To be in Miami and hear for calls that, you know, the big moment of change is on the horizon, if this administration came to the conclusion in Venezuela, that even that opposition was not ready to take over and not ready to earn the support of the Venezuelan military, how can they not arrive at a similar conclusion in the Cuban case?

Hello and welcome to GZERO World.

I'm Ian Bremmer and today we are talking about Cuba and how the communist island nation came under President Trump's crosshairs.

As with all things Cuba, we'll talk about how the country's fate is also deeply tied to the 2.4 million or so Cuban expats in the United States, many of whom make up President Trump's Republican voting base.

A recent Miami Herald poll, for instance, found that 79% of Cuban Americans support some kind of military intervention in Cuba, and that about the same percentage said they would be unhappy with an economic solution that keeps the regime in place.

That may mean trouble for President Trump, who is leaning towards some kind of economic deal.

Joining me to talk about all things Cuba, a University of Miami historian and Cuba expert, Michael Bustamante.

Don't worry, I've also got your puppet regime.

Hello, China.

Hello, Donald.

- You better stop helping Iran.

Okay.

- We're going to do something really big.

- Okay.

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And... [music] Will President Trump launch a military invasion of Cuba?

Well, if you listen to the President, the answer seems simple.

I do believe I'll be the honor of having the honor of taking Cuba.

Whether I free it, take it, I think I can do anything I want with it.

You want to know the truth.

Shall we take Trump at his word?

Not this time.

The United States military is not going to launch an American or even an American-backed invasion of Cuba any time soon.

Happy 65th anniversary to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, by the way.

In his second term, Trump has reasserted American dominance in the Western Hemisphere, from Greenland to Panama to Venezuela, as part of a self-described "Don Roe" doctrine.

But in Cuba, he's much more likely to pursue an economic approach.

But why?

Because he wants a quick win without the military risk.

Since January, when the United States deposed Venezuelan once strongman Nicolas Maduro, whose cheap oil sustained Cuba's economy, Trump has ramped pressure way up on Havana, blockading the island and threatening to take it.

But the escalating situation around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz has rattled the American President, underscoring that not all military operations are created equal.

Even more so than Venezuela, Cuba has no political alternative to the Castro regime, at least not in Cuba.

So Trump may look for a deal that keeps the regime in place.

And while Cuba lacks the oil or the strategic value of say Venezuela, Trump could settle for a diplomatic win, opening the island to outside investment and tourism.

An economic agreement could suit the Castro government just fine, and not because it checks off box number one, stay in power.

After months of U.S.

pressure, Cuba's economy is in real trouble.

Blackouts, reduced school hours, four-day work weeks and grounded flights due to fuel shortages.

A deal could resemble the 2015 opening by President Obama, except Trump would treat the economics as the end goal, not a step toward political change.

But such a deal would fly in the face of what Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Cuban American himself, and millions of Cuban expats have been calling for.

Here he is, responding to a reporter on a noisy tarmac recently.

- Do you still want regime change or would you be okay with an economic deal?

- No.

- We need an economic deal.

Look, Cuba's economy needs to change and their economy can't change unless the system of government changes.

It's that simple.

Who's gonna invest billions of dollars in a communist country?

And if President Trump may be thinking he can keep little Marco in check, here's Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speaking for the 1.2 million Cuban expats in Florida in late March.

- Ultimately, you can't split the baby and say, you know, we're gonna maintain a, they're gonna maintain a communist government, but somehow they'll open to some investment here or there.

No, it's not going to fly.

And that's why a quick economic win in Cuba may not be quite as simple for President Trump as he hopes.

Because even if he does work out the greatest economic deal of all time with the current Castro regime, he's going to enrage a lot of very important voters in South Florida who see such an arrangement as a non-starter.

Here to talk about all of this and more is Michael Bustamante, a historian at the University of Miami and expert on Cuba, U.S.-Cuba relations.

Michael Bustamante, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

So, there's been a lot of chatter about Cuba and some action recently.

