A Requiem for Communist Cuba’s Apologists

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, February 10, 2026

 

Sure, communist Cuba has been on the “brink of collapse” before. Who would begrudge prudent observers who hold their passion in reserve as they await further evidence that Havana’s grip on power is starting to loosen? But conditions on the island have deteriorated rapidly following the ouster of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro.

 

If Cuba had a geopolitical project in this century that it pursued with anything like the vigor it displayed in its efforts to export Soviet-style communism around the world throughout the Cold War, it was Havana’s efforts to establish a loyal benefactor in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuelan regime. It’s not clear precisely how much of Venezuela’s sanctioned oil exports are no longer making their way to Cuba, but America’s efforts to interdict illicit energy shipments are clearly biting. That and Washington’s successful lobbying of other oil-producing nations, including Mexico, to cut Cuba off have thrown the communist regime into crisis.

 

In late January, the Financial Times reported that Cuba had less than a single month’s worth of oil in reserve. Already, the country’s energy stockpiles appear to be dwindling. Havana informed international air carriers this week, for example, that it will no longer be able to refuel commercial jets on Cuban tarmacs.

 

That’s hardly the only crisis facing Cuba’s tourism-dependent economy. The country’s GDP is collapsing. Inflation-related price hikes are rampant and contributing to shortages. Rolling power blackouts have become a feature of daily life. All these conditions have exacerbated what was already a catastrophic level of emigration from Cuba. By some estimates, the island has seen a 25 percent decline in its population in the space of just four years.

 

It is difficult to judge from our vantage just how fragile the Cuban regime has become as the “polycrisis” that the country’s leaders have been contending with for years deepens. But to hear the regime’s American admirers tell it — or, at least, to gauge from their garment-rending protests over the fate to which the Trump administration is consigning the junta in Havana — things are getting quite serious.

 

The socialist-friendly left in the United States seems beside itself over a report published by the left-aligned media venue Drop Site News alleging that Secretary of State Marco Rubio deliberately misled President Donald Trump into believing that “high-level” negotiations between Washington and Havana were ongoing. In reality, there have been no such talks.

 

“This is what we’ve seen with Gaza, right?” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in a mystifyingly ponderous reflection on the dispatch’s claims. “This is the — a new kind of era of depravity opened up where there used to be — or, there was this stated commitment on human rights — that innocent civilians were almost exempted from the rules of war, from blockades.” Today, the congresswoman contended, the “entire Western world” looks away as the U.S. and its partners “starve and deprive a people.”

 

The Nation’s Katrina Vanden Heuvel published a similar lament. She mourned the “loss of Venezuela’s sovereignty,” which is now “in the hostile hands of Donald Trump” — effectively cutting Cuba off from a country whose resources it once pilfered. In her view, Washington is preparing for a regime-change operation, but Vanden Heuvel makes no meaningful distinction between regime change at the hands of the U.S. military or the sort brought about by the captive peoples under Havana’s boot. Either outcome is something to be feared.

 

Havana’s collapse would result in “an influx of uncontrolled migration,” Vanden Heuvel warned, “the agitation of the Miami exile community,” and growing calls for a direct U.S. military presence on the island. Trump cannot want that, the author infers. That makes Rubio’s betrayal all the more seditious.

 

“Marco Rubio is deliberating LYING to [Trump] about talks with Cuba,” declared David Adler, the co–general coordinator for something calling itself the “Progressive International.” “There are no such talks — only the strangulation policy that Marco Rubio pushed to fulfill his lifelong fantasy of regime change on the island. Where’s MAGA?”

 

Indeed. Where is MAGA? Watching eagerly, we must assume, popcorn in hand.

 

The anti-interventionist left has long mistaken Donald Trump’s commandeering of growing skepticism on the right toward the Iraq War as an expression of its own hostility toward America’s extroverted presence on the world stage. Nothing — not Trump’s intervention against Bashar al-Assad in Syria, his strikes on Iranian regime targets, or his decapitation of the Venezuelan regime — has led them to reconsider their own misconception. The Cuban expatriate community in South Florida, for example, knew precisely what the president’s outlook toward Havana was when two-thirds of them told pollsters in 2024 that they viewed Trump favorably.

 

The Cuban regime has long served as an anti-American totem for the revolutionary left. Even more than the Eastern Bloc and the People’s Republic of China, the Cuban revolution was admired for its unique and enduring hostility toward Washington even when the watchwords were “détente,” “glasnost,” and “perestroika.” The international Marxian left admired it for its capacity to engineer the collapse of a regime even in the absence of a mass proletarian consciousness — the sine qua non of the socialist revolution, according to Marx himself. When the revolutionary left transitioned to small-cell terrorist activity, their doctrines shifted with them. Suddenly, it was Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and the Brazilian Leninist Carlos Marighella (whose Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla operationalized the Cuban revolution’s unique conditions) who captured the imaginations of the international left.

 

For some in the global Marxist diaspora, Havana’s implosion would be more painful than even the collapse of Soviet communism. Long before 1991, Moscow had lost the stomach for the fight against capitalism. The Chinese Communist Party, too, has made its own accommodations with the market. Although Havana’s 2021 experiment with legalized private industry (on a small scale) shook their faith, the far-left faithful never abandoned their admiration for the anti-Western regime on America’s doorstep.

 

The economic precarity Cuba is experiencing right now is a direct result of decades of U.S. government policy. It’s a wonder that the far left is surprised that this policy, which was never a state secret, is bearing fruit. The collapse of Cuban communism would liberate a people who will tell anyone willing to listen that the regime compels them to live like “robots,” and that’s valuable enough. But it would also drive a stake through the heart of the notion that collectivism is popular or even desirable. It can’t come soon enough.