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- [00:00]
Podcast Host/Announcer
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- [01:44]
David Remnick
You're listening to the Political Scene. I'm David Remnick. Early each week we bring you a conversation from our episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour.
- [01:55]
Podcast Host/Announcer
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour,
- [01:57]
Ada Ferrer
a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.
- [02:02]
David Remnick
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Since the beginning of this year, President Trump has turned sharply from his promised focus on domestic issues, America first, to a series of foreign military adventures that have shocked many of his own supporters and much of the world. In January, there was the invasion of Venezuela and the seizure of its president, Nicolas Maduro. Then came the threatened invasion of Greenland. And now there's a war with Iran that has engulfed the Middle east, killed many hundreds of people and threatens the entire global economy. And yet, no sooner was the bombing of Iran underway. Thank you. That Trump and some of his allies began teasing a new move taking Cuba. That'd be Good.
- [02:53]
John Lee Anderson
That's a big honor. Taking Cuba.
- [02:55]
David Remnick
Taking Cuba in some form. Yeah, taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it. I think I could do anything I want with it. You want to know the truth? They're a very weakened nation right now. The US has effectively shut off Cuba's oil supply, and the electrical grid had a near total blackout last week. New Yorker staff writer John Lee Anderson has been to Cuba countless times in his career, and his most recent trip followed the invasion of Venezuela. I spoke with John Lee Anderson this past week. John Lee, the Trump administration has recently said that the president of Cuba, Miguel Diaz Canel, has to step down. So let's start there. Who is Diaz Canel? What's his role in the regime, and what would ousting him even accomplish?
- [03:49]
John Lee Anderson
Diaz Canel is the handpicked successor to Raul Castro. He's a party apparatchik. He was a provincial party chief, and he has served, how shall I put this creditably, as the face of the ongoing regime, and he's not had any easy time of it. There's been, as we know, a huge economic downturn in Cuba, et cetera, the falling apart of relations in Trump 1 and now Trump 2. Biden did nothing during his four years to alter things in Cuba, for better or worse. So dsk now there's a kind of. Yeah, he's a work. He's a working stiff, really, and doesn't have a huge amount of respect from the population, but nor is he seen as particularly evil. He's seen as the front man for the regime which continues to be controlled from behind the curtains by the elderly Raul Castro and his family. So Raul Diaz Canel, he won his reelection three years ago, so he has two to go.
- [04:53]
Ada Ferrer
He.
- [04:53]
John Lee Anderson
He has to leave office. In April 2028, he won his reelection. To give you an idea of the kind of politics on the island under the slogan of continuidad continuity, which doesn't appeal to people under 30 years old. And he's uninspiring, but.
- [05:12]
David Remnick
Uninspiring. The description you've given me when we've talked on the phone and in your coming piece about Cuba is of a Cuba in desperate straits. People are leaving and leaving and leaving. The streets are filled with garbage.
- [05:29]
John Lee Anderson
That's right.
- [05:30]
David Remnick
There's blackouts all the time. The economy is in desperate straits. Events in Venezuela and elsewhere could not have been all that encouraging. So continuity seems a kind of a grim way to put it.
- [05:46]
John Lee Anderson
Yeah, exactly. But you have to put into context that this is a regime that presents itself as the revolutionary continuation, which includes notions of sacrifice. In a way, there's analogies here to Iran, right? This idea of sacrifice, a common enemy, the Yankee imperialist empire just there over the sea, as ever oppressing us. Increasing numbers of Cubans don't believe that anymore. But they have little agency to alter the situation. And Diaz Canel always succeeds in disappointing. He even defers, almost as if Raul Castro was the Supreme Leader, as Iranian presidents do. So back to part of your first question. What does it do to remove him? Zip. Because he has no real power. But I think for someone like Trump, as we know, he's rather simplistic. So he thinks we got rid of Maduro and now it's mine. Venezuela's mind. If we get the Canel out of there, it'll look good because he's the top guy.