What is happening to the Cubans today?

If by to the Cubans you mean the Cuban people- They are living the most difficult period in their memory for most.

Things haven't been nearly this bad since 30 years ago when the Soviet Union fell and Cuba's GDP declined by something like a third in three or four years.

On a percentage basis, Cuba's GDP in the last five years hasn't declined nearly as much, but the Cuban economy never recovered to where it was in 1989, and so this crisis feels in the minds of most Cubans much worse than even what they went through in the 1990s.

Hearing about all sorts of shortages in electricity, they don't have fuel, so I mean the buses aren't running, they're not picking up trash.

How much, I assume you're talking to people that are on the ground, I mean what is day-to-day life like right now for Cubans?

Yeah, day to day life is incredibly difficult.

Imagine that the power's been out for 18 hours, it comes on at two in the morning and you have no choice but to get up and try to cook the rice and beans that you wanna feed your family for the following day because you don't know if you're gonna have electricity.

So people are really just thinking about not even how they're gonna get by that day, they're thinking almost hour to hour.

Obviously there's differences in terms of some Cubans have access to money and resources that come from family outside, some have a foot in Cuba's nascent private sector, so they're a little bit perhaps more insulated.

But for folks who are relying on state sector salaries, they are really, really having a very, very difficult time and poverty and inequality have become increasingly severe.

This is really, really dire times.

I mean, no gas, no electricity, people are breaking down the wood doors in their homes to get wood for cooking, right?

They're cooking with fire in the streets, I mean, in Havana.

That's how bad things have gotten.

So if nothing were to happen, if there were no political decisions that would change the trajectory that we are now on, play this out in six months, in a year, in two years.

What happens in Cuba as a consequence?

On the one hand, you would expect that as things get worse, people are going to get more and more frustrated, and you would see some kind of civic unrest.

And maybe that is what would happen.

We've seen in recent weeks people going out on their balconies at night and banging pots and pans in a kind of collective signal of protest.

But whether we would get anything bigger, sort of a taking of the streets, in sort of a mass scale, that's I think an open question.

And part of the reason it's an open question is because people are so exhausted.

They're, as I said, just trying to get by every day.

And Cuba has lost a tremendous amount of people to migration in the last few years.

The estimates vary, but between a million and two million Cubans have left in the last five, six years.

It's the largest exodus ever.

So who's left?

Of like what, 10, basically?

Originally out of 11, right?

So they've lost more than 10% of their population.

So it's more Cubans have left in the last five years than left in the immediate wake of the Cuban Revolution, not just in terms of absolute numbers, but as a percentage of the population.

So, it's seismic.

So, who's left, right, to sort of fuel that protest movement?

Cuba also has an aging society.

It's one of the oldest countries in Latin America because the people that leave tend to be young.

So, you know, you could see a situation where this plays out and does lead to some kind of instability or civic, you know, unrest or protest on a mass scale.

But you could also just see this kind of wither into just a really, really dark, dark place.

Now, I know it's hard to assess this, but to the extent that the Cubans are blaming someone, how much are they blaming the Cuban government?

How much are they blaming the United States for the hardship?

I think many Cubans I know, they're tired of the blame game that in the geopolitical corners tends to point their finger on either one actor or another, either the Cuban government or the United States.

I think most Cuban people I know are aware that US sanctions have a bite.

They obviously have impacts on the Cuban economy.

Otherwise, there'd be no reason for them.

But the argument that they have heard their whole lives from the Cuban government that it is only the United States' fault, that's something that even if you agree with it, it's just not working politically anymore.

People don't buy it because they have seen their own government make some very serious mistakes over the last few years.

They know their own government has some ownership here, and they haven't owned up for their part in this mess, and their part in making the Cuban economy as vulnerable as it is to the kind of external pressure that they're facing now from the Trump administration.

Now, there was a flurry of Cuba in the news in the Obama administration.

We had a baseball game.

