← The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim
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- [00:01]
Ed Conway
How does a banana trigger a CIA backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open and reveal the world shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow
- [00:33]
Yalda Hakim
Sky News the full story first. Hello, it's Yalda and I'm currently in London.
- [00:49]
Unnamed US Official or Analyst
Cuba not only has weapons that they've acquired from Russia and China over the years, but they also host Russian Chinese intelligence presence. So Cuba has always posed a national security threat to the United States. They, by the way, have been one of the leading sponsors of terrorism in the entire region.
- [01:08]
Miguel Díaz-Canel
If there is an attack, the Cuban people will respond in unity, firmness and in defense of our sovereignty. We don't want the war, but we're not afraid of it and we are getting ready so that we're not surprised or defeated.
- [01:30]
Donald Trump
Cuba, look, it's a failed country, everybody knows that. They don't have electricity, they don't have money, they don't have really anything. They don't have food. And we're going to help them along. Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years doing something and it looks like I'll be the one that does it.
- [02:05]
Yalda Hakim
Richard is currently in Iran. He's covering the funeral of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and as always, comms are pretty tricky there at the moment. So we'll talk to him again next week. But this week I'd like to talk about Cuba. I have just returned from the island nation, which is just 90 miles off the coast of the United States, and I conducted a rare interview with the Cuban President. It's not often that you get access to the country and access to the leadership. And I had an incredibly insightful and fascinating conversation. And of course many of you may know that Cuba has been in the news a lot recently, mostly because during the Donald Trump has been almost on a weekly basis threatening Cuba. And what we've seen really is a large military buildup off the coast of Cuba, in fact the largest military buildup outside of the Middle East. He's also imposed, on top of the decades long sanction that the country faces a strict oil embargo or blockade on Cuba and the Cuban people are suffering. It was my first trip to Havana. I spent about a week there and I have to say it is perhaps one of the most beautiful places I'VE ever been to. It does feel like it's stuck in time. Whether it's the classic American cars or the architecture, it's everything that you would think it would be. The nostalgia around it, the romance around it is deep. And yet you also see a nation that's crumbling under these severe sanctions and now this blockade. So I'd like to tell you a little bit more about my journey there and also speak to someone who has been tracking the situation in Cuba for an incredibly long time. Of course, follow us wherever you get your podcasts on Apple or Spotify. You can also watch us on YouTube and send us any of your thoughts and questions at the usual place, the worldatsky.uk. Joining me now to discuss this is Dr. Christopher Sabatini. He's the director of the Latin America Program at Chatham House. I've just come back from a week long trip to Cuba. Extraordinary, fascinating place, a place you know really well. But of course, Cuba has been in the news endlessly these last few months. Especially Donald Trump, whenever he gets an opportunity, mentions Cuba. And even whilst I was there he said something along the lines of, you know, after many, many decade, Cuba is on its way towards us basically. And he's talked about taking Cuba, he's talked about it being a failed state. Why is Trump obsessed with Cuba?
- [05:07]
Dr. Christopher Sabatini
Cuba has been a thorn in the side of the United States since the Fidel cast revolution of January 1, 1959. When it came to power, the US tried various ways to try to remove the government, topple it, including assassination attempts, the efforts to bring in Cuban, an organized CIA organized Cuban group of dissident officers, and of course the 67 year old regime has been able to endure all of this. And so now you have Donald Trump saying, you know what, I want this on my cv, if you will, or at least on my history note, I was the one who finally brought Cuba back into the US Fold. For Donald Trump, he sees this as an effort to bring Latin America once again fully within the US Sphere of influence. And even more than that, he sees it as a way of bringing it within sort of the Donald Trump sphere of influence as we see him in other places, basically weighing in on elections and favoring specific candidates. So to him, Cuba's kind of the crown jewel in all of this.
