COMMENTARY As the U.S. cuts off global oil to Cuba, the island's communist regime could get President Trump to back off by offering something he's showing special interest in: dictatorship consulting.
Cuba’s communist regime must feel a bit like a suckling pig in Havana on New Year’s Eve: it’s desperate to find a way out of the roasting caja china where President Donald Trump just shoved it.
Having declared Cuba a grave security threat to the U.S., Trump is blocking international oil shipments to the ruined island.
The dictatorship could get Trump to ease up by correcting its brutal human rights record, reforming its catastrophic economic policies, and maybe ditching that cheesy “Homeland or Death!” motto, too.
But none of that's going to happen, at least not until 94-year-old regime patriarch Raúl Castro dies, which is probably never going to happen, either.
Cuba's hierarchy will have to negotiate with something else. And it knows it better come up with something fast — not for the sake of regular suffering Cubans, but because top party bosses and military brass may no longer be able to live comfortably if the oil deliveries dry up.
Their survival may depend on offering Trump the only thing they have left that he’d be interested in:
Mentoring.
Call it crude-for-consulting. If they want to see fuel imports again, they can promise Trump help with his bid to turn America into his own private Cuba.
They can be his tyranny tutors.
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Trump, after all, is leaving little doubt that he'd welcome advanced dictatorship instruction.
This week he all but screamed for it by demanding federal control — read Trump control — of U.S. elections, especially the upcoming mid-term contests that are looking ominous for his Republican Party.
The U.S. Constitution makes it clear — as clear as Trump’s 2020 election loss — that the states and not megalomaniac presidents oversee voting. But Trump keeps pushing the tantrum lie that he lost his 2020 re-election bid because the states, especially Georgia, let millions and millions of undocumented immigrants vote.
"We want," he bellowed, "to take over!”
No K Street consultant in Washington could ever get Trump the kind of totalitarian presidency results that advisers from Cuba’s MININT could.
Who better to coach Trump on taking over elections than Cuba, where only one party gets to party?
The Central Committee can teach him how to skillfully purge voter rolls and rig contests — Cuban apparatchiks don’t need to stay up late watching CNN to know who won theirs! — or how to deploy troops to cancel the balloting because of a fabricated national emergency (like, say, his falling approval ratings).
But the Cubans could advise Trump on so much more.
Martial-law mojo
They'd be especially badass at showing Trump how to get his martial-law mojo back regarding the military and immigration police occupation of U.S. cities, which was going so great until middle-class white women in Minneapolis butted in.
His communist mavens will help him make sure that doesn’t happen again, no señor.
Trump's also frustrated that he hasn’t been able to bend the justice system to lock up his political foes — especially the rule-of-law schmucks, like former special counsel Jack Smith, who tried to lock him up for his alleged Jan. 6 sedition.
Attorney General Pam Bondi doesn’t seem up to the task. Bring in los cubanos.
They’ll have a Power Point presentation ready to bring into the Oval Office that shares their Che Guevara-tested, kangaroo-court secrets about summarily prosecuting, convicting and sentencing anyone a totalitarian regime suddenly wants to destroy.
After that, Smith will be no more protected than former and failed Cuban Economy Minister Alejandro Gil was last year.
The regime needed a scapegoat for its epic economic disaster — so, behind closed doors, it condemned Gil to life in prison for corruption and espionage and, for all we know, stealing babies’ organs.
No K Street consultant in Washington could ever get Trump results like that. But advisers from Cuba’s MININT, its security ministry, sure could.
With Cuba's tutelage he could cut through woke justice system obstructionism on a host of other strongman ambitions: deporting non-criminal migrants with no due process; slapping tariffs on countries, or waging wars on them, with no congressional questioning; dropping interest rates with no Fed hesitation.
And the tens of billions of dollars Cuba’s military-run tourism agency has reportedly socked away could be a guide to even greater personal family enrichment than Trump’s reportedly realized so far during his presidency.
For Trump, autocrat expertise like that just might be worth letting the world’s oil into Cuba again.