- [06:53]
David Remnick
I have to say though, John Lee, the war with Iran is not going particularly well. It's chaotic. The rationale for it has never really been explained coherently. The entire Middle east is in a state of chaos. How do Cubans perceive this situation where the American President, in the midst of all this, gets up and rather blithely starts talking about regime change through the good agencies of the United States in Cuba?
- [07:27]
John Lee Anderson
I think that the quagmire of the US in the Middle east because of the Iran we're right now plays into the hands of the Cubans that are having to negotiate their survival or whatever with the Americans. They have a few days of oil supplies left. The Americans have been blockading them ever since they Captured Maduro on the 3rd of January and not been allowing any other energy supplies to come into Cuba for the government's use. So they're in the sort of 14th round and it kind of against the ropes here. They have to figure out how to get the Americans to give them some fuel. And of course there's a front end which is, you know, as we've heard through leaks, Marco Rubio basically wants an economic opening. He's not going for regime change, but a kind of Maduro like thing where they find a Del C and its regime kind of succession, stabilization. They don't want chaos in Cuba, but the tail end of that of any package they are going to try to force the Cubans to agree to will include some kind of notional political succession or transformation. The Cubans are very unlikely to agree to that because that would mean negotiating themselves out of existence. And as people on an island, they have nowhere to go. So they won't face bombs or guns like the Iranians are right now. It'll be more, we think, more like Venezuela. But these are people who have spent the last nearly 70 years conjuring up stratagems to survive American strategies of containment, outright hostility attacks, and usually bested them, and also negotiations. So if I'm them, I'm thinking to myself, the Americans have gotten themselves into a mess over there. This plays to us. So let's spin out the negotiations. Let's do some economic concessions, which we're already seeing. Talk about, but let's tread water on the political thing.
- [09:19]
David Remnick
You've been to Cuba a million times over your life. You wrote a terrific biography of Che Guevara, and you've made two especially recent trips to Cuba, one in May and one in the wake of the invasion of Venezuela, much more recently. Just give me a sense of what it's like to walk around and be in Havana and other cities and towns in Cuba compared to previous trips. What's it like?
- [09:47]
John Lee Anderson
Oh, gosh. I mean, look, since 2021, there's been an exodus. You know, nobody knows exactly, but anywhere up to 20% of the population have left. Have left. It is incredible. And of course, it's an island. People have to pay to leave. And therefore you can imagine if it had land borders, you know, how many more would have left. Maybe similar to Venezuela, where about a third of the population has left over 10 years. Right. Because economic collapse, but primarily young people and anybody with skills. So you might be a doctor with a heart cardiac specialist in Havana, and you end up pushing some, you know, ancient person around Miami in a. In a care home, you know, and that's the kind of. Or driving an Uber somewhere. And that's kind of what's happened to a lot of Cubans. So when I first went back, I hadn't been in a while. I was struck by the emptiness of Cuba. And I went to Havana and three other towns in the interior, and everything was just empty. There was no people. I really felt the exodus. And, you know, I visited old friends. You know the one, the friends I have are mostly quite old people now. Some have died, some have left, their kids have left. Many of them are being sustained by the remittances their kids can send for where they're. Wherever they're living, Spain, the United States. And the houses around them are empty and also inhabited in some cases by also elderly people, because their kids and grandkids have left as well.
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David Remnick
When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a period that Cuba really struggled because they had been subsidized and Propped up by the Soviet government. And then the Venezuelans stepped into the breach and there was a relationship there that helped Cuba get from day to day.
- [11:39]
John Lee Anderson
That's right.
- [11:39]
David Remnick
How is Cuba getting by at all? What's the economy?
- [11:43]
John Lee Anderson
Yeah, I mean, I lived there during that period, David, in the early 90s, when the Soviet, you know, rug was pulled out from them and, you know, people went from driving cars to riding bicycles. And in, in the countryside, they went from tractors literally, to oxen. And the average Cuban lost I don't know how much of their body weight. And there was a lot of suicide. And it was bad. It was bad when I was there in the early 90s. Then, as you said, Venezuela stepped in. Chavez and Fidel formed this Hugo Chavez, the late Venezuelan wannabe, really acolyte of Fidel Castro. And they did this oil for expertise deal. So, you know, Venezuelan oil that began, this was 25 years ago, for Cuban expertise in everything from doctors to teachers to sports instructors and of course intelligence and military security guys. And that's what's ended with Maduro. So comparing that period of the early 90s, following the Soviet implosion to the period now, there are differences, but also many similarities. These long blackouts, for instance, just yesterday, the national grid collapsed for the umpteenth time in Cuba.