We had like the museum that opened up to the internet.

It sounded exciting.

It never went anywhere.

Why did that fail?

What was the intention and where did it fall short?

Well, I don't know if I would agree that it failed.

I mean, I was in Havana and in Cuba generally a lot in that period.

And I've never known a period that felt more hopeful, more effervescent.

Of course, there were winners and losers in that sort of reform process.

But it was a time when for the first time in all my years of traveling there, I knew people, more or less people my age, who were making a decision to stay.

That they were not thinking of how do I get out of here.

Talented people with professional ambitions and great educations were thinking, I wanna stay, I wanna start a business.

Something is happening, I'm not exactly sure where it's going, it's imperfect, sure, but I wanna see it and ride this out.

The Obama policy at its peak really only had two years to work and then two things happened.

Donald Trump is elected and then Fidel Castro dies within weeks of one another.

And so that kind of casts a pall on this hope.

And so I don't know as if we know where that process would have ended up.

But what I would say is that in retrospect, it also is clear that the Cuban government missed an opportunity.

They saw the Obama opening as, you know, the United States has definitively turned a page on past policies of sanctions.

We can kind of play it safe.

We can take our time to doing the things internally or with respect to our other relationships and partnerships around the world.

We can play off different foreign interests against one another because Cuba is sexy.

Cuba is in style.

They did not jump in and embrace opening with the United States.

They did not.

And the reaction from Cuban official corners in the immediate aftermath was striking.

It was, this is, Obama's policy is more the same.

It's a Trojan horse, right?

And they missed an opportunity to really double down on, say, US investment for some of the loopholes that were created at the time in the sanctions framework.

The fact that they didn't meant that it was that much easier for Trump to unwind the normalization thing when he came in, because there weren't these sort of deep web of business ties that connected both places yet.

So now we've had a shift in US policy where Trump is expected to do something big.

A win is coming on Cuba.

What do you see this policy so far as moving towards?

You are right that they have created very high expectations, especially where I live in Miami.

- Certainly, the Cuban-Americans have to be thinking, "Finally, it's our time."

- The same way they were in 1991.

- But this time they all want an invasion.

- I mean, I don't know if they all want it.

There was a poll recently that suggested that there's strong support for some kind of military action.

That's actually long been the case.

You can poll Cuban-Americans going back years and years and find a majority of people will say, "Yeah, we'd like military action, but we also want the government to get out of the way if we want to send money to our mom."

So there's a lot of inconsistency and I think popular attitudes, but make no mistake, expectations are really high that the moment is coming.

U.S.

diplomats have put that out, that 2026 is the year of change, the year of liberation.

But what's that going to mean?

The Trump administration- Because there is no opposition on the ground in Cuba.

It's not that there's no ... There is opposition.

I mean, a party, a group.

There are many groups.

The problem is that they are weak.

They are not particularly united.

Most of the significant leaders that have existed are either in jail or in exile.

This is not anything like the Venezuela case, where you had a very well organized opposition that despite its own history of fractiousness came together around the 2024 election and really won that election, I think, as has been shown.

Then a lot of them ended up in jail and in exile.

Correct.

But at least in that case, there is, I think, a plausible case that you could make that there is a political force that is not just ready, but willing and able to sort of take over in the event that the existing state somehow just falls.

Now, that is not a case that the Trump administration is making, by the way.

That is not a case that they're making.

But I think that's what's more striking, that to be in Miami and hear for calls that the big moment of change is on the horizon, if this administration came to the conclusion in Venezuela that even that opposition was not ready to take over and not ready to earn the support of the Venezuelan military, how can they not arrive at a similar conclusion in the Cuban case?

Assuming they probably are, right?

I think the suggestion, I mean, there's been conflicting reporting and conflicting signs because the politics on this are so difficult for the Secretary of State.

It's clear the governments are talking.

- Who is Cuban American?

Who is Cuban American?

Yeah.

The governments are talking.

