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The person who wrote this never asked a Cuban immigrant how they felt about the government in Cuba. Many will tell you a story about how their family desperately escaped on a row boat, are lucky to be alive and blame Castro.

The bottom line is that many Cuban immigrants in the United States feel that the current government destroyed the country and should be removed and Marco Rubio’s quest to fix Cuba is a reflection of Cuban immigrants values.

There is a strong argument that the Cuban government has treated many Cuban citizens very badly. But the assertion that this mistreatment is why the US is behaving aggressively towards Cuba is pretty naive. The people in power in the US at the moment do not care about the civil and political rights of Cubans. They care about acquiring Cuba and its natural reaources for themselves and their clients.
>The people in power in the US at the moment do not care about the civil and political rights of Cubans. They care about acquiring Cuba and its natural reaources for themselves and their clients.

I thought the motivation was ideological, chiefly from the cuban exiles voter base, of which Rubio is a part of? Aside from maybe tobacco, cuba doesn't have much natural resources. That's why it's so poor.

The main reason Cuba was valuable to U.S. interests before the Revolution was as a playground for American vacationers. Las Vegas was basically spun up as a replacement Havana after the Revolution took it away from U.S. interests and jet air travel made Nevada a reasonable destination for well-heeled East Coasters.

I think something similar could be true today, and it doesn't require any natural resources beyond cheap labor, Caribbean weather, and an obedient government.

Hot Springs, Arkansas was an alternative during that era.

The nations first national park anchored the attraction, complete with eponymous hot natural water baths. All the big celebrities of the day vacationed there ( alongside all the biggest gangsters, Al Capone included ) and professional baseball teams held spring training there.

Today, Hot Springs is still a pleasant place to visit, but it’s no longer a national draw.

Hot Sprints was pretty sad the last time I visited (more than 10 years ago now), but you could clearly see that it was once a ritzy place. One thing Havana had on Hot Springs was obviously that they could be open about liquor consumption during U.S. Prohibition (not that there was no booze available in a place like Hot Springs), and of course also the ability to bootleg liquor back to the U.S.

At the time of the Revolution, Cuba was effectively run by American East Coast mobsters and U.S. sugar, fruit, and tobacco interests. Security services like the relatively-new CIA got much more interested after it "fell" to communism, but were also part of the pre-Revolution power structure too -- as were the well-heeled Cuban oligarchs/capitalists/landowners who were dispossessed during the Revolution and decided to flee to Miami (and eventually produce our current Secretary of State)

Behind every ideological move is a rich man trying to get richer.

That is to say, ideology may do some heavy lifting, but the buy-in to actually translate that to action requires a profit motive.

Reading current events is a whole lot easier once you disabuse yourself of the idea that everything happens for a reason.

I can't comment much on Cuban-American immigrant feelings about Castro or the current Cuban government, but Marco Rubio's parents fled the US-backed regime of Fulgencio Batista, who Castro overthrew.

Maybe that's an example we should pay attention to though. How many of Cuba's problems are caused by the US doubling-down on trying to interfere? Obviously their current power outages are.

Cuba is poor because they run an absolutely insane Soviet-style communist planned economy. Every major industry is owned by the government, with state approved production targets, price controls, and state resource allocation. This is a failed economic model that doomed the Soviet Union that the rest of the world has moved on from.

Chinese officials visited Cuba and told them to adopt market-style reforms that were very successful in China, and Cuban government officials said no. The Chinese officials left extremely confused why Cuba would not consider them.

> their current power outages are [caused by the US]

No, only indirectly. Cuba used to receive billions of dollars of free oil from Venezuela, they would use part of it for internal consumption (electricity generation) then resell the rest to pay for imports. But after Maduro was deposed, free oil transfers stopped, Cuba needed to purchase oil on the open market, and there is no money to do so; hence the economic and electricity crisis.

Could the Cuban economy be run better? Sure, but Cuba is being actively blockaded by the US. To act like that isn't the proximate cause of their power outages is ridiculous.
> Cuba is being actively blockaded by the US

False. This is a common point of confusion. There is no blockade on Cuba, only an embargo. You can research this yourself.