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David Remnick
The whole electric grid went down in Cuba.
- [12:57]
John Lee Anderson
For how long? I don't know exactly, but sometimes back in, I think it was October of last year, it went on for almost a week. You can't get gasoline for love or money. And some people with dollars on the black market find ways, of course, but basically there is no fuel. They haven't received any in three months. So that's disappearing.
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David Remnick
John Lee, what does somebody like Marco Rubio, who seems so influential when it comes to Cuba policy in the Trump administration, what does he want? What are these negotiations with the Cubans about
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John Lee Anderson
the package, as I understand it, that the Americans want. Start with a sweetener, that is to say, you open up economically to investors, be nice to private enterprise, which will help you anyway, and will allow us to sort of invest and da, da, da, and make money. And we will start to allow fuel in, or it might even be we will sell you the Venezuelan fuel you used to get for free, and then you'll owe us. So the point, what they're trying to do is basically make Cuba a dependency of the United States in the same way that Venezuela is now a neo dependency. And this new imperialism has Trump's name all over it. Yesterday when he talked, he was like, I Can do whatever I want with it. He didn't say, we, the United States. He said, I. It's all about him.
- [14:23]
David Remnick
Is there any way in the world you envision a better future? What would have to happen?
- [14:31]
John Lee Anderson
There does have to be a shift by the party. You know, it's. It's.
- [14:35]
David Remnick
Look, in Cuba. The Communist Party in Cuba.
- [14:38]
John Lee Anderson
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, look, yes, you do have to have joint ventures. You already have an entrepreneurial class in Cuba, so there's already an island. Wide networks of conspiracies evading state control. Right. So you need to legalize that. You need to bring it out to the surface. Cubans are incredibly resourceful people, as they've had to be. And, you know, like people everywhere, they want to live good lives and want to make money, so you might as well get over yourself and let them do that.
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David Remnick
But that means the. That that's the end of the ideology and. Which is already at the end of its rope.
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John Lee Anderson
But it is.
- [15:14]
David Remnick
It's also the end of the Communist Party inevitably, no?
- [15:17]
John Lee Anderson
I would think so, yeah. Yeah. The fact that it's remained as long as it has has to do with the fact, I think a lot of it's geographic. The fact that it's an island, you know, it's just harder to change things on an island. However, this could be tougher than the Americans think. Even Rubio, whom I think has adopted, interestingly, a more sophisticated policy approach with both Venezuela and now Cuba than I would have expected. But it's got this, you know, imperialist kind of veneer, which one wonders, really, is that going to work forever, this idea of making countries dependencies in this new era, will it last beyond Trump? And I think that they may be, as we've seen with Iran, the Iran intervention, this arrogance, a hubris, a kind of denialism about history and human nature, and a lack of knowledge about other countries and their pasts. And so, quite apart from whether or not the Cuban Communists party goes down the ditch, I don't think there'll be too many lamentations about it in Cuba. There will still be residual nationalism that's going to rear its head. And at some level, it may well cause these negotiations to be difficult, more than difficult and strung out over time. And on the one hand, the Cubans who are having to do these negotiations are looking it around and they're thinking, the Americans are in this quagmire.
- [16:44]
Jason Adam Katzenstein
This.
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John Lee Anderson
This benefits us. On the other hand, they're thinking, we've got to get some energy supplies somewhere here. So they're going to go into this like maybe a canny poker player and they're handicapped because of the fuel thing. But on the other hand, they may have some resources that the Americans can't see right now. And one of those resources, it may sound paradoxical, is the fact that there's already been some protests and some unrest on the island that could spread further. Yes, that threatens the regime, of course, but they have the ability to suppress most of it. However, it's also a threat to the United States because if chaos begins in Cuba and the people they want to stabilize it, that is the remnants of the Communist Party and the military are incapable of controlling that chaos. You have chaos not 700 or 800 miles away, as is Haiti, but 90 miles away. And you could be seeing, you know, a re immigration flood to the United States if there's real chaos on the island.
