28.05.2026

Che poster, 1968, designed by Alfredo Rostgaard

Under siege and still resisting

Attempting to replicate its success in Venezuela, the White House seems intent on leaving the existing regime intact, but transforming the country into a pliant neo-colony, writes Eddie Ford

Published in The Telegraph last weekend was an article by John Bolton, former national security advisor in Donald Trump’s first administration. He eagerly anticipates the impending sweeping away of the Castroite regime and the Communist Party of Cuba.¹ Of course, he has a fearsome reputation as a warmonger, and indeed coined the term “troika of tyranny” as a description of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.²

But he has since fallen dramatically out of favour with the mercurial US president, to the point where he was criminally indicted last October, with FBI agents searching his home and office.³ Nonetheless, a hawk is a hawk, and his article ends by eulogising a future Cuba that has returned to the ‘western community’. “Leftist Americans in the 1960s joined ‘Venceremos brigades’ in Cuba to harvest sugar cane, while protesting US imperialism,” Bolton writes, but “those days are long gone”. He concludes: “Soon their children and grandchildren may be welcoming a free Cuba back into the west”.

Also at the weekend there was a more informed and measured article in the Financial Times that takes a different approach to the dreams of John Bolton.⁴ Rather, it is more likely that what the Americans - and now secretary of state Marco Rubio - are aiming for is something along the lines of Venezuela. What you do is some sort of deal that maybe involves removing from power, by one means or another, the general secretary of the Cuban Communist Party, Miguel Díaz-Canel. But, as for the 94-year-old Raúl Castro, it seems improbable that US military helicopters are going to land and whisk him away from wherever he has been hiding (events could prove us wrong, of course). Perhaps a possible deal will leave the existing state apparatus intact.

What is most interesting about the FT article is the point it makes that, as far as Rubio is concerned, this would be a U-turn, reminding us of the debates amongst the Republican candidates first time round, when the question of Cuba was raised. Trump rambled away about striking a “good deal” with Havana, possibly including hotel and golf investments, and Rubio pounced, exclaiming, “Here is a good deal” - a free Cuba that gets rid of the Castro regime - which went down well. In other words, as the FT puts it, how to deal with “the heady expectations” of the Cuban Americans in Florida that Rubio was “once happy to encourage” - given it is his home constituency, of course. An appetite that has been whetted by US officials announcing on May 20 murder charges against Raul Castro for his role in the shooting down of two planes in 1996 that were dropping ‘Brothers to the Rescue’ leaflets over the island, trying to ferment counterrevolution.⁵ They were shot down over Cuban airspace, no doubt, but actually crashed over international waters - hence the charge.

Unsurprisingly, a recent poll of Cuban Americans showed that a large majority support military intervention in Cuba and oppose an economic deal that keeps the regime in power - with Miami residents quoted in the press as saying they would not tolerate another Venezuela. But, breaking a taboo of the Cuban community against negotiating directly with Havana, Rubio has also at times dealt with Raúl’s grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodriguez Castro. Therefore, the argument goes in the FT and elsewhere, it would be a ‘Nixon in China’ moment. That is, it took a Republican to go for a rapprochement with Red China, as a Democrat could never have got away with it. Similarly, only a Rubio or a Trump could keep in line the Cuban-American population - not least in Florida.

Rubio has also made the assertion that the minnow Cuba represents a “threat” to the superpower United States - maybe because of its 300 drones. Okay, so you launch them all against Miami and conceivably two get through - but who would do that? You might perhaps do it as your very last desperate stand, but it is the height of absurdity to think it poses any danger to America, unless you possess tin-foil-hat paranoia.

Barter

The fact of the matter - heroism and innovation aside - is that revolutionary Cuba only survived because of the backing of the Soviet Union, as Bolton and Rubio would be more than happy to tell you. Yes, the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 was a humiliating failure and there were over 600 attempts on Fidel Castro’s life, at least according to Cuban intelligence - some of them quite exotic, like exploding cigars, and even weirder things.⁶ But without the Soviets, something would have got him and the comrades close to him - probably sooner rather than later.

Basically what you had was a barter deal: the Soviet Union would import from Cuba mainly sugar and in return Cuba would get industrial goods, oil, gas, etc - what it needed to keep going. Yet in 1989-91 the Soviet Union implodes - suffers the counterrevolution within the counterrevolution - and the deal finishes. The inevitable happens and an economic whirlwind hits society, Cubans ‘officially’ describing it as a ‘Special Period’.⁷

There were stories of horses and carts replacing automobiles in the streets of Havana and ordinary Cubans being encouraged to grow their own food. The Cuban government was forced to turn to tourism to gain sufficient income. Hotels and other tourist infrastructure accounted for 37.4% of investment in an attempt to save the system, and private homestays also played a big role. Nevertheless, people were forced to live without many goods and services that had become the norm in the 20th century.