- [06:05]
Yalda Hakim
And he's spoken about this, he said for 50 or 60 years US presidents have tried to deal with Cuba and it's going to come down to me to get Cuba. And we've also seen in the national security strategy the most recent One, Donald Trump's national security strategy, where he firmly had in there, well, his, you know, NSA team had firmly in there this idea that they, this administration was shifting towards the Northern hemisphere. And so what we saw in Venezuela earlier this year was perhaps a model that they want to use for others in the region, a warning shot. If you don't listen to what we want, we will come and get you. And perhaps Donald Trump, on some level, Venezuela was seen as a success, thinks, well, I can probably do this to Cuba as well.
- [06:56]
Dr. Christopher Sabatini
That's exactly right. He's even referred multiple times to the Venezuela model. Now, the extraction, such as it was in violation of international law, but such as it was, it was successful just 40 minutes. Special Operations forces came in, killed many of his, many of Maduro's guards, most of them were Cubans of course, and extracted, but there weren't, there's no American lives lost in that operation. He even talked about in the case of Iran, which of course is not a good model for a Venezuela type success story that Donald Trump wants to create. And Cuba is the same. I think immediately after the extraction, January 3, 2026 of Nicolas Maduro, he started to talk about, you know, I think that'll work in other places and he's followed the same playbook. But I do think right now what's happening in Iran and even what's happening in Venezuela is giving him a little bit of pause because, you know, if you go in and even if you cleanly extract a leader that is not to your liking, in the case of Venezuela, you still have to deal with the aftermath. And we see him now embracing the interim president of Venezuela, Delsey Rodriguez, even though she was part of the problem. The same security apparatus has remained. That won't work in Cuba, it's barely working in Venezuela. But Cuba's a different animal altogether. It's a 67 year old communist government that's deeply disciplined, totally failed in terms of its economics and total violator of human rights, no doubt. But it is much more cohesive in terms of its leadership structure and its control over the economy. And because of that, it's control over the society, which means you don't have a ready made opposition or any factions within the regime that could easily replace whomever they wanted to take out. Whether it's DS Canel, who I know you've interviewed, or Raul Castro, or Raul Castro's child, son and grandson. There's just simply not an easy replacement here.
- [08:48]
Yalda Hakim
Yeah, as you say, it's a deeply entrenched system that has existed for 67 years. I just want you to take our audiences back to the Revolution of 1959 and Fidel Castro, because the Castros are synonymous with what we understand about Cuba. You know, the name is linked completely. When we think about Cuba, we think about the Castros and their control over this small island nation, which, you know, has left so many people today baffled. Like, why is the United States so interested in an island that is okay 100 miles from Florida, but. But a small island nation that has its own system? Sure, the United States may not be in favor of it, but 9 million people, what is going on?
- [09:35]
Dr. Christopher Sabatini
I think there are a number of reasons here, Yelda, and you just mentioned one of them, which is the weird romanticism around Cuba. I mean, you stand in Havana and you see the U2 plane that was shot down at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. You know, you go to the National Hotel, which was sort of where, you know, the Mafia at the time and Frank Sinatra and others would hold court. It's kind of embedd global consciousness of as a sort of sweltering hot spy driven place. But then you have the revolution and you know, again, you had. For the US concerned it was the height of the Cold War. They thought Cuba was firmly under their thumb. It had been. They even had written into their constitution a thing called the Platt Amendment, which gave the US the right to intervene to topple any government that was not to its liking. And then you have this, you know, ruffian group of guerrillas, you know, bearded guerrillas who come out of the mountains and take over and topple a deeply disliked and very abusive dictator, Batista, and then engage in a full on communist revolution just in the, literally not even in the backyard, just 90 miles off the coast of Florida and continued to stick its finger in the eye of the United States. And so there's always been this sense of it's not even that Cuba's been a threat, except for during the time of the Cuban Missile crisis to American lives. It was this irritant that here is one time a client state, now a former client state, that has been able to resist everything the US has thrown at it. And that has included efforts of opening up under Jimmy Carter and then Barack Obama, efforts of cracking down under Ronald Reagan and then George W. Bush and of course now again Donald Trump. Everything's failed. And so there's this sense of why is this problem for the US at least persistent, no matter where you fall on the ideological spectrum, either way, even if you're sympathetic to the Cuban Government, you're wondering, why has this been able to persist in such a way? It's a really interesting conundrum, and I think for many policymakers, it drives them nuts. There's one other thing that's important, and that is the massive amount of Cubans who fled the revolution initially, but then later fled the economic collapse caused by the socialist policies. And now you have well over 2 million Cuban Americans living in the United States. And they represent a very solid voting bloc. They tend to vote as Republicans. Part of that's because of their anger over JFK not calling in the U.S. air Force Force to defend the Bay of Pigs and promote it. So they allpecuban Americans, there are two people they hate most, Fidel Castro and jfk. And so it's been a really rich vein of support for Republicans. And they, you know, and Florida used to be more of a swing state in U.S. politics. At 29 electoral votes, they would sometimes go blue, sometimes Democrat, or sometimes Republican. It's now a solidly Republican state. But it is a constituency that deeply rewards loyalty to their cause, even if that loyalty means you're not that effective in achieving their goals.