U.S.

diplomats have also put out there that they are looking for a Cuban Delcy Rodriguez in reference to the Maduro successor that seems to have been basically handpicked by the United States.

I think it might be dawning on them that that person doesn't really exist.

There's no one, to my mind, in the Cuban government that's that in a position to simply stick their neck out and kind of be the person who's going to do the United States bidding.

And so what does that leave you with?

And then you add in that you don't really have an opposition.

So your options seem to be limited.

Even if you can somehow decapitate the high ranks of the Cuban state, you're going to have to deal with some remnant of that government that can keep stability.

Because this administration does not want total instability 90 miles from its shores that could lead to things like another mass migration crisis.

That would be their worst nightmare.

So the expectations that have been created for big political change that goes all the way, root and stem political reform versus some of the hard realities.

That's where the rubber meets the road.

And that's where I think the outcomes here might disappoint some of the expectations that are sky high in Miami.

There's certainly been, depending on when you listen to Trump on this issue, there's been a focus on a lot of deals you can do.

Tourism deals, real estate deals, you know, maybe you can find a way to work with the Castros themselves, not with the president, who has said that he's not going anywhere, of course.

And then, you know, you say that's a win.

You paint that as a win.

So two related questions.

One, do you think that's where the Trump administration is actually now heading?

And two, if it is, what are the implications of that?

It is really hard to know if that's where the Trump administration is heading.

I think, you know, all things being equal, I could certainly see Trump himself being perfectly fine if that's where this ended up.

But they have a problem in that Trump himself has said also repeatedly that part of the reason he's so interested in Cuba is because he's had, you know, wonderful Cuban Americans who have supported him.

He's appointed many Cuban Americans to diplomatic posts.

He has a Cuban American as Secretary of State.

And so, and seems to want to do right by them in some way, whatever that means.

And that do right by them, as most Cuban Americans would define it, is not simply having the opportunity to go participate in a hotel venture.

And so that's where Trump's kind of deal-making instincts may conflict with some of the domestic political pressure that he's going to get from a place like South Florida.

On the other hand, if they are able to craft a deal, as has occasionally been reported, that is basically about economics, and by the way, the Cubans have signaled that they'd be pretty comfortable with that.

Their red lines are don't tell us how to run our political system, don't tell us who to let out of jail.

But even if part of the Trump White House is willing to go there, the consequences for someone like the Secretary of State, I think, are significant in terms of his future political ambitions, in terms of electoral support for future Republican candidates in Florida, right?

So, that's where there's a disjuncture here.

Okay, but Trump doesn't care that much about that, right?

I mean, like, if I'm thinking about Trump wanting a win on the back of Iran, which has not gone well, on the back of Venezuela that has, and those two experiences have been very, very different in terms of level of ambition, right?

Then, you know, why wouldn't he take that?

And from his perspective, it's another win.

It's another war that he gets to say is essentially over, that he's resolved.

He might very well.

And I have no doubt.

Do you think that or you don't think that?

I think Trump might be willing to take that deal any day of the week.

I think there are other parties in the administration who also would be.

As long as there is, as part of that, some kind of at least superficial political signal, maybe a little bit more than superficial.

The Cuban government, say, lets out a number of political prisoners in jail, doesn't commit to democratization overnight, but makes some gestures in the same way that the Delcy Rodriguez government has done in Venezuela, right?

But largely, you keep the picture of the state the same.

That might be perfectly sellable for Trump, for many parts of the White House.

The question I have, and Rubio himself might be forced to do that if that's what Trump wants.

But then Rubio has a question.

Does he go along with it?

And how does he sell it to his own community?

That I think is a really interesting thing to think about.

You know, you're right.

For Trump, he might not care.

Presumably, he doesn't have to run for election again.

But again, I think for Rubio, that's where the dynamic is really interesting.

So then the other question is, let's imagine that this happens.

And it's bloodless.

And it is the Americans suddenly are investing like crazy in Cuba.

And you've got big five-star complexes.