A blockade in international law requires a physical naval presence that intercepts ships. It is literally an act of war. The US is not intercepting ships that travel to Cuba. The US maintains an embargo on Cuba, not a blockade.

See https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/world/americas/cuba-russi...

> The United States Coast Guard is allowing a Russian tanker full of crude oil to reach Cuba

> Asked by reporters about this article on Air Force One Sunday evening, President Trump confirmed it. “We don’t mind having somebody get a boatload, because they need — they have to survive,” he said. “I told them, if a country wants to send some oil into Cuba right now, I have no problem with that. Whether it’s Russia or not.”

The tanker in question successfully reached and delivered its cargo to Cuba.

The current energy crisis in Cuba is a result of the collapse of the Maduro regime, which was providing billions of dollars of free oil to Cuba.

There is a strong argument that the Cuban government has treated many Cuban citizens badly. But the assertion that this mistreatment is why the US is behaving aggressively towards Cuba is pretty naive. The people in power in the US at the moment do not care about the civil and political rights of Cubans. They care about acquiring Cuba and its natural reaources for themselves and their clients.
Marco Rubio cares about his own quest to be the man who finally frees Cuba from communism. He doesn’t care about natural resources. It’s a pride thing. And I’m fine with that.
> And I’m fine with that.

People, specifically children, are dying:

"infant mortality has doubled to 9.9 per 1,000 births; childhood cancer survival rates have fallen from 85 to 65 per cent; and essential medicines are available at only around 30 per cent of normal supply levels." [1]

Are you fine with that?

[1] Children are dying as US sanctions push Cuba to the brink, warns UN human rights chief https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/06/1167671

People are dying everywhere all the time. What has communism achieved that it’s worth having these kind of infant mortality rates? I promise you if it weren’t for communism they would have much lower infant mortality rates.
What about the mass suffering the US boycott has caused?
Rubio's family left Cuba before the revolution that put Castro in power.

Rubio has been pushing a false narrative of his family's history for a long time.

Having angry expats exercise control over foreign policy is stupid.

The rest of us don't need to do anything that doesn't serve us just because they have an axe to grind.

There's a good Scott Horton and Dave Smith conversation about this, but it's so obvious really, when you look at rich Cubans and rich Persians. Those revolutions happened because of their parents and grandparents, and now they want to pretend like they somehow represent the country they left? lol

Because the US is a nation of expats, I find that US policy mostly aligns with how the people who moved here from there feel about the government they left.

Places like Canada and Europe, we are mostly friendly with and have slight disagreements. Ukrainians support their home country and we support Ukraine. Venezuelans, Cubans and Iranians hate the government and so do we. Chinese people have a so so view of the government and we have a so so relationship with China.

It doesn’t work perfectly, but it’s more the exception than the rule. I think it’s really a test of how compatible a society is with our society in how expats who live here view their home country and it’s more a correlation than a cause that expats views on their government mostly mirror our governments views on a country. It just very direct right now in regards to Cuba as Rubio has a lot of sway over the US policies.

Anyways, regardless this post was more a disagreement with the articles views than some sort of enforced doctrine.

I have some small quibbles with what you're saying, but I think the main issue is that only Cubans and Persians really coerce our foreign policy into something different from what it would otherwise be.

I don't think Ukrainians in the US account for bipartisan US support for Ukraine. I think there are a host of geopolitical factors and basic inertia accounting for that.

But then, you look at Cuba, and see a bunch of Cubans donating to Republicans, and can easily tell the difference between Democrats and Republicans on what to do with Cuba. And it's not even like the Republican base really cares; it's just that one voting/money block that has its thumb on the scale.

edit: I guess with Iran, however, it's pretty clear who and what moved Trump on that, and it wasn't the expat community.

> Many will tell you a story about how their family desperately escaped on a row boat, are lucky to be alive and blame Castro.

Many will also not want to tell you any stories about what their family did in cuba.

Like I'm not trying to downplay the real violence and excesses. But read about how americans talked about cuba pre-castro, what they expected from the place during batista's dictatorship.

