By admin 
In September 2010, an ailing Fidel Castro made a striking admission. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg had asked him whether the Cuban model was still worth exporting. “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” Castro bluntly told him. Sixteen years later, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, one of Cuba’s top diplomats, offered me a similar assessment of the state of the revolution, nearly seven decades on. In an interview in Washington, D.C., Cossío told me that Cuba’s Soviet-influenced system of central planning and state control “is exhausted.” The world, he said, has changed, and Cuba has to change with it. He stressed that Havana is open to pursuing that transformation in partnership with Washington. But coercive economic pressure, he argued, will make the task only more difficult.
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Coercive pressure is, in fact, the Trump administration’s strategy. Since President Trump returned to the White House last year, his administration has put an economic squeeze on Havana, including sanctions and fuel-shipment restrictions that have contributed to severe shortages and prolonged blackouts on the island.
Trump’s approach to Cuba reflects a mix of ideological opposition, national-security concerns, and economic opportunism. Some within his administration object to Havana’s partnerships with U.S. adversaries, including Russia, China, and Iran. (Cossío claimed that Iran’s presence in Havana consisted of one Persian restaurant.) The administration has also cited Cuba’s failure to cooperate with U.S. law enforcement on migration concerns. This year, the two governments appeared open to working out some of these issues and acknowledged having direct contact. But Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla,told reporters in Havanaearlier this month that neither negotiations nor an agenda for future talks has been established, despite Havana’s willingness to stay in touch.
Since the U.S. military ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, Trump has repeatedly warned that Cuba could be next. In May, CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Havana to deliver Trump’s message that Washington was prepared to engage on economic and security issues, but only if Cuba made “fundamental changes.” Days later, the head of U.S. Southern Command met with Cuban military officials near Guantánamo Bay.
A White House official, in a written response to my questions, conveyed Trump’s view that Cuba “has been horribly run for years” and said the United States is “ready to open a new chapter in the relationship.” The official added: “The only thing standing in the way of a better future are those who control Cuba for their own gain at the expense of the Cuban people.”
Cossío and other top Cuban officials have sought to demonstrate that Cuba can change for the better on its own. But the gap between what Havana considers meaningful reform and what the Trump administration says needs to happen remains wide. Washington has demanded substantial changes, and although Havana is open to economic modernization, it insists that its political system is nonnegotiable. Prolonged blackouts have disrupted everyday life, and deteriorating water and sanitation systems have contributed to a surge in illnesses. Hospitals face fuel shortages and electricity disruptions, which affect refrigeration for medicines and vaccines. In eastern Cuba, UNICEF earlier this year, 481,000 people were relying on water trucks, and some families were being forced to use unsafe water because fuel shortages constrained pumping and other essential services.
Against that backdrop, Cuba has been pursuing its own economic reforms. In June, the government approved 176 measures that expand private business, foreign investment, and private participation in banking, while giving investors a greater role in state-owned companies. The government also began allowing Cubans living abroad to own or invest in private businesses on the island. Subsequent measures have eased bureaucratic restrictions on private businesses and opened additional space for foreign investment, including in tourism.
As Cossío and I discussed relations between Washington and Havana—which Cossío was careful to call “bilateral contacts,” not negotiations—he laid out what economic change in Cuba might look like. His country, he said, needs to move toward an economy “more dependent on financial instruments, on the market economy, with a much greater role for the private sector,” while leaving the state as a participant. He described the transformation now under way as the “most significant social and economic transformations” in Cuba in the past 60 years.
The U.S. is now applying extraordinary pressure on Cuba, to the point that Cuban officials have accused Washington of seeking to force political change. “They speak openly, openly about military aggression, and they are subjecting the people of Cuba to an unrelenting war,” Cossío told me.