- [12:35]
Yalda Hakim
And one of the sons of the Miami, or I guess, Florida Cuban American communities is Marco Rubio, who of course, is Donald Trump's Secretary of State, National Security Advisor. He's the son of Cuban immigrants. Now, the Cubans that I met say, well, his parents left before 1959 and before the revolution, but. And for him, it's personal. And the enmity that is felt by the Cuban leadership in Havana towards him is incredibly personal because they point the finger of blame more than Donald Trump on Marco Rubio. And I put all of these things to Diaz Canal, the now Cuban president.
- [13:24]
Miguel Díaz-Canel
Cuba is not a failed state.
- [13:26]
Yalda Hakim
Responsibility for your system, and that it has failed the Cuban people. It's not just the blockage.
- [13:34]
Miguel Díaz-Canel
Let me explain. We take on the responsibility of the things that we need to improve, the things that we have not been able to achieve, and the things that we have to postpone because of the blockade. But if we had done everything perfectly, the country would be leaving a situation like this, because the main cause of this is the blockade. And let me give you some figures. The fact that we have 20 hours or more of power cuts is not the inability of our national power grid. Our technicians, our engineers of the power industry, our heroes. They can maintain power plants which are dated, working on national crude oil, which is a heavy oil, purely on the basis of their talent and knowledge. And these power plants cannot be repaired or go through their normal maintenance cycles because of the blockade. Because the blockade has shut off the valve for currency to Cuba.
- [14:36]
Yalda Hakim
You've created a system where you've been completely.
- [14:40]
Miguel Díaz-Canel
Let me finish this idea. The blockade is preventing hard currency to come into Cuba. The blockade prevents Cuba from getting loans and credit or power or spare parts from the United States to come into Cuba or from fuel to come into Cuba. What country can operate without fuel? What happens in the US if they didn't have access to oil?
- [15:04]
Dr. Christopher Sabatini
As you say, he's not actually a son of sort of Cuban refugees from communism, but he grew up and cut his political teeth in that environment. And so this is why in part, I mean, I'm not sure this is why in part, the regime is so upset about Marco Rubio, because he spent a large part of his career as a senator just basically serving as a mouthpiece for a lot of these scare tactics and really advocating for a really ramped up, tightening policy that basically eliminated or prevented travel to the island. And so now he's come into power and he's got to own that policy and he's pushing it. And the problem is, I think even he's beginning to realize that pushing it to its logical extreme, the outcome could be very, very risky. But it was also the idea that if you squeeze the regime hard enough, it's eventually going to give up, or the people, if they suffer enough, they're eventually going to rise up. That never happened. And so you have basically since the embargo for now, what, 65 years, a completely, utterly failed policy that just keeps on getting tighter and tighter. And just now they're still sanctioning individuals. They sanctioned the military holding company, gaisa. They're still trying to think that if they squeeze hard enough, they can force some sort of either concession from the government, which isn't going to grant it, I think, or that the people will rise up, but the people are tired, they're hungry, they get fighting day by day, and they're leaving more than. Almost. Well, more than 1 million, almost 2 million Cubans have left since 2020. So it's not been a viable strategy. But yet this, this myth persists that it's just going to take a little while longer and the myth persists, or that fear persists that a couple people tap into that Cuba's a threat, but it's not. It is a country. And I hate to say this, I'd say this with of 9 million poor people who simply want some form of change. And they're stuck between these Two competing narratives and two competing, if you will, objectives which are never realistic. It isn't a viable system. They've never taken the reforms necessary. It doesn't have the economic base to be able to be a viable economy that could provide for its own people. And on the other hand, the United States has pursued this policy, thinking above all reality that somehow, somewhere the Cuban government's going to collapse.
