By Reed Lindsay, Journalist and Documentary Filmmaker with Belly of the Beast
The American Conservative / The Time Has Come to Engage with Havana.
Mission accomplished in Venezuela. After months of mounting pressure that culminated in the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump has declared victory.
Now the president’s attention has shifted to Cuba. Trump has suggested that, without Venezuelan oil, Cuba is on the verge of collapse, and on January 11th he urged its government to “make a deal, BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.”
It is a warning that Cuban leaders should take seriously. But the collapse of the island’s economy wouldn’t be a problem unique to Havana.
For decades, Washington’s economic war against Cuba has weakened a government that has arguably been our most reliable security partner in the Caribbean.
Instead of increasing America’s leverage, harsher sanctions have made Cuba less stable—and the United States less secure—by destabilizing the island’s economy, accelerating unprecedented migration to the U.S. border, undermining anti-drug efforts, harming American businesses, and encouraging closer ties with Russia and China. A truly failed Cuban state, just 90 miles from our shore, would likely have even greater consequences.
Current policy toward Cuba is not based on our fundamental national interests, but rather on Cold War nostalgia and Florida politics. These factors have hampered the recalibration explicitly called for in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS):
We will reward and encourage governments, political parties, and movements in the region that are broadly aligned with our principles and strategy. But we must not overlook governments with different perspectives with whom we nevertheless share interests and who wish to work with us.
The NSS raises four specific security concerns in the Western Hemisphere: stemming migration to the United States; treating drug cartels as national security threats; blocking Chinese and Russian influence; and securing U.S. access to supply chains, strategic locations, and resources.
Addressing these four concerns is described as the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, or as Trump has called it, the “Donroe Doctrine.”
Defending the Monroe Doctrine is nothing new for a Trump presidency. In 2019, then-National Security Advisor John Bolton declared that the Monroe Doctrine was “alive and well.” The rhetoric may be the same in Trump’s second term, but Bolton’s interpretation and the approach of the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) reflect two entirely different perspectives. Bolton used the term to advocate for a Cold War-style anti-socialist campaign directed against Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. The policy articulated in the NSS follows a different logic.
The NSS represents a shift from a neoconservative doctrine obsessed with communism toward a “flexible realism” that holds that “there is nothing inconsistent or hypocritical… about maintaining good relations with countries whose systems of government and societies differ from our own.”
But when it comes to Cuba, the Trump administration’s approach is neither flexible nor realistic. Overseen by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a neoconservative ideologue who declared himself the “architect” of the maximum-pressure sanctions initiated during Trump’s first term, the current policy toward Cuba undermines the very objectives and principles at the heart of the National Security Strategy (NSS).
A complete reversal toward engagement is not a concession or a gamble: it is the most coherent way to align U.S. policy toward Cuba with the administration’s strategic vision for the hemisphere.
Nowhere is the current inconsistency more evident than in the fight against drug trafficking.
Despite all the rhetoric in Washington about drug trafficking as a threat to national security, U.S. policy toward Cuba ignores an inconvenient truth: Cuba is the U.S. government’s primary security partner in the Caribbean.
According to the State Department’s 2024 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, drug traffickers avoid the island because of the Cuban government’s “strong and aggressive security presence,” which prevents transnational criminal organizations from establishing a foothold there. The same cannot be said of U.S. allies such as the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, and the Bahamas, which are major cocaine transit points due to corruption, weak law enforcement, and porous borders. In contrast, Cuba is widely recognized as a “bright spot” in the fight against drug trafficking in Latin America, working closely with the U.S. Coast Guard and other U.S. agencies to track traffickers, share intelligence, and disrupt smuggling routes in the region.
“The most effective U.S. partner in terms of security in Latin America is Cuba,” said Hal Klepak, a military historian and former NATO strategic analyst. “There are key U.S. security benefits derived from cooperation with Cuba that, frankly, do not exist with any other Latin American country.”
Those benefits are unlikely to materialize without a policy change. Under Rubio’s leadership—whose brother-in-law was convicted in the 1980s for trafficking cocaine into the United States—the State Department removed Cuba entirely from its 2025 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report. No explanation was given. Meanwhile, under Rubio’s guidance, the Trump administration has smeared the island with labels disconnected from reality. For example, the State Department’s designation of Cuba as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism” contradicts the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community. There is no credible evidence that the island sponsors terrorism, and it has even been the target of terrorist attacks perpetrated and financed by individuals in the United States.
The irony is clear. At a time when the administration emphasizes the need to secure U.S. borders by combating cartel violence and transnational crime, U.S. policy is undermining cooperation with one of the few governments in the region that consistently delivers.