- [17:46]
David Remnick
John Lee Anderson, thanks so much.
- [17:48]
John Lee Anderson
Thank you, David.
- [17:53]
David Remnick
You can read John Lee Anderson on cuba@newyorker.com and you can subscribe to the New Yorker there as well. New yorker.com In a moment I'll be joined by the Pulitzer Prize winning historian of Cuba, Ada Ferrer. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.
- [18:20]
Podcast Host/Announcer
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- [21:34]
David Remnick
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We're talking today about the United States and Cuba and the Trump administration's threats lately of a takeover there. Trump would certainly not be the first president to intervene in Cuba. America's troubled relationship with the island goes back centuries. To get a clearer view of the relationship, I spoke with the historian Ada Ferrer, who won the Pulitzer prize for her 2022 book, An American History. Ferrer herself left Cuba as a small child, coming to the United States with her mother back in 1963, when Castro's regime was arguably at its peak. I spoke with Ada Ferrer this week about what a military campaign would mean to Cubans and to the large Cuban American population in Florida and beyond. So, ada, Donald Trump said this about his intentions toward. It may be a friendly takeover, it may not be a friendly takeover. It wouldn't matter because they're down to, as they say, fumes. That's what President Trump has said. How do you react to a statement like that?
- [22:43]
Ada Ferrer
Well, they are down to fumes. He's assuming there's a difference between a friendly takeover and an unfriendly takeover. In my opinion, there's no such thing as a friendly takeover of Cuba. And if you know any Cuban history and any history of the relationship between the two countries, you can't listen to those words and not cringe.
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David Remnick
John Lee Anderson was just there for us and is about to publish a piece about what he saw and what he heard. And it's pretty desperate. My guess is that you speak to people there as best you can, but
- [23:19]
Ada Ferrer
tell me what it's like. It feels total. You know, it's just. There's a sense of hopelessness, of. There's a complete lack of confidence that the current government in Cuba can find a solution to anything. And it's affecting every realm of daily life. And it's gotten worse since Trump has tried to. Has cut off the. The shipments of oil to Cuba. It's gotten a lot worse over the last three months. But it was already, I mean, it was already devastating. You already had hospitals, parts of which were crumbling, literally. I know someone in Cuba, this was in December of 24, who needed hip surgery because she fell and broke her hip. The family had to provide the prostheses. They had to buy it on the underground market themselves because the hospital couldn't provide it. They had to provide medicine, they had to bring sheets, they had to bring food. The other thing they had to provide was blood because the hospital could not keep stores of blood.
- [24:42]
David Remnick
Wow.
- [24:42]
Ada Ferrer
The government can't even pick up garbage. And that was true even before. Right. So there's a sense in which there, there's a lot of basic services that they can't provide.
- [24:54]
David Remnick
The responsibility for that failure is at the feet of the Cuban government, at the feet of the United States. Where do you place it?
- [25:04]
Ada Ferrer
Both. The Cuban people are so desperate right now that they are much less interested in the question of who's to blame. In some ways, they don't quite care who's to blame. They just want something to change. So I think that's the mood right now. In terms of what I think the US Embargo is a Policy that has harmed the Cuban economy, there's no question about that. Right from the very beginning, it denied Cuba access to its major and natural market. Right. 90 miles away, Cuba turned to the Soviet Union and found salvation there. Right. But in some sense, it never became an economically independent nation. It relied on the Soviet Union for decades. The Soviet Union collapsed, it sent the Cuban economy into a tailspin, and then Venezuela stepped in with oil. Right. But there's no saviors anymore. If you look at what the Cuban government has been investing in over the last years, there's tremendous investment in the tourist industry, but remarkably, surprisingly little in things like agriculture or infrastructure or even education, health and so on. So they've made decisions that have contributed to the current crisis.