- [17:23]
Yalda Hakim
So what I witnessed was supermarkets with empty shelves, power cuts for 20 to 22 hours a day. So I was speaking to families. I would go into homes where the fridge would be off and food would be rotting and people are literally living day by day because they can't buy too much food because they it will go off. Power comes maybe one for an hour a day and there's no schedule. So it can come at 2 o' clock in the morning, it can come at 3 o' clock in the morning. Suddenly the entire family's up, turn washing machines on, charging phones, cooking, trying to have some semblance of normalcy when, you know, it goes out again for them to have some kind of life. So it does feel like a society, a country that, that is now crumbling finally under this US US Pressure.
- [18:12]
Dr. Christopher Sabatini
Yeah, that's exactly right. For a long time, the Cuban government loved to blame everything on the US Embargo. And there are plenty of problems with the socialist and communist model, I can tell you. You know, food shelves before in state stores were often very barren where stores were much more filled with fresh vegetables and meat and so on. But the oil blockade basically has just entirely crippled Cuba. And unfortunately, Secretary of State Marco Rubio loves to say it's not the U.S. s fault, it's the Cuban government's fault. Well, the truth is that this case, it is because that level of misery that you just described, Yalda, did not exist January 9th when the US established the oil blockade. So this is us made, is a U S made disaster. But I don't think it's going to be enough to force the Cuban regime to crack and give up. And I don't think for the reasons you just said, it's going to be enough for Cuban people to rise up and try to seek change. So you're stuck in the middle right now, and it's a very cruel alternative. And it's a standoff. And the people that again, that are caught in the middle are the Cubans.
- [19:18]
Yalda Hakim
And yet DS Canal, you know, and the Cuban regime, well, he has admitted publicly to his party that maybe it's not all Washington, maybe it's not all the blockade, and they've put into place 200 reforms to bring about change, open up their markets. They've even talked about fast food chains. I mean, the idea that there would be a McDonald's that would pop up, you know, on the high street in downtown Havana feels sort of implausible. Because when you go to Havana, and you know this from all your travels there, it feels stuck in time. It feels like it's stuck in the 50s, the cars, the old American cars, the buildings. I mean, it is perhaps one of the most beautiful cities I've ever seen. And yet the decay and the fact that it is crumbling before your very eyes, it is a system that's clearly not working. And as you say, it's a standoff. Because the Cuban regime is, regardless of whether Raul Castro, who's 94, is willing to just kind of behind the scenes say, look, you know, you guys take over. I'm too old, I can't deal with this anymore. There is this sense of not wanting to give up power, even though it feels like they've lost control on some level.
- [20:29]
Dr. Christopher Sabatini
The reason why it doesn't want to change its economic model, first of all, is that's how it survives. I mean, the Cuban state controls everything. And most of that everything is also controlled by the military conglomerate, Gaisa, tourism, mining, gasoline, gasoline stations, all of that, even pizza shops. By the way, I just once went to how the communism doesn't work. I went to a state owned pizza shop restaurant in Cuba. The worst pizza I've ever had in my life.
- [20:57]
Yalda Hakim
I was just gonna say, I thought that you were gonna say they served burgers.