The deputy foreign minister made no demands for a new diplomatic initiative or a major U.S. aid package to alleviate Cuba’s distress. Trump, he said, has the power to put the relationship on the right path by removing restrictions on Americans traveling to the island. He could also restore Americans’ ability “to do business in Cuba, to trade with Cuba, to invest in Cuba if they wish.”
“We’re not asking for a grant,” Cossío said. “We’re not asking for gifts or favors. We want the U.S. to stop punishing the Cuban economy” and its commercial relationships with countries around the world. This year, for example, Mexico’s state-owned oil company, Pemex, paused its oil exports to Cuba after the U.S. seized Maduro. And the Trump administration backed a lawsuit brought by a private U.S. docks owner against major cruise operators for using docks in Havana confiscated by Cuba’s government in 1960. The cruise companies maintain that their travel operations to Cuba were legal.
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The Trump administration says that its goal is not simply to open Cuba’s economy but also to pressure the Cuban government into making broader political change. Its policy calls for more freedom, democracy, human rights, and free enterprise in Cuba, while maintaining the U.S. economic embargo and restrictions on transactions that benefit the Cuban military and security apparatus. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the first person of Cuban descent to hold the position, has repeatedly portrayed the Cuban government as a threat to U.S. national security and argued that its ruling elite maintains control over the economy.
This month, as Cuba was rolling out further measures to expand private investment, Rubio announced another round of sanctions against Cuban state-linked financial, mining, and energy entities, saying that the measures were aimed at those who sustain the regime. Cossío stressed that American companies could have a place in Cuba amid the changes if Washington eased its restrictions. “The U.S. could take advantage of that, become an important business partner in Cuba,” Cossío said. “They could invest. They could have a better relation with the emerging private sector in Cuba. They could benefit as a business opportunity.”
Mindful that Trump is always seeking another win in relations with other nations, Cossío put it in terms the American president is likely to understand. “They could even claim a victory,” he said.
It’s hard to imagine Castro putting the proposition quite that way. Goldberg’s interview with Fidel Castro came as Fidel’s brother Raúl was beginning to loosen the state’s grip on the economy, allowing more small businesses to operate and opening limited avenues for foreign investment. Back then, Cuba was beginning to adopt some of the economic ideas that Washington had long demanded—even as U.S. policy prevented Americans from participating in the experiment. The new measures are a significant loosening of the economic system built around state control. But Cuba remains a one-party state.
That may not sit well with the Trump administration, which says Cuba’s economic model cannot fundamentally change without altering its system of governance. Cuba’s critics in the U.S. point to the regime’s record of detaining political prisoners. The government this year announced it was releasing 2,010 prisoners, but Human Rights Watch, citing local advocacy groups, said in April that 700 or so political prisoners remained behind bars. Hundreds more faced house arrest and other restrictions.
“The only thing worse than a Communist is an incompetent Communist. And so their system of government has to change because they will never be able to develop economically without those changes,” Rubio said in March. “Economic change is important. Giving people economic and political freedom is important, but they come hand in hand. They come together.”
Cossío said that Cuba had been considering a transformation since at least 2011, but had hoped to undertake it under less punishing circumstances. After the opening made by the Obama administration, when the two countries restored diplomatic relations and the U.S. eased restrictions on travel and some commerce, Havana believed it might finally be able to move forward. The subsequent rollback of most President Obama–era policies in Trump’s first term, followed by more limited engagement under President Biden, changed that calculation.
Now, Cossío said, Cuba has concluded that it cannot wait. “The country has changed. We’ve changed demographically. Our human resources have changed. The world has changed,” he told me. “We’ve come to the conclusion this year that, in spite of that, we cannot delay any more the transformation that we need to put in place in Cuba.”
Sixteen years after Castro acknowledged that the Cuban model no longer worked, Havana is openly trying to evolve—and Cossío is telling Washington that it can either try to force the transformation from the outside or participate from within. But U.S. administrations, past and present, have long been skeptical that a system that has resisted changes for decades can meaningfully transform without radical changes at the top.