The costs of this approach are not limited to the fight against drugs.
For years, Washington has warned that Russia and China are expanding their presence in the hemisphere. The National Security Strategy treats this as a central threat, noting that competitors outside the hemisphere are exploiting opportunities created by economic pressure and political neglect.
Cuba is the prime example.
Seven years ago, the island was slowly but surely returning to the U.S. sphere of influence. Diplomatic relations had been normalized, the embargo eased, and trade between the two countries was increasing. For the first time since the Cold War, the United States was in a position to shape Cuba’s economic future through engagement rather than punishment.
American cruise ships arrived in Havana daily. U.S. airlines reinstated regular flights. Google, Netflix, AT&T, Marriott, Airbnb, Carnival, Caterpillar, and General Electric, among others, were in Cuba finalizing deals or exploring business opportunities.
That opening came to an abrupt halt when Trump handed over Cuba policy to Rubio in 2017. The “maximum pressure” strategy, championed by Rubio during Trump’s first term and adopted by President Joe Biden, isolated Cuba from the United States.
American companies left the island, and some were sued in Miami federal courts by Cuban Americans who alleged—often dubiously—that these companies had trafficked in confiscated property. These lawsuits became possible when Trump activated Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, a controversial and long-dormant law, at the urging of Rubio and other hardliners in South Florida, who had received campaign donations from some of the plaintiffs.
The outcome was predictable: Washington created a vacuum that Russia and China rushed to fill.
Moscow has offered investment, tourism, and oil, while Russian warships replaced American cruisers in Havana harbor. Chinese companies have expanded their role in infrastructure, telecommunications, and energy. These relationships are based not on ideological affinity, but on necessity.
There is no indication that Cuba would prefer to align itself with Russia or China rather than strengthen ties with the United States. On the contrary, recent history suggests the opposite. When engagement with Washington was possible, Havana pursued it. When engagement was replaced by hostility, the Cuban government looked elsewhere.
Yet hardliners continue to treat the Russian and Chinese presence in Cuba as a provocation, rather than a consequence of their own policies. Rubio and his allies in Florida have propagated myths about “spy bases” and other implausible threats to justify increasingly harsh measures that deepen Cuba’s dependence on America’s adversaries.
This is the central dilemma of the administration’s Cuba policy: by weakening the Cuban state and excluding American businesses, Washington has reduced its own influence while amplifying that of its rivals.
In 1958, the United States supplied about 70 percent of Cuba’s total imports (86 percent of its agricultural imports) and absorbed 67 percent of its total exports (88 percent of its agricultural exports). Today, Cuba imports more from China—which is on the other side of the world—than from the United States, which is only 90 miles away. According to the U.S. Agricultural Coalition for Cuba, the U.S. holds a 15% share of the food export market to Cuba, which could increase to 60% if trade restrictions were lifted.
The embargo not only limits Cuban purchases of U.S. goods; it also prevents U.S. companies from operating in Cuba or partnering with Cuban entities. Earlier this year, Cuba leased land to a foreign company for the first time since the 1959 revolution, allowing a Vietnamese company to grow rice on more than 7,000 acres.
Meanwhile, the Cuban government is considering further liberalization measures to attract even more investment, allowing foreign companies to operate in U.S. dollars and hire workers directly. The announcement was made at the Havana International Fair, which hosted 715 companies from 52 countries. Needless to say, the presence of American companies was minimal.
Furthermore, our current policy toward Cuba closes off any possibility of accessing the country’s critical minerals. Cuba possesses the world’s fourth-largest cobalt reserves and significant quantities of nickel. The foreign mining company extracting both minerals is Canadian.
Likewise, a recent assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that there are 4 billion barrels of undiscovered oil off the northern coast of Cuba. Companies from Russia, China, India, Great Britain, France, Angola, Spain, Venezuela, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Canada have obtained exploration rights.
While the National Security Strategy (NSS) calls for making the United States the “partner of choice,” our policy ensures the opposite. By excluding itself from the Cuban market, the United States relinquishes economic influence, weakens its competitive position, cedes critical resources to foreign competitors, and undermines its own national security objectives.
It has also placed a heavy burden on the American taxpayer.
The NSS makes it clear that the American public is no longer willing to fund permanent foreign policy projects that are unrelated to fundamental national interests. U.S. policy toward Cuba violates this principle at every level.
Maintaining the embargo is not without cost. It requires a vast enforcement apparatus to monitor travel, financial transactions, shipments, and trade, often targeting U.S. citizens and companies rather than adversaries. Millions of taxpayer dollars are spent each year freezing assets, investigating minor violations, and issuing fines that do nothing to improve U.S. security.
