Cuba

 This is a striking story about the current situation in Cuba. It is a familiar tale of the collapse of communist institutions in the face of economic stagnation and the rush of people to turn to religion as society seems to collapse around them. 

What was interesting in the piece was that no one in Cuba blames the US for their plight. Despite the embargo that we have had forever and that Trump made considerably more stringent, Cubans blame their local leaders for their misery. And they are clearly miserable. This gibes with what I saw in the Museum of Remembrance in Santiago, Chile. There was no mention of the role the CIA played in supporting Pinochet's coup, but rather the blame was kept squarely on the military and industrial leaders who ushered in those decades of brutality.

Of course, if you ask an overeducated leftist in the US, we are responsible for the repression of Pinochet and the junta in Buenos Aires; we are starving the people of Cuba with our embargo. This is the dark twin of American Exceptionalism on the right, which is that the US is a uniquely evil place that does uniquely evil things. The reality, I think, is much more complicated.

The US absolutely contributes to misery and repression by its actions. We supported and support military dictatorships, if it serves our national interest. Of course, that's what national interest means. Until recently, however, we also funded things like USAID and tried to help countries that were not actively hostile to us. This could vacillate between Democratic and Republican administrations, but the rest of the world at worst tended to tolerate us, because we tended over time to be on balance more benevolent than malign.

Trump has, of course, tilted the scale so far towards malevolence that he has burned bridges all over the world. The one area where he seems to be - if not exactly admired than at least tolerated - is Latin America. Perhaps it is the long tradition of caudillismo -  strongman politics - that they tend to respond to. I actually think that accounted for some of his gains among Hispanic voters in the US in 2024. They saw in Trump the sort of machismo leader that they've traditionally admired. That's why he tended to outperform Harris among that demographic.

We will know in a little over a week, if Trump has surrendered all those gains and more with Hispanic voters, through the reckless brutality of his policies. I have to wonder and perhaps hope that the all the "mini-Trumps" springing up in Latin America will also see their popularity and grip on power recede. We saw Luna win in Brazil, and Sheinbaum in Mexico, but overall, there almost has to come a reckoning for the new cynical brutality of American policy towards Latin America. The people there want to believe in the US, because often their home grown leaders are terrible - as in Cuba.

If the Cuban communist regime finally does collapse Trump will take some credit for it, and some of that will actually be deserved. However, the real issue is that communism doesn't really work and that problem is not a problem of the United States' making, though we have ostracized and deprived that country of so much for so long, that I don't think a non-communist regime would have fared much better.