- [20:59]
Dr. Christopher Sabatini
No, no, exactly. If only. Actually, it would have been far better. The point being is, you know, McDonald's may be welcome sometime, at least as a reprieve from the really bad pizza. But on the other hand, so what that means is the Cuban government is loathe to, to open up these spaces because their entire survival, their entire DNA for the last 67 years has been built on the smothering economic control and state control over society and the economy. And that when you start to open that up, you give people choice, you give people opportunities for freedom, and you give people a certain amount of agency and resources to oppose the government. And that is not something this Cuban government can endure. So the likelihood that they're going to make any meaningful concessions that will be sufficient to get the US to say, okay, we'll lift the oil and blockade. We may even lift elements of the embargo, allow U.S. investment. It's far off. I can't see it happening for precisely the reason that this is not in the Cuban regime's interest. And let me add one more thing. Because there are a number of Cuban Americans in Florida who want retribution, who want revenge for having been forced out of their island, for having their property seized, for having their relatives or even themselves be thrown into prison, for expressing themselves. There's a lot of animosity there. And so if you're in the Cuban government, you're looking across the Florida Straits thinking, I'm not really sure I want to weaken the chances of my survival here, the regime's survival, which is my protector. So, again, it's understandable on many levels on both sides, but it's completely impractical in terms of a negotiation dynamic.
- [22:37]
Yalda Hakim
There are two things here. You know, you mentioned one of them, the economic situation in the country, which, you know, the Trump administration, previous American administrations have put pressure on the Cubans to change the model. The other thing is the human rights issue that keeps coming up. I mean, I put this to the president. People who'd even just put up banners in the city saying, you know, they're suffocating or they're killing us, have ended up with seven or eight years sentencing. President dismissed that and said, this is a media campaign. It's a social media campaign driven by the west, driven by the Americans. There's no such thing. A lot of these cases have never gone to trial. They're not willing to accept that there's a human rights issue in the country. Obviously, like any dictatorship.
- [23:20]
Dr. Christopher Sabatini
That's exactly right. And so, first of all, according to credible human rights groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, there are hundreds of political prisoners rotting in Cuban jails for doing nothing more than you say than holding up a banner, staging a march denouncing the government, running an independent blog, being an investigative journalist reporting on, for example, poor housing, conditions in Cuba. That can land you in prison. Prison. What you've also had is, again, it's a smothering control over society that has basically preempted the need for the sorts of human rights abuses we see, say, in El Salvador, rounding up prisoners without due process and throwing or crime or even paramilitary squads. They've already pretty much preempted all of that. And so people exist with this shadow over them of basically operatives and spies. Even among them, you have the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, which are sort of neighborhood committees, are now somewhat weakened, but we're reporting to the Communist Party. This is a form of really totalitarian control, and it still exists. But yes, the regime loves to play victim. They love to always point to the embargo and oh, political prisoners, we don't know, explain them. They always are denying it. They always are sort of making excuses and blaming the United States. But the truth is we live in a modern world where the expectations of people's right to express themselves, participate politically, participate civically, they're being denied. In Cuba on a daily basis, some of the greatest opposition leaders are either in prison. Manuel Cuesta Marua, who's a friend of mine, is currently has been arrested recently. Others have fled to Florida and elsewhere, Spain and Mexico. So you've had this dispersion of potential opposition that has weakened the base of that opposition movement and it's sort of organizational capacities because there's been such a
- [25:18]
Yalda Hakim
hard crackdown for so long that there isn't a real opposition that's sort of naturally, you know, emerged from all the years of oppression that.
- [25:28]
Dr. Christopher Sabatini
And here I will. I mean, it's primarily the repression, but here I will blame in part the embargo. I work at Chatham House and we did a study in Chatham House and the success rate of maximum pressure sanctions for regime change in closed societies. So North Korea, Iran, Russia, Cuba, Burma, Myanmar, the success rate is 0. It doesn't work because basically by cutting off the country so extremely, what you do is you deny the ability of outside investors to be able to create political and economic space. In the case of Cuba, where tourism, US travelers can't travel to Cuba for tourism. They can travel for people to people. Context, you reduce that level of exchange from people to people, it just isolates them more. And it basically gives the regime in power, whether in all of these cases North Korea, Russia, Iran, it gives them control to distribute economic rents or goods to their own cronies and not have to compete with more entrepreneurial individuals who may have different interests. As I like to say, this is sort of a basic theory of economic change. It goes back to John Locke. We knew this. But somehow when these maximum pressure sanctions are applied, we simply assume they're going to work. And the track record is not even bad, it's a failure.
