The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House is trying to identify Cuban officials willing to sign a deal as part of a “regime change” effort.
US President Donald Trump is aiming to remove Cuba’s leadership and is actively seeking government insiders in Havana willing to strike a deal with Washington to “oust the communist regime,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
A US newspaper reported on Wednesday, citing unnamed US officials, that the Trump administration has no “concrete plans” for Cuba, but that the recent abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by US forces “has been left as a blueprint and a warning to Cuba.”
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U.S. officials told the newspaper that meetings were being held with Cuban exiles and civil society groups in Miami and Washington, D.C., to identify Cuban government officials who may be “interested in striking a deal.”
Earlier this month, President Trump directly threatened Cuba, writing on his Truth Social platform: “I strongly suggest we reach a deal before it’s too late.”
David Smith, an expert on U.S. politics and foreign policy at the Center for American Studies at the University of Sydney, told Al Jazeera that the White House may be “too optimistic” that threats alone are enough to topple Cuba’s government, led by President Miguel Diaz-Canel.
“We saw recently in Iran that President Trump seemed to believe that if there was enough of a threat, the Iranian government might cave in,” Smith said.
“He was really encouraging the protesters and hinting that the Iranian regime was very weak, but it turned out that the Iranian regime was still strong enough, repressive enough, and certainly determined enough to hold back,” he said.
Smith said the situation in countries like Cuba is opaque to outsiders, including the actual power of the government and the loyalties of officials.
Ricardo Zuniga, a former senior official in President Barack Obama’s administration who was instrumental in brief detente negotiations between Havana and Washington from 2014 to 2017, said Cuba’s leadership would be a “much harder nut to break” than Venezuela’s.
“Nobody wants to work on the U.S. side,” Zuniga told The Wall Street Journal.
Overthrowing Cuba’s leader has been a dream of many American politicians for decades, ever since the 1959 revolution that brought the country’s renowned revolutionary leader Fidel Castro to power.
The United States unsuccessfully attempted to overthrow Cuba’s leadership during the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1962. The CIA also attempted to assassinate Castro several times during his lifetime, but Bolivian forces with U.S. support executed Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara in 1967.
Cuba is located just 150 kilometers (93 miles) from South Florida, and hundreds of thousands of Cubans have left the island for the United States due to economic hardship and political repression.
The Cuban diaspora in the United States forms a powerful voting bloc, including Trump administration officials such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a longtime critic of Cuba’s communist government.
Professor Smith from the University of Sydney told Al Jazeera: “There was always a sense among the anti-communist hardliners in the regime that this place was very small and very close. It would be a real humiliation for this place to be allowed to continue as it is.”
“Trump, who was politically socialized during the Cold War, would truly consider the presence of a communist government in Cuba an insult to the United States,” he added.
