and military conglomerate. And a business group has one central objective: to make money and maintain the flow of resources. Therefore, it can talk to anyone about anything, as long as its interests are protected.

Q. So you see it from a transactional point of view, similar to what happened in Venezuela, where through a spectacular but limited strike — a biopsy — Nicolás Maduro was removed, but the rest of the system was left intact?

A. I’m not even sure the Cuban “cell” is as important as the Venezuelan one. The biopsy here would be even smaller. If the United States accepts that its demand for change can be satisfied by replacing Díaz-Canel, I think we’ll see it happen. And I also think that won’t change anything inside Cuba.

Replacing Díaz‑Canel, beyond giving the U.S. administration a symbolic victory, would mean that something else would have to follow, because the Cuban-American community in South Florida is demanding much broader changes. And if any change — however small — takes place under U.S. pressure, that carries other implications we may not yet be able to fully read. People will see that the Americans arrive and force the replacement of Cuba’s president. In that contrast, I see the possibility of a deeper fracture in a regime that today has very little legitimacy, not only for political reasons but because of its incompetence in providing for the nation’s well‑being.

Q. You speak of incompetence above ideology. But as a model for how society should function, doesn’t the revolutionary project seem, in practice, not to have worked?

A. The Cuban revolutionary project is 70 years old. In its historical moment, it generated important opportunities for social welfare. But those opportunities were exhausted many years ago. The system began to unravel in the 1990s, during the Special Period. It was only thanks to the financial rescue provided by [Venezuela’s] Chavismo movement that the project managed to reassemble itself. Under Fidel Castro, the 1990s saw a period of opening, and that opening began to close once Venezuelan subsidies started arriving, because they allowed him to consolidate power. Without Venezuelan oil and Chavista support, Cuba’s trajectory would already have been very different.

Q. So the Chavista subsidy bought the Cuban Revolution extra time.

A. It bought it a quarter of a century. And if one had to distill Fidel Castro’s political genius, it would be that he secured a new subsidy. Once he lost the Soviet one, he managed to reassemble the same model of economic dependency, this time from Venezuela, through Hugo Chávez. We’re talking about a model that has always depended on sustained, external financial injections on a pharaonic scale — probably unprecedented in human history on a per‑capita basis. A design that is always extremely vulnerable to shifts in the external environment, as the collapse of the Soviet Union made clear.

Q. Returning to the idea that Cuba has lost perhaps 20% of its population in recent years — more than a million people — a civilizational exodus, what does that mean for the Cuba that might come next?

A. The people leaving have a very specific sociodemographic profile: young people, women of reproductive age. When those people leave, it’s not just individuals who go — it’s talent. Cuba is a country that has been bleeding talent for 70 years, since the very beginning of the Revolution. That talent could have been mobilized for Cuba’s future. Mobilizing it requires exactly the kind of dialogue the San Isidro Movement was calling for.

The other side of the equation is an aging and unproductive country: a population pyramid that is increasingly elderly and a productive base that is increasingly inefficient. That is a time bomb. The only thing that has masked that reality is remittances — the flow of money from abroad.

Q. Is there a civil society capable of responding to this moment? Because we don’t see internal political organization, we don’t see leadership, the way we do in Venezuela.

A. Social movements in Cuba have been decimated. I’ve been very close for many years to Afro‑descendant social movements. The last salvo of those movements is San Isidro, which can be placed within that history. And those movements have been destroyed. Perhaps the most dramatic aspect of the current situation is that Cuba has never been this weak — not only geopolitically, but in terms of its social fabric. The country has been brought to its knees to the point that the very project of nationhood is at risk. We are back in 1898. And that is this leadership’s great historical responsibility: they have placed the country in the weakest possible position to once again confront Teddy Roosevelt, now in this context.

Q. Trump smells blood and strikes. He talks about maximum pressure on Cuba. As a historian who has seen the social cost of sanctions, what do you make of the Trump administration’s position?

A. I wish this question could be avoided. To me, it’s ethically untenable, because when people talk about pressuring Cuba, what they’re really talking about is pressuring Cubans. Cuba is an abstraction. What we’re actually talking about is making sure people can’t go to school, that hospitals don’t function. There is a humanitarian dimension that those who support this policy should consider, because the consequences have names and faces, and they are devastating — especially for the most vulnerable sectors.

Two weeks ago, at Harvard, I had a videoconference with private‑sector Cuban entrepreneurs — supposedly the beneficiaries of this policy — and all of them spoke about the enormous difficulties of keeping their businesses afloat. I’m not entirely sure what the president means when he says he’s going to have “the honor of taking Cuba.” Venezuela can pay for that; it has the resources. In Cuba’s case, someone has to put up the money, and I don’t know who is going to do it.

