OPINION:
In a social media post last week, President Trump called Cuba a “failed country and only heading in one direction — down.” Then he added, “Cuba is asking for help, and we are going to talk!!!!”
The only thing Washington and Havana have to talk about is how soon the communists can pack their bags and leave.
I would like to volunteer to be part of the American negotiating team.
I feel a special connection to Cuba. I was there for a week as a journalist in 1998. What I experienced left a lasting impression. The situation was wretched when I was there. It is worse now.
Without Venezuelan oil, there are rolling blackouts. Hunger is rampant. In 2025, the average Cuban worker earned the equivalent of $16 a month. Garbage piles up in the streets.
The regime blames the United States for choking off its fuel supply. Good for us.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked whether he believes Cuba is a threat to our national security. Silly question.
Cuba has been a thorn in our side since Fidel Castro and his gang seized power in 1959. It has been allied with the worst of the worst: China, Russia, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah. As Venezuela moved to Marxism, Cuba sent secret police to Caracas to instruct its goons in the instruments of repression.
Climate kook Greta Thunberg took time out from campaigning for Hamas to denounce the U.S. fuel blockade as “a brutal act of collective punishment.” Yet the suffering of the Cuban people is a result of the merciless regime that rules them, not the U.S. blockade.
Food and medicine are exempt. Most of the chicken in Cuba comes from Mississippi and Alabama.
Pre-Castro, Cubans had the third-highest caloric intake in Latin America. Today, the average Cuban gets half a pound of chicken and 10 to 12 eggs every 10 days.
Hardly a night goes by without a demonstration somewhere on the island. On March 13, a march through the streets of the regional capital of Moron ended with a mob storming the Communist Party headquarters.
In Cuba, the regime has all the guns, which makes open revolt impossible. It operates a string of political prisons where 1,200 are currently incarcerated. That is the equivalent of 40,000 political prisoners in the U.S.
On my first day in Havana, I was walking along the Malecon by the sea when I struck up a conversation with a gentleman who seemed well-informed. I invited him to come back to my hotel for lunch. He politely declined. Ordinary Cubans are not allowed to enter tourist hotels. It is one of the many contradictions of Cuban communism. Power to the people — but not access to the hotels they are forced to build.
The doorman at my hotel told me he was a civil engineer. He could earn $20 a month practicing his profession or $20 a day in tips. Communism turns engineers into doormen.
My most poignant encounter was on my last night in Havana. I met a young man who was selling postcards. He came to the capital to study physics but then decided there was not much of a future in that or anything else in Cuba.
When he heard me speaking English, he approached me. “You’re an American? For God’s sake, help me to get out of here! I don’t want to end up like them.” He pointed with his chin to older Cubans shuffling by on the street. I gave him $20 and the name of a contact who might have been able to help. I hope he made it out.
I think of him and others I met in Cuba as the island wakes from a 67-year-old nightmare.
The Miami-based Center for a Free Cuba is calling for the release of all political prisoners, bringing in international human rights monitors and holding free and fair elections for a popular government.
Cuba has been part of our consciousness for as long as I can recall: the Castro revolution, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban missile crisis, the Mariel boat lift and the flight of more than 1 million Cubans, including the parents of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Cuba’s rulers will never give up on communism any more than the ayatollahs will give up on radical Islam.
Talk is cheap. The island’s future lies in two words: Cuba libre.
• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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