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 right now 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 has shoved it.
Having declared Cuba a grave security threat to the U.S., Trump has engineered the cut-off of international oil shipments to the 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, then, 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 do dry up.
So their survival depends on offering Trump the only thing they have left that he’d be interested in:
Their mentoring.
If they want to see crude entering their harbors again, it’s time they promise Trump they can help his bid to turn America into his own private Cuba.
They can be his tyranny tutors.
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Trump, after all, has left little doubt that he'd welcome advanced dictatorship instruction.
This week he all but screamed for it by demanding national control — read Trump control — of all 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 megalomaniacal presidents oversee voting. But Trump keeps pushing the lie that he lost his 2020 re-election bid because the states, especially Georgia, let millions and millions of undocumented immigrants vote.
Therefore, he cried, “we want 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 strangling electoral autonomy than Cuba, where only one party gets to party?
The first consulting session could show Trump why the violent MAGA insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, that tried to overturn the 2020 results was unsuccessful.
Communist mavens
His communist mavens will help him make sure a fail like that doesn’t happen again, no señor.
They can teach him how to more effectively purge voter rolls and rig contests — Cuban apparatchiks don’t even need to stay up late and watch CNN to know who won theirs! — or better yet, how to deploy troops to cancel the balloting because of a fabricated national emergency (which would most likely be his plummeting voter approval ratings).
But the Cubans could advise Trump on so much more than elections.
Trump, for example, is feeling 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 just 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 wreak vengeance on.
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 disasters — 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 their 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 interference; 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’s harbors again.
