At our inaugural event on Friday, October 23, TCFR was honored to host Dr. Javier Corrales, as he discussed the dramatic shift the geopolitical landscape of the Western Hemisphere underwent in early 2026. On January 3, 2026, a high-stakes U.S. operation in Venezuela resulted in the arrest of Nicolás Maduro while leaving the underlying regime apparatus intact—a palace coup and political surrender that the White House heralded as a crowning foreign policy achievement. Following this intervention, the eruption of conflict in Iran demonstrated the hazards of military overextension, consuming vast White House resources and triggering global energy inflation. Caught between these two extremes, U.S. policy towards Cube reflects a third doctrine: maximum economic leverage and diplomatic isolation. Washington approached Havana under the assumption that the Cuban leadership, facing existential isolation, might similarly negotiate a structural transition as Venezuela had.
However, Havana rejected U.S. overtures. Cuba’s stance of unyielding institutional resistance was forged in the immediate aftermath of the 1959 overthrow of Fulgencio Batista and the rise of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary state. For over six decades, Havana has maintained an uncompromising anti-imperialist posture- a position that stands as a unique, unprecedented anomaly in Latin American diplomatic history. Unlike most, if not all other, nations in the Western Hemisphere, which has periodically cycled through tactical cooperation, economic integration, or ideological alignment with Washington, Cuba’s post-1959 state apparatus was constructed entirely around existential, institutional confrontation with American power. As Dr. Corrales highlighted during his presentation, this strategic congestion along with the ever growing Iranian struggle has created a dual impulse within U.S. foreign policy: while military and logistical bandwidth became constrained, the administration's appetite for a visible "trophy" increased—leading Washington to turn its focus squarely toward Cuba.
A central contribution of Dr. Corrales's analysis on Cuba is the concept of the Dual Embargo. While public discourse overwhelmingly focuses on the six-decade U.S. commercial embargo, the primary driver of Cuba's current economic immiseration is the internal embargo imposed by the Cuban state upon its own domestic private sector.
Dr. Corrales emphasized that quantitative studies measuring the relative damage of both policies consistently conclude that the internal embargo is the far greater drain on national productivity. By prohibiting private medical practice, independent accounting, private banking, and formal property rights, Havana has maintained a Cold War command economy that neutralizes domestic entrepreneurial talent and forces 8-hour daily blackouts across a dark island. While the U.S. core mechanisms of trade and financial restrictions that block oil shipments and international credit does exacerbate the fuel shortages and limits access to foreign capital markets, the Cuban governments’ embargo on their citizens generates total state dependence on state rations while prompting mass emigration as the administration exports costs onto citizens.
During the audience Q&A session, Dr. Corrales addressed enduring historical misconceptions surrounding pre-revolutionary Cuba. While Marxist narratives frame the 1959 revolution as an inevitable response to mass impoverishment, empirical data shows that 1950s Havana possessed living standards, literacy rates, and health indicators comparable to Western Europe. However, Fulgencio Batista's 1952 coup destroyed democratic legitimacy and created a weak dictatorship that failed to maintain order, ultimately opening the door to radicalization. The subsequent transition to state socialism and internal economic blockade transformed one of the hemisphere’s most prosperous nations into an impoverished, ration-dependent state.
Drawing directly from his 2022 landmark monograph, Autocracy Rising: How Venezuela Transitioned to Authoritarianism, Dr. Corrales explained how embattled autocracies survive severe economic shocks and international isolation. Rather than liberalizing, regimes deploy inherited institutional reservoirs and engage in function fusion: granting governing institutions, military bodies, and non-state allies overlapping economic, legal, and coercive roles.
First developed in revolutionary Cuba through the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs) and Brigades for Rapid Action, function fusion was exported to Venezuela under Chávez and Maduro. In Cuba today, function fusion allows the military holding conglomerate (GAESA) and elite cadres to control lucrative foreign exchange, tourism, and port operations while assigning civilian surveillance duties to party committees. Furthermore, the regime weaponizes economic scarcity (a "Bolshevik effect") to decimate independent civil society, turning food ration books and state welfare into instruments of political compliance while utilizing mass emigration as a political release valve.
On the geopolitical stage, Cuba's most successful soft-power asset has been its medical diplomacy—exporting Soviet-era trained medical staff and low-cost pharmaceuticals to build international goodwill across the Global South. Yet as state blackouts and economic ruin deepen, this diplomatic lifeline faces severe strain.
Inside Washington, policy toward Cuba is shaped by competing domestic interests and emerging security doctrines. Dr. Corrales outlined the historical shift in the Republican foreign policy coalition: while the traditional GOP business sector (agriculture, construction, tourism, and shipping) strongly favored Obama's 2010s opening, political pressure from South Florida voters convinced the Trump administration to prioritize pro-embargo conservative Latino constituencies.
However, current U.S. policy is further complicated by emerging ideological frameworks within the national security apparatus. A vein of thought is that Cuban cooperation would be a visible, low-cost strategic “trophy” in America’s backyard to offset Middle East fatigue. Another, highlighted in on-site event discussions, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's vision of "Greater North America" conceptualizes the Western Hemisphere as an exclusive U.S. security perimeter stretching from Greenland to Ecuador. Under this doctrine, which views the world through a stark bipolar hemispheric lens, Cuba represents the singular unaligned island within America's core defense zone. This desire for hemispheric dominance reveals an explicit U.S. ambition for Cuba to succumb to American strategic influence and effectively fold into a secure U.S. domain– mirroring political subordination asserted over Cuba.
Dr. Corrales concluded his presentation with a striking note of long-term optimism. Unlike Venezuela, Cuba possesses no vast petroleum reserves. While resource-rich autocracies reduce foreign engagement to pure extractivism, Cuba's lack of oil forces future policymakers—both in Washington and Havana—to look beyond natural resources. Rebuilding Cuba will require establishing genuine property rights, transparent legal institutions, and comprehensive sector-by-sector human capital development, laying the necessary groundwork for a durable post-authoritarian transition.
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