Q. Perhaps Venezuela.

A. It would be a tragicomic irony, but you never know.

Q. And who is Trump, for you, as a historical figure?

A. For me, Trump is the worst version of the worst United States in Cuba’s history. He is the perfect caricature of imperial voracity. And it is tragic that Trump achieves through force, through blackmail, what president Obama tried to do through cooperation and sincere dialogue. But if we had to understand who is actually driving this tragedy, we would see that it is not in Washington. That architect is in Havana. The ones who have failed, the ones who have let opportunities slip away, are in Havana. Because U.S. governments can pursue whatever policy they want. The only responsible thing a Cuban leader can do is understand that reality and use it for the nation’s well‑being.

In republican Cuba, between 1900 and 1959, across different political orientations, everyone had to deal with that reality — and they often reached agreements that were favorable, including presidents with nationalist agendas, like president [Gerardo] Machado. That didn’t begin in 1959. The generation of 1959 inherited that ability and dismantled it thanks to Soviet subsidies, creating in the process a caricatured historiography in which every president before the revolution was a clown.

Q. Do you think a revolt led by those the regime claims to represent — but does not — is possible, such as the protests outside the Communist Party headquarters in Morón?

A. I’m a historian, so I avoid futurology. I think the conditions exist for eruptions of that kind. The state still maintains its repressive capacity, but the situation is very tense. The question is what comes next. Suppose Cubans, fed up with the lack of electricity, water, and medicine, take to the streets. What happens the next day? One possibility is a humanitarian crisis whose escape valve is migration, 90 miles to the north. But at this moment, the United States is so hostile to immigrants that Cubans would likely look for another way out. And if the state’s repressive mechanisms collapse, the question remains: what comes after?

Q. What should come next?

A. The actors who could lead that are not easily identifiable. There are different exile groups that have been trying to position themselves, but they are outside of Cuba and would need Washington’s approval. The fact that we cannot answer that question is part of the tragedy. There is no María Corina Machado in Cuba. All those figures have been silenced, imprisoned, exiled, or are very little known within Cuba, because information was tightly controlled until very recently.

Q. Is Castroism, as a historical project, ideologically dead?

A. There is a vast security apparatus that is a fundamental part of the answer to that question. The Castro regime of 1961 is not the Castro regime of 1978, but that apparatus ended up becoming part of its DNA. It is an apparatus whose sole purpose is to manufacture enemies in order to destroy them. That has been central to the sustainability of that ruling group.

Q. Is an arrangement between the White House and the Palace of the Revolution possible — one involving economic changes but leaving a recycled version of Castroism in power?

A. That’s what they’re aiming for. It would be an Obama 2.0, more or less what Obama tried to do 10 years ago, this time with the help of American gunboats.

Q. And that connects with the concern expressed by Ricardo Zúñiga, part of Obama’s team, in Jon Lee Anderson’s recent New Yorker piece: that the greatest fear is a negotiation in which there is some change, but the current apparatus remains in charge — a process similar to Russia’s, where the oligarchs took over state assets.

A. It’s not unlikely that we’re already on that path. One of the great mysteries of Cuba in recent years is that a large portion of the national budget has been devoted to building hotels, even as tourism was declining. The question many people have been asking for years is: why so many hotels, and who is going to end up owning them? GAESA doesn’t disclose its accounts; it’s not under the oversight of the Office of the Comptroller General. What happens with that money is unknown.

Q. Is a negotiated exit possible, or will Cuba have to keep sinking before anything changes?

A. I have enormous faith in the capacity of Cubans. Those outside support those inside; those inside run the businesses of those outside. Cubans have been rebuilding networks that aren’t very visible, that have grown and flourished in the shadow of power. There are entrepreneurs who speak of paying their employees dignified wages. A young, dynamic business class committed to a national project in which independence and well‑being are not at odds. What they lack are institutional spaces.

For years, through our Cuba program at Harvard, I’ve been talking with those entrepreneurs, with social movements, trying to build bridges with financial sectors, because that’s where I see people who can help with a Cuban reconstruction. The challenge is to create spaces for encounter and coordination so that the best version of Cuba becomes viable.

Q. What does that better version look like?

A. A prosperous and social‑democratic Cuba. A Cuba where democracy is not built at the expense of social welfare, but on the basis of it. Cuba made significant advances in social welfare, and unfortunately, those advances became so tied to the system’s ideological rhetoric that they were almost rendered expendable. That, to me, is a total tragedy.

Q. And how do you deal with the neighbor? This Trump‑era imperialism is extractivist, predatory in its logic.

A. That logic collapses in Cuba. There isn’t much to extract. And I’m counting on Trump’s attention span, which is very limited. But beyond that: the United States cannot be reduced to this moment. Obama is also part of U.S. history. There are other United States, with financial and commercial interests that are not entirely incompatible with what many Cubans want. It doesn’t have to be the most extractivist version.

Q. Trump has said that Cuba is a national security threat. What do you make of that argument?

A. It’s impossible to link Díaz‑Canel to drug trafficking, which is the first thing mentioned in the January executive order regarding Venezuela. That argument cannot be made about Cuba. So one has to invent the fantasy that a prostrate, collapsed island represents a threat to the United States. In the realm of imperial fantasies, that competes with turning Canada into a U.S. state or annexing Greenland. It’s not credible.

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