And tourism comes.

The economy feels more open.

They're getting more information.

They're traveling more.

Is that-- I mean, that may not be Trump long term.

It's a different presidency.

But to what extent would that reality create an inevitability that this regime is actually going to have to open politically, because you can't maintain communism in an environment like that for very long?

Well, I think in some ways that was kind of the long-term bet of the Obama policy, too, was that, you know, take the United States out of the equation as sort of the boogeyman in Cuba's internal politics, take away the scapegoat that everything is the United States' fault and engage with the Cuban people, bring in information, and that will over the long term create ingredients that will snowball over time.

I'm not sure if that would be guaranteed to play out in that way, and I think a lot of it has to do with how that economic opening is structured.

If it's an economic opening that's structured in such a way that allows the Cuban military, which already has controlling interests in the tourist industry and a bunch of sectors of the Cuban economy, to really suddenly become kind of the new kleptocrats, right, of an oligarchic economy that doesn't allow Cubans to really build an economy from the ground up, there's no reason that that kind of opening would necessarily have to lead to political opening.

I think if an economic opening is really from the ground up, it's going to require the Cuban government also to make enormous changes in how they structure their economy.

They have played with liberalization of the economy to some degree, but it's been sort of one step forward, one step back.

They really have yet to signal that they get that their own economic model is broken.

Final question for you.

Trump looking at the world today, is wanting to make change in Cuba as a priority the correct political impulse for this administration?

In some ways, it seems a surprising impulse, you know, given kind of the deal-making impulses, given the comfort that this administration has with dealing with autocrats in lots of places around the world, given that this is an administration that could easily cozy up to the current Cuban government and get a hotel deal out of it if they were smart.

I mean, I've long thought that the smartest thing Havana could have done from their own self-interest point of view back in 2017 was offer Trump a little island off the coast of the main island, right?

Small price to pay for what they're going through now.

But I think for Trump, it's also about symbolism.

I think this is, to be able to say hypothetically, selling whatever deal comes out of this as I was the president who did the thing that no other president did.

I mean, that goes straight to, I think, his ego.

- Yep.

- And so I think Cuba is attracted to the president not because of natural resource wealth, there's some oil, there's some nickel, but this is not Venezuela, right?

It doesn't have the strategic implications of Iran.

This is about the symbolism of communism, right?

And being able to say that, you know, we planted the flag and defeated that thing that no one else could, even if defeat really isn't defeat in so many ways.

So I think for him, the symbolism part is probably how this is being sold to him, is why he should even care at all.

Michael Bustamante, thanks for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

And now to puppet regime, where President Trump digs down on his promise to get a big fat hug from Xi Jinping.

Yes, he really said that during their upcoming summit.

Hello, China.

Hello, Donald.

You better stop helping Iran.

- Okay.

- We're going to do something really big.

- Okay.

- New tariffs.

- Okay.

- Like a million percent this time, possibly two million.

- Okay.

- Okay.

Okay what?

I just said okay.

What do you mean okay?

Like okay you're gonna stop doing what I asked you or okay like you're not?

- Yes.

- You really drive a hard bargain, you know that Mr.

Xi?

Could you let some Chinese boats through the Strait of Hormuz?

You mean the blockade of the blockade that's meant to open the Strait by closing it?

- Yes.

- Alright forget the tariffs and we'll do the boats but you gotta give me something very big next time I see you.

What's that?

A hug?

- No.

- No?

A big hug.

A big fat one.

- Done.

- Ha!

Still got it.

That's our show this week.

Come back next week and if you like what you've seen or even if you don't, but you have your own Caribbean nation in your crosshairs looking at you, Dominica, check us out at GZEROmedia.com.

♪ [Theme Music] ♪ Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at Prologis.com.

And by Cox is proud to support GZERO.

The planet needs all of us.

At Cox, we're working to seed the future of sustainable agriculture and reduce plastic waste.

Together, we can work to create a better future.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And... ♪♪♪♪♪