Is Cuba Next After Venezuela? Pressure Mounts (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Looks like it's going down.

[00:00:05] Speaker 2: It's going down for the count. You ever watch them fight? I have. They go down for the count. President Trump has his sights set on another country in the United States' backyard, Cuba. I don't know if they can hold out. It's one of the U.S.'s closest neighbors and one of Venezuela's closest allies. American presidents have long criticized the Cuban government. But now some say the Trump administration is emboldened to go further than before. Cuba is a failing nation. I think Cuba will not be able to survive.

[00:00:30] Speaker 1: What's your answer?

[00:00:31] Speaker 2: From the BBC, I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. And today on The Global Story, after Venezuela, is Cuba next?

[00:00:49] Speaker 3: I'm Will Grant. I'm the BBC correspondent in Mexico for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

[00:00:54] Speaker 2: Will, I know you've lived in Cuba. You've spent a lot of time reporting from there. From your vantage point, what is the crux of the problem that the Trump administration has with Cuba?

[00:01:05] Speaker 3: At the heart of the Trump administration's issue with Cuba is really the heart of Washington's ongoing issue with Cuba. Basically, they don't like a communist-run government 90 miles off the coast of Florida. They've never liked a communist-run government 90 miles off the coast of Florida. They've tried to remove a communist-run government 90 miles off the coast of Florida many, many times in different guises, through CIA-planned attempts on Fidel Castro's life, the late leader of the Cuban Revolution. Hundreds of those were planned and several were attempted, to squeezing the island through the US economic embargo for six and a half decades, putting punitive measures on everything from companies that might want to send food and medicines to Cuba, to even British and European tourists who visit Cuba. So there's a whole series of things that Washington has done since 1959, essentially to force regime change in Cuba. Of course, Donald Trump, in his second administration, with Marco Rubio as his Secretary of State, it looks like they really do intend to see some form of regime change, some kind of permanent shift in Cuba off the back of what's happened in Venezuela.

[00:02:21] Speaker 2: It does seem, at least here in Washington, that we are hearing a lot more about Cuba and about Cuba's connections to Venezuela. We've heard President Trump refer to Cubans as being the protectors, the thugs behind the Venezuelan government. And one thing that caught my eye when the United States captured Venezuela's leader, Nicolas Maduro, was that there were a number of Cuban soldiers who were killed in that operation. They were protecting Maduro. And we'll have a lot of questions here, but why would there have been Cubans protecting Maduro?

[00:02:54] Speaker 3: Part of the relationship, the bilateral relationship between Cuba and Venezuela, is built on intelligence officers and soldiers, military support. Now, the Cubans had denied that. They said that basically the arrangement was that crude oil would come to Cuba and prop up the Cuban revolution, and doctors would go back in the other direction.

[00:03:17] Speaker 2: So crude oil would go from Venezuela to Cuba.

[00:03:20] Speaker 3: And in return, they would pay for that with human capital in the form of doctors and medics and healthcare workers who would work in the shanty towns and in the remote regions of Venezuela. Hugo Chavez, the late Venezuelan leader, and Fidel Castro, the late Cuban revolutionary leader. The two of them came up with that idea, and it was basically the mainstay of the economic relationship between the two socialist allies until this point. There was a third dimension to that though, of course, which was intelligence officers' support, particularly in the wake of an attempted coup on Hugo Chavez in 2002. I think from there on, there was more of a role for Cuba because basically Cuba's know-how in terms of what Venezuela wanted to achieve or the Venezuelan government wanted to achieve was in terms of how to stay in power, for six and a half decades.

[00:04:19] Speaker 2: So- And so part of that intelligence sharing involved actual physical bodyguards.

[00:04:26] Speaker 3: On the ground, protecting Nicolas Maduro. So he, as a disciple of Fidel Castro, so the Castro brothers, was very much part of the same equation that Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez created. So he had Cubans around them. It was rumored that he actually trusted Cubans more than his own countrymen. As somebody who himself was trained in Cuba, he bought into the Cuban vision of a socialist nation. The other things they did was advise on crushing dissent, quite frankly. There's reports from people who were held in detention, dissidents and journalists, that when they were held in a very notorious detention center in the center of Caracas called El Helicoide, that they were interrogated by people with Cuban accents. Throughout this entire period, against those sorts of allegations and against the allegations that Cuban soldiers were infiltrated in the Venezuelan military at absolutely every level, the Cuban government denied them, said that they weren't there, that it was an invention by Washington, that it simply wasn't true. Well, considering that 32 of the 100 or so people who were killed in the US operation in Venezuela were Cubans, they simply had to acknowledge them. They had to acknowledge that they were there. And it sort of exposed that it was true that they had people on the ground in Venezuela and had done for years.

[00:05:59] Speaker 2: So Will, you were in Havana, the capital of Cuba recently, as those soldiers' remains were brought back and put on display, essentially lying in state, right? They were honored by the Cuban government. What was the scene like there in Cuba as you were there reporting?