The deeply entrenched feudal-type rural poverty provided the raw human material for the mafia to create a vile playground for their own fantasies and sell it to other wealthy americans. Epstein economy shit. Castro didn't come out of nowhere, he harnessed the deep disgust and pain of a people being treated as things for money and pleasure. So yeah the sugar plantation landlords, the batista enforcers, the mafia sex slave sourcers were running for their lives. A lot other people got caught up too, absolutely. But ask your hypothetical cuban immigrant some followup questions. It's not always exactly personal why they hate castro.

Not even the slightest justification for inflicting so much suffering on the current population of Cuba.
I visited Cuba and found that Castro's popularity is fairly universal there. I have never been to Miami and don't know any Cuban immigrants, though.
>Marco Rubio’s quest to fix Cuba is a reflection of Cuban immigrants values.

How do you know that's his motivation?

There are countless countries around the world that need to be fixed

No offense, in my opinion you are being very arrogant. Foreign intervention doesn’t relate to fixing a country.

Think about how harmful Trump is to his country and how harmful he can be to a country that he doesn’t have any responsibility to. It shouldn’t be difficult to understand.

People who live outside if their country and say things like this are being shallow. They are understandably frustrated but this is not a healthy way as can be seen in numerous examples in history

right yer...Trump admin is gonna pause and hear out their grievances...in a pipe's dream. Blatant corruption with no shame waging unrestricted economic warfare. Greed is the policy.
Odd to see no mention of the US government's rationale for intervening over their continuing to leave a vaguely weak enemy alone as past administrations have: the US believes that inhibiting Chinese covert activity (real or imagined) has risen in necessity to now outbid the cost of invasion.

This could have only come to pass because the administration has faith in the pessimistic forecasts for peace between Beijing and Washington. If so few private sector forecasters thought Tariffs and Hormuz were important black swans to consider, how can we give the forecasts of no US-China conflict as much credence as we do?

Idk if Hn is the place for my making such remarks, however, as the commentariat has gotten much less confident in the value of sober political analysis than before.

You could make this a headline about anything and it would be true

The U.S. Is (insert anything) to Make Rich Men Richer

It's already in the hands of rich men:

"A decade ago, Forbes estimated Fidel Castro’s personal net worth at $900 million."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/keithflamer/2016/11/26/10-surpr...

I'm sure most of that went to his sons (the ones that weren't Prime Minister of Canada).

Maybe. But also, if the regime falls, you know who will become richer and more healthy? ALL CUBANS!

If bad people do the right thing for the wrong reasons, we should be thankful, not angry.

Oh yes. We've seen so many US invasions for the purpose of regime change end up with prosperity for the citizens of those countries.
South Korea, Japan, Germany, France, Belgium, Afghanistan (although Biden fucked up and pulled out), and Iraq. That's a pretty impressive list.
Should the Cubans that will inevitably be killed along the way be thankful as well? Or the Cubans currently suffering due to the blockade?

Even for clearly despotic regimes, overthrowing them is not the obviously right thing.

Trump's problem is that he sees the US and the world only through the lens of maximizing profits for his cronies. In the face of global warming and climate change, this is extremely harmful to the country and the world. His attitude is always win-lose, never win-win.
On a recent podcast episode Ezra Klein mentioned something like "when making agreements one should be able to accept the deal of either side" which is something that's stuck with me and is basically an elegant way of describing a win-win situation.
I hope they continue terrorizing the communist regime that tortures dissidents.
Fascists torturing communists... seems familiar.
Free markets harm children and people of Cuba, but communism doesn't, I'm sick of these leftists.
What part of the free market demands the blockade currently imposed on Cuba?
America: Get rid of communism and become a democratic government so that your people are free and your government is not a threat to us. Are you upset that a liberal government is preventing the maturation of an authoritarian communist government so that a result similar to North Korea does not happen? Sanctions and blockades are what achieve this, and these things do not happen with diplomatic handshakes.
Yeah as an American I totally feel threatened by the Cuban government in the year 2026.

Holy hell man, get a grip.