- [26:27]
David Remnick
The state of Florida and its politics has been for years influenced by Cuban Americans.
- [26:33]
Ada Ferrer
Right.
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David Remnick
And the usual stereotype of that is that they're quite conservative, especially on this issue. Are they still?
- [26:42]
Ada Ferrer
Absolutely. I think Cuban Americans would. A majority of Cuban Americans would welcome some kind of action by Trump and Rubio to force a change in Cuba. I think what many people don't think about when they think about Cuban Americans is how diverse the community is, not politically necessarily, but in terms of when they arrive. So most Cuban Americans, most Cuban born people in Miami arrived in the very recent past. That means that they grew up in a communist society. They went to schools, they recited poems about Che Guevara or their parents did. They came out of that system and this ongoing developing crisis over the, in some ways over 30 years, but very, very in an accelerated manner over the last five or six years. What that means is that the people who are eager, many of the people who are eager for that kind of action from Trump and Rubio aren't these old Cuban Americans who lost property 60 years ago. It's people who had, you know, never had much property to be taken. And that also means that that distinction that's traditionally drawn between Cubans on the island and Cubans here is not quite as meaningful as it was decades ago.
- [28:14]
David Remnick
Now, Cubans fleeing the Communist Party had enjoyed protected status immigrating to the U.S. but now we're deporting record numbers of Cuban people with some of those Cold War protections revoked. What do Cuban Trump supporters think about that?
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Ada Ferrer
I mean, you're right. The Cuban Adjustment act, which had afforded Cubans advantages that nobody else had, it's still the law technically, but it almost doesn't matter.
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David Remnick
Right?
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Ada Ferrer
Because Trump is doing things that he's acting as if the law didn't exist. There are Cubans Languishing in places like Alligator Alcatraz, including a cousin of mine. There are people who came in under Biden's humanitarian parole program. And those people all received self deportation letters. And I think what was. I know actually that what was happening before the invasion in Venezuela was that Trump was losing support over that. And you got a sense from talking to Miami people in Miami, political leaders, activists, that, you know, and I heard it, that he was going too far, that they thought it, he didn't mean them, that he thought he was going to go after criminals, but he was just going after people who were working and so on and so forth. But I haven't heard that so much since the attack on Venezuela.
- [29:42]
David Remnick
About a decade ago, Barack Obama as president visited Havana and he removed Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. That's a decision that Donald Trump eventually reversed. That was a moment of reality, optimism, both in Cuba and in the United States about Cuban American relations. How were those moves received at the time and how are they remembered among Cubans today? That moment a decade ago,
- [30:15]
Ada Ferrer
I was there when Obama visited. And in all my visits there, I have never seen the sense of excitement and hope that I saw when Obama was there. People were on the street, people were eager to see him, eager to watch everything he said on television. I ran into people who said things to me. Like I remember talking to this older woman who said she watched his speech on television and she referred to him as my president. And yeah, there was a sense that, you know, the relationship between the two countries has been so hostile for, you know, 60, 67 years that that moment just seemed like the possibility of something new and something different and now seems the polar opposite.
- [31:06]
David Remnick
I mean, I have to think if you're sitting in Havana today or anywhere in Cuba, and you watch what happened in Venezuela and you listen to Marco Rubio and others talk about the imminence or almost inevitability of American action in Cuba, the sense of anxiety has to be really horrible.
- [31:33]
Ada Ferrer
The anxiety isn't just about Trump and it isn't just about Marco Rubio. The anxiety is about the fact that they haven't had electricity maybe in 36 hours. Whatever little food they had is gone. Hospitals are sending people home because they can't do surgeries. Right. So in some sense, the sense of hopelessness about that, about the current situation, means that more people are willing to take a change, no matter where it comes from. And I think that is new. So if you think about the Cuban population now, and maybe I forget the numbers, maybe a Third are born after the fall of the Soviet Union. They've never known a Cuba in which you could achieve well being. Not luxury, but well being without access to hard currency, without access to remittances from abroad, without some kind of reliance on an underground market and shady deals. Right. That's so in some. So the crisis now is happening after 30 years.