What happens next could be similar to Venezuela. It is not insignificant that, when Operation Absolute Resolve by US combined forces snatched Nicolás Maduro and his wife earlier this year, some 32 Cuban security officials were killed.⁸

As a result of that operation, of course, the new president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, and head of the same regime that Maduro operated, appears to be totally compliant - whether because she is a stooge, or due to the sheer weight of circumstances that leaves her no other options.⁹ Either way, Caracas has now cut off oil supplies to Cuba. Mexico too has also been strong-armed into stopping oil deliveries. In the recent period, only one oil tanker has arrived on Cuba’s shore and that is from Russia - with US permission.¹⁰

We have all seen the grim pictures and read the terrifying reports of blackouts becoming the norm in Cuba, as the country goes dark. Vicente de la O Levy, minister of energy and mines, declared on May 13 that the country has completely run out of oil - leading to severe power outages lasting up to 22 hours a day in Havana. “The only thing we have is gas from our wells, whose production has increased,” said De la O Levy.¹¹ This is an almost totally unimaginable situation, when you think about day-to-day life in terms of the modern world. You cannot listen to the radio, watch TV or use your computer; you have to read a book by candlelight, and so on. How can you operate a school without electricity nowadays or perform an operation in a hospital? How do you cope if you are a pregnant woman?

Well, that is the life of Cubans now, where normality seems like a distant fantasy or something that you can only see on a screen for those few hours when you have electricity. The island is being remorselessly strangled by conscious and deliberate American policy.

Model

For Marxists, it is perfectly legitimate to critique early revolutionary Cuba, seeing that there are those who held it up as a model - and still do. Yes, it was less brutal and less weird than the regimes that you had in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, let alone China or North Korea, or the freak society of Cambodia under Pol Pot. Nonetheless, it was presented as something to emulate.

You can talk about it as an example of why socialism in one country does not work, but just leaving it at that would not give you the full picture. You need to add that, in the early years, Cuba attempted to do what Chávez talked about in Venezuela - which was a Bolivarian revolution that was all-Latin American. Bolivar was the ‘great liberator’, not just someone associated with one country. He was concerned precisely with a movement that embraced the whole of Latin America. That was certainly the case with Ernesto Che Guevara, who was internationalist to his core: he was an Argentinian who had experienced Latin American politics, not only in his native country, but also in places further up north like Guatemala.

As for the Cubans, they talked about a tricontinental revolution - hence the Tricontinental Conference of 1966 attended by roughly 500 delegates from 82 countries, which ended up founding the Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America.¹²

Bolivar was not the only inspiration - maybe there was Mao Zedong as well, with the idea that backward countries can surround the imperialist heartlands, as Mao’s forces in China surrounded the cities. That was certainly the model for Che Guevara, as can be found in his famous book, Guerrilla warfare - not only has it got technical advice on how to build a tank trap, for example, but generally how to conduct rural guerilla warfare (though he does briefly write about suburban guerilla warfare).

His model was the guerrilla foci - that all you need to do is start off with a few dedicated guerrillas, and they carry out a rural war against the existing unpopular regime, and people are inevitably attracted to this movement, which grows and grows, to the point where it becomes almost a conventional army - and then they take the cities. That is the theory he attempted to put into practice in Congo and Bolivia, for instance - but with disastrous results, of course. Ultimately, that was down to the failure of Guevara’s model, not internationalism and orthodox Marxism - and not any lack of genuine conviction and heroic sacrifice.

Obviously there is a lot of deep discontent inside Cuba, with people highly dissatisfied with their lives, particularly amongst young people - how could it be otherwise? But the fault is manifestly to be laid at the door of the US - not those inside the wall being besieged, but those outside laying siege. US imperialism is attempting to subordinate Cuba to its wishes and open up the country to American ‘investment’ - which will require ordinary Cubans bending the knee to their great power bully of a neighbour less than a hundred miles to their north.

Nowadays, Cuba does not represent anything more than a show of defiance - for which it has to be punished, of course. Obey your masters. But it no longer represents a model to follow, as it once was for Hugo Chávez. However, Venezuela has massive oil reserves - purportedly the largest in the world. You simply cannot replicate that, just as you cannot simply replicate Cuba - because that would require understanding Cuba, not only in terms of Fidel, Che and so on, but also precisely in the context of the Soviet Union, when there was a genuinely multipolar world. OK, Moscow was much weaker economically and militarily than Washington. Nonetheless, it still could present a challenge to the hegemony of the United States.