- [26:45]
Yalda Hakim
And yet you mentioned earlier that Jimmy Carter, President Obama, tried to do the other thing, which was outreach, and try and open the country up and try and take a different approach. That hasn't seemed to work either.
- [27:00]
Dr. Christopher Sabatini
No, it hasn't. And let's take the part of Obama's which I know better. There was a real effort. Obama traveled. One of the things he did, which is just curiously, Marco Rubio gave a talk when they indicted Raul Castro for the murder of Cuban Americans in 1996. He gave a speech via YouTube hoping it would somehow be broadcast in Cuba. Barack Obama was in Cuba. One of his demands was that he be allowed to give a press conference with Raul that would be broadcast in real time to Cubans and that they both would have to take questions from the press. So Cubans got to hear in real time what an American president was saying about the desire for freedom. Very, not very subtle, actually. Criticism of the intransigence of the Cuban government. And then you had to watch Raul Castro try to take questions from the press. Didn't go well at all. The man is not accustomed to transparency or accountability. He looks basically completely like a fish out of water. And that was very telling. You don't get that in the midst of this isolation. Instead what you get is this loggerheads and this virtue signaling and rhetoric about change that doesn't quite stand up. And in the case of Trump, my bigger concern, Yalda, is that this, that has a certain escalatory logic. And we saw this with Venezuela. First it was hoping to take out the drug gangs, then maximum pressure, first of all, maximum pressure, sanctions and then mobilizing the military, then the drug gangs, potential risk of invasion. And then eventually they had to do something because the regime didn't crack. In this case in Cuba too, we see the, as you mentioned, Donald Trump saying Cuba's a failed state, it's ours, we can take it, we can do with whatever we want, we with it. That's not true. But this creates a certain risky dynamic that things could escalate even more and force the hand of the Trump administration to do something that may not serve either's interest in terms of the regimes, the Cuban people's or the Trump administrations.
- [28:55]
Yalda Hakim
Certainly the Cuban leadership said to me over and over again is that we are not Venezuela, our system is different. You know, at the end of the day, they were able to replace Maduro with Rodriguez and, and nothing really changed. But in terms of allowing that to even happen, that's just not going to be what happens here. Is that your reading of the situation?
- [29:18]
Dr. Christopher Sabatini
Yeah. So first of all, Cuban government has had over 60 years to consolidate its power and it is a one party state. Again, I keep on saying this. It's a communist state, truly. I mean, it's astounding. You think about the failure of communisms and you see them in real time when you go to Cuba, whether it's delivery of food or Whatever, bad pizza. But the second thing that really is different is that you have the military controlling a large part of the economy. It's a very vertical system and it's a dynasty. You had Fidel Castro then the next president was Raul Castro. And now his son Alejandro is in the Interior Ministry. His grandson Raulito is negotiated with Marco Rubio. This is a very consolidated, very tightly knit elite circle. That is a dynasty. And as much as some people, especially in Florida would want to admit it, the path for any change, Delsey, like Maduro, like change of Venezuela, is going to have to pass through the Castros. And that is not what most Cuban Americans want.
- [30:20]
Yalda Hakim
Do you think that they are looking inwards and thinking the Russians gave up on communism, the Chinese did, the Vietnamese opened up their markets. Should we be doing the same so that we aren't constantly vulnerable to American threats and presidents like Donald Trump who can come and squeeze us even from further.
