President Trump is actively trying take down the unelected dictatorship in Venezuela (he lost the last election in a landslide, but declared himself the winner and stayed anyway) that has been the ruin of the country.
Wouldn’t it be something if, by so doing, it takes down another unelected dictatorship that has ruined a country – Cuba?
Here are key excerpts from Juan Forero and Ryan Dubé’s lengthy, but 100% worthwhile, article for the Wall Street Journal:
U.S. Oil Blockade of Venezuela Pushes Cuba Toward Collapse
Communist-ruled island was already suffering from food shortages, blackouts and exodus of people, and now faces loss of cheap oil from Nicolás Maduro
Cubans are going hungry, suffering from spreading disease and sleeping outdoors with no electricity to power fans through the sweltering nights. A quarter of the population has fled during the island’s most prolonged economic crisis.
And it’s about to get worse.
The U.S. is ratcheting up pressure on Havana’s key benefactor, Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro’s regime, which has kept the Communist-ruled nation afloat with cheap oil. Now Venezuelan oil exports are at risk thanks to a partial blockade targeting sanctioned tankers—the kind that carry about 70% of the country’s crude.
One tanker that the U.S. has already seized was en route with almost two million barrels of Venezuelan oil.
The blockade adds to a U.S. pressure campaign on Maduro that also includes a major military buildup in the Caribbean, airstrikes on boats allegedly connected to Venezuelan drug trafficking and threats of bombing the country itself.
Were Venezuela’s oil shipments to stop, or sharply decline, the Cubans know it would be devastating.
“It would be the collapse of the Cuban economy, no question about it,” said Jorge Piñón, a Cuban exile who tracks the island’s energy ties to Venezuela at the University of Texas at Austin.
Cuba’s deep reliance on Venezuela means Cuba’s Communist government is doing all it can to prevent Maduro—who trained in Cuba as a young man—from being forced from office in his greatest challenge after nearly 13 years in office. That means ensuring he is always surrounded by security and loyal aides, with no one carrying cellphones or other electronic devices.
The threat to Cuba comes as the nation is in the throes of its most severe economic crisis since Fidel Castro and his bearded guerrillas took power in 1959—harsher and longer-lasting than the so-called Special Period after the Soviet Union unraveled in 1991.
“It is really bleak and desperate,” said Ted Henken, author of books on Cuba and a professor at New York’s Baruch College who regularly travels to the island. “Hope is gone, and people are desperate to get out.”
More than 2.7 million people—about a quarter of the island’s population, many of them young and ambitious—have fled the island since 2020, hundreds of thousands of them to the U.S., according to calculations of a Havana-based demographer, Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos.
“What Cuba is going through—a phenomenon I call demographic hollowing out—is nothing less than a humanitarian disaster only seen in countries in armed conflict,” he said.
Venezuela – once, not so long ago, a prosperous country – has, under hugo chàvez and now nicolàs maduro, become a disaster of the first order.
And Cuba – headed in the post-castro era by miguel mario díaz-canel bermúdez – has been a disaster of the first order for decades….though you’d never know it by the $900 million dollars Forbes estimated his personal worth to be when he died in 2016.
Wouldn’t it be nice if both of these dictators were deposed, and the people of Venezuela and Cuba had a shot at government that was at least minimally beneficial for them?
We can only hope.