- [32:45]
David Remnick
But. But I want to be clear about what you're saying. You're saying people would welcome a change. They're desperate for a change, yes. At the same time, you're not saying they're eager for American intervention in the way that Marco Rubio hints at it.
- [32:57]
Ada Ferrer
I don't know that a majority is eager for Marco Rubio to invade. I can't say that. I think more people than ever are willing to countenance that as a possibility and even as a short term solution,
- [33:18]
David Remnick
I'm worried that's going to be taken advantage of.
- [33:22]
Ada Ferrer
Yeah, I do worry about that, because I don't think a solution will ever be US intervention. I don't think that. I don't believe that because I'm someone who has studied US Cuban relations forever and I know what US invasion and US intervention and US meddling. I know that history. One of the words or one of the phrases that keeps getting used is something about the liberation of Cuba. A free Cuba. Historically, the US has not acted in the interest of a free Cuba. From the 19th century, it tried to impede Cuban independence at every turn. In the 1820s, when Latin America became independent, it specifically wanted to avoid that for Cuba. Then in the mid 19th century, in the 1850s, they supported the government and independent Americans supported invasions of Cuba to liberate it from Spain and then attach it to the US as slave states. This is when slavery still existed. In 1898, you get the Spanish American War in which the US intervenes in Cuba. Most Americans may not realize that what preceded that was 30 years of struggle for Cuban independence and the US went in. But then it staged a military occupation for almost four years and left only when Cuba was willing to accept something called the Platt Amendment, which gave the US the right of intervention. The revolution happened in 1959 and the US tried to intervene. And again at multiple points that you had the Bay of Pigs, April 1961, a CIA sponsored invasion of Cuba which was manned by Cuban exiles. And before it happened, I thought of this when Trump was kind of suggesting that Marco Rubio might be the next president of Cuba. At the time, people in Washington, in the White House were slapping themselves on the back saying Bobby Kennedy was going to be the next mayor of Havana and. Right. These kinds of predictions are not unprecedented. So in some sense that's part of the background. That's why any historical knowledge makes you skeptical of a statement like Trump's.
- [35:41]
David Remnick
You have family still in Cuba?
- [35:43]
Ada Ferrer
I have, yes, I have family still in Cuba.
- [35:45]
David Remnick
How do you talk to them? How is it possible to speak to them? Can you have phone conversations or is it by WhatsApp? How does it work?
- [35:51]
Ada Ferrer
WhatsApp, it's all WhatsApp.
- [35:53]
David Remnick
And what are the conversations like?
- [35:56]
Ada Ferrer
Well, I mean, a lot of the conversations, some of the conversations are about, you know, health. Right. I have a cousin right now in the hospital. Sometimes they need medicine and I have to figure out ways to get them medicine. You know, a lot of it is things like that, dealing with day to day practice, with day to day emergencies. Yes. I actually have family that left Cuba and they moved to Spain. So many people are going to Spain. So there are these private bus companies. Well, I don't know what they're doing now with no gas, but they were doing this, you know, before January, these private bus companies that just go from one town to another picking people up and just taking them to the Spanish consulate in the Spanish embassy. So there's so many people doing it that it's become a business. Last time I was there, which was two years ago, I said a little over two years ago, I spent a lot of time with someone who is a poet who was kind of driving a car to make extra money. And one of the things we talked about, and I've noticed this over 30 some years of traveling to Cuba is that you get tired of watching people leave. You're happy for them, but you get tired of saying goodbye. And I've noticed it myself that many of the people who I was friends with in the beginning are no longer there because they've left and you make new friends, then they leave. I reached out to him in can't remember when, late last year. He always told me he would never leave. And he's now in Spain, he's living in Madrid, something he said would never happen.
- [37:34]
David Remnick
Ottofer, thank you so much.
- [37:36]
Ada Ferrer
Thank you.
- [37:41]
David Remnick
Ada Ferrer is a professor of history at Princeton University and her book An American History won the Pulitzer Prize. Her memoir, Keeper of My Kin, is due out in May. That's it for the program today. Thanks for joining us and I hope you'll join us next time.
- [38:05]
Ada Ferrer
From prx.