- [30:42]
Dr. Christopher Sabatini
So there is a recognition of the failures. Raul Castro has actually spoken about it. He articulated what he called the lignamientos, which was the reform lines that he thought to try to imitate the Chinese and the Vietnamese example. I remember once speaking to a Chinese government officials asked him what he thought of Cuba's attempt to imitate their model and he just laughed because it didn't. I mean, the Chinese opened up agricultural markets. They injected even local democracy and local in communities and towns. The Cubans never. They just couldn't. They didn't have the stomach for it. I think in part, again, it's the threat of having the United States. But I also think it is a deeply ingrained attitude of a very vertical caudillo, to use a sort of a Spanish political science term, caudillo type system. You know, in China and in other places you had a rotation of leadership. In the case of Cuba, it's been two brothers and now basically the power behind the throne are. There is one son and his grandson. It doesn't have that flexibility. So you're not going to see that level of opening up. And when you speak to economists in Cuba and there's a University of Havana center for the Study of the Cuban Economy, they will privately, some of them have left, will admit they're not going to do it. They understand what needs to be done, but it's too much of a threat. And it's. I hate to say it, but it is very much their institutional culture. To tell one story, I was at Columbia University trying to open up an exchange program after the Obama opening for Cuban law students and even lawyers to come to the United States and study at Columbia Law School, take a few classes and then participate in a summer associateship with New York based law firms. And everyone thought it was a great idea. And I'd talk to the Cubans, say, oh, we got to discuss it, we got to see the Politburo, we'll talk about it. I mean, it was, and my argument was, if you don't want to get your lunch handed to you by incoming capitalists when you open up, you better have some lawyers that are ready to go toe to toe. And they just wouldn't do it. They just couldn't do it. They just, they, it was just, they were so distrusted and so hierarchical that there were so many boxes to check that in the end, the whole thing, and I'm not the only one who said that. I mean, there are many of investors during that brief opening under the Obama years, from basically 2014, the end of 2014 until 2017, July, no one really made any headway.
- [32:59]
Yalda Hakim
Dr. Sabatini, I just wonder in this kind of tense period for the island, what would military action look like? And, and I mean, if you had a crystal ball, how do you think this is likely to end?
- [33:15]
Dr. Christopher Sabatini
So I know DS Canal likes to talk about, in the interview, talked about what Cuba would do in the event of a U.S. invasion. And I think there'd probably be some resistance, but I don't think it'd be significant. You've been there, you've seen their armaments. It would be a total mismatch. But having said that, I think there was a possibility of some form of US military action before Iran and before the earthquake in Venezuela. But I think what's happening, first of all, let's see the case of Iran, I think maybe this is just wishful thinking. It's given Donald Trump some pause about foreign adventures, that you can't force regime change from the air or even with empty threats and saber rattling and that you may end up in over your head and with a real political cost. So in the case of Cuba, that's very true. In the case of Venezuela, now it's more pressure. The U.S. southern Command, which is the command unit that basically organizes all U.S. forces south of Mexico, has 900 of its officers in Venezuela helping with relief and its ships are parked off the coast. US military that would occupy that arena is pretty occupied in Venezuela right now. So I don't know where the force would come from. From having said that, again, the logic, the rhetoric that need to deliver and quickly may be an incentive to push Donald Trump to do something. Would he organize an invasion? We're just a few months out from basically a midterm election in the United States where the Republicans are not faring well or thought not to do well. So that could be a real risk. A few aerial strikes may serve to shake up the regime, but I don't think it will bring it down just as it didn't in Iran. Would that serve as some sort of get tough policy that could avoid the risks of putting US Boots on the ground? Yes. Would it produce results? Maybe not. But you know, oftentimes Donald Trump isn't looking for results. He's looking for basically bragging rights. So in that case, it may happen. But the problem is too, what would they hit? I mean, there aren't missile sites. You know, there is these alleged and they exist satellites from the Chinese and the Russians. But what they would actually hit to destroy. He was already pretty destroyed. You saw Havana Yelda. I mean, it's. What are you gonna do? I mean, you're just bombing someone else into the Stone Age.
- [35:42]
Yalda Hakim
Dr. Sabatini, really fascinating talking to you. Thank you so much.
- [35:45]
Dr. Christopher Sabatini
Thank you.
- [35:55]
Ed Conway
How does a banana trigger a CIA backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? Order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open and reveal the world shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.