Taxpayers also fund a sprawling ecosystem of nonprofits, media outlets, and quasi-intelligence initiatives under the banner of “promoting democracy.” For decades, the federal government has squandered hundreds of millions of dollars with little impact beyond subsidizing patronage projects based in Miami and enriching allies of Cuban-American politicians like Rubio, Bob Menendez, and Mario Díaz-Balart.
These programs are not only absent from the National Security Strategy; they directly contradict it. Neither democracy nor human rights are mentioned once in the National Security Strategy (NSS) in relation to our hemispheric security interests.
The Trump administration oversaw a historic overhaul of the international aid bureaucracy, cutting billions of dollars from foreign aid programs to redirect resources toward critical national interests and reduce inefficient spending.
But Rubio has protected the so-called “democracy promotion” efforts directed at Cuba. The hardliners in Miami continue to enjoy comfortable salaries funded by U.S. taxpayers and direct access to Rubio and other Cuban-American politicians in Washington.
A policy of engagement that normalizes U.S.-Cuba relations would render both the sanctions enforcement apparatus and the “democracy promotion” industry unnecessary, directly advancing the NSS’s stated goal of reducing the administrative-regulatory-welfare state and the foreign aid complex.
Americans are paying for Cuba policy not only with their taxes, but also with their freedoms.
The National Security Service (NSS) emphasizes that the federal government’s first duty is to safeguard the constitutional rights of American citizens. However, our Cuba policy violates those rights by restricting travel, not because of a national emergency or public safety concern, but to pursue regime-change fantasies concocted by neoconservatives like Rubio, who, incidentally, has never set foot on the island.
Cuba welcomes American travelers, who face fewer security risks there than in other Latin American countries. Ironically, the Cuban government allows U.S. visitors to travel freely to the island, while our own government prevents its citizens from exercising their constitutional rights.
Americans can travel to Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and even Iran without a federal licensing process dictating the purpose and content of their activities. But U.S. law makes it illegal to travel to Cuba as a tourist and imposes criminal penalties of up to ten years in prison and fines of $250,000.
A decade ago, when travel restrictions were relaxed, hundreds of thousands of Americans visited the island. Today, Cuba’s beach resorts receive far more Russian tourists than Americans.
By infringing on our right to travel, the current policy toward Cuba limits the United States’ ability to exercise “soft power” in its interests, one of the stated goals of the National Security Strategy. A policy that prohibits Americans from exercising the fundamental freedoms that project U.S. soft power is fundamentally incompatible with our strategy to counter foreign influence in the hemisphere.
“Fifty years is long enough: the concept of opening up to Cuba is valid. I think we should have made a stronger deal,” Trump said in a September 2015 interview with The Daily Caller. Now he finally has the opportunity to make that deal, and his National Security Strategy (NSS) lays out exactly how it should be: transactional, interest-based, and grounded not in ideology, but in reality.
For its part, the Cuban government has consistently shown a willingness to come to the negotiating table. Cuba wants stability, a strong bilateral relationship, and an end to the sanctions. There is only one red line it will not cross: its sovereignty. This non-negotiable principle is consistent with Trump’s NSS, which encourages other countries to prioritize their own interests and makes it clear that the U.S. “defends the sovereign rights of nations.”
Unfortunately, Cuba policy remains trapped in a failed regime-change logic that predates the end of the Cold War. That logic has been kept alive not out of strategic necessity, but because of a policy captured by a small group of hardliners who have spent decades insisting that the only acceptable outcome is total surrender.
That’s not making deals. It’s a recipe for failure. Any negotiation driven by ideological demands for political rupture or democratic transition is unlikely to succeed.
The choice is not between pressure and compromise. Pressure has already been applied. The decision now is whether that pressure leads to an agreement—or to collapse.
Collapse could mean mass migration, a greater entrenchment of foreign rivals, an opening for drug traffickers, and a failed state just 90 miles from Florida. That scenario may serve the political ambitions of ideologues in Miami and Washington, but it would harm U.S. interests.
If Trump wants the best deal, he will have to abandon the regime-change fantasies that have sabotaged U.S. policy for decades. Cuba is weakened, but not desperate. It will not trade its sovereignty for survival.
The United States has leverage. It also has much to lose. The only outcome that serves U.S. interests is one that keeps Cuba afloat and brings it to the table as a partner, not as a trophy.
Reed Lindsay is a journalist and documentary filmmaker at Belly of the Beast, an independent media outlet based in the United States focusing on Cuba and US-Cuba relations.
IMAGE CREDIT: The American Conservative