[00:06:18] Speaker 3: It was truly extraordinary. I mean, Raul Castro, who makes very few public appearances now, was there to receive them at the airport, aged 94, standing next to him, President Miguel Díaz-Canel. To full military honors, as you say, the boxes were taken from the plane and loaded into a funeral procession that then drove into Havana to the Ministry of the Armed Forces. The vast majority of the route from the airport to this ministry would have had people along the way. Cuba hasn't lost this number of combatants in a one-on-one battle with the US military, as far as I can see, since the start of the Cuban Revolution. The only point that we can compare it to is the Bay of Pigs in 1961. But that was Cuban exiles who were trained by the CIA and brought to the coast of Cuba to basically try and take back the island. That failed. There were fatalities on either side, and certainly the US military was involved. But in a direct fight like this, with 32 combatants killed and none on the other side, it was a very sobering moment, a very almost humiliating moment, in a sense, for the Cuban Revolution, except they certainly didn't paint it like that, as you'd expect. It was a moment of pride, a moment of honor. The words next to each of these boxes with the photo of the respective soldier were the words honor and glory next to them.

[00:07:48] Speaker 2: You've mentioned oil a few times here. How much oil has Cuba been getting from Venezuela?

[00:07:55] Speaker 3: Well, it was much higher when Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro struck up their relationship. It was in the region of 100,000 barrels of oil a day with which Cuba could sell the excess beyond its domestic consumption to other nations in the Petro-Caribbean Agreement. In that sense, we talk about Venezuelan oil basically uplifting, upholding the Cuban Revolution. It was through steps like that. Gradually over time, and with the fall of the oil price, the global oil price, Venezuela hasn't been able to provide those kind of numbers. And it's reduced to more like, the accepted number is somewhere around 35, maybe 40,000 barrels of oil a day. Much, much less. But when combined with what Cuba gets from Mexico and from Russia, enough traditionally to be able to keep the lights on, but not recently.

[00:08:56] Speaker 2: So if in this relationship, Cuba has been getting oil, you say in return, they send doctors and soldiers to Venezuela. How many doctors and soldiers are you speaking of?

[00:09:08] Speaker 3: I mean, thousands, tens of thousands. We don't, or at least I don't currently know how big it is. We just know that it has been in the past to the tune of thousands, many thousands. And the benefit is that those doctors would be paid much better than they would be paid in Cuba. But the argument in terms of those in Florida, that it was exploitative, that they were still being paid a fraction of what the Venezuelan government was getting per medic. And that the people are basically obliged to go to very dangerous shanty towns in Caracas or remote communities because they're not paid a dignified wage back in Cuba.

[00:09:55] Speaker 2: So will you say prior to Maduro's ouster, the Cuban government had not in an official capacity really recognized that they were providing this intelligence protection service. Now at this moment, what's happened to the rest of the Cuban security intelligence operation in Venezuela?

[00:10:12] Speaker 3: Well, we don't know exactly in terms of numbers, but here's an anecdote that tells us quite a lot about where we are now. The next day after these remains have returned, the boxes of cremated ashes, there is a protest outside the U.S. embassy led by President Miguel Díaz-Canel. He makes a fiery speech and then a whole slew of people walk past the U.S. embassy waving Venezuelan and Cuban flags and chanting about solidarity and cooperation to the death and so on. Now, as that was happening, we received on our phones confirmation that Delcy Rodríguez, the interim president in Venezuela had met with John Ratcliffe, the director of the CIA in Caracas. That is for Cuba watchers, Venezuela watchers is extraordinary. She didn't meet with a distant diplomat. She didn't meet on the head of Latin American affairs or the Western hemispheric affairs from the state department. With an emissary from the White House or she met with the director of the CIA less than two weeks after her boss has been removed by U.S. troops. And I showed the information to a Cuban government official and to say he went white is an understatement. Why? Because it indicates the suggestion that this is the direction of traffic from Caracas now, away from Havana and towards Washington.

[00:11:46] Speaker 2: Well, when you talk about what comes next for Cuba, the United States relationship has been testy with Cuba for a long time, as we've said, but there was this period of rapprochement, you could sort of say, right? Under the former democratic president, Barack Obama. When he came to office, he tried to ease the United States relationship with Cuba. In fact, I recall that moment when he visited Cuba with his family. This was 2016, I believe. The first American president in years, what was it, nearly nine decades, to visit Cuba. Why has that effort at rapprochement, that warmth, not lasted? It was just a little blip, it seems, in American history.

[00:12:34] Speaker 3: I moved to Cuba around that time, just before the announcement. I think we all thought that it really was the turning of a page. The words Obama used himself is that, I come to bury the remnants of the Cold War in the Americas, and the tears down the cheeks of people watching, that will never leave me. Watching that speech, watching the reaction of people, friends, family.

[00:12:56] Speaker 2: So people in Cuba felt really hopeful at that moment.

[00:12:59] Speaker 3: Extremely hopeful. Young people felt that there might be a future for them on the island, that they might be able to open businesses, they might be able to do artistic projects, they might be able to come and go more freely, that there would be university exchange programs, that there would just be a modern, grown-up relationship between these two old enemies. And of course, we never got a chance to find out what else might've come, because Donald Trump won the 2016 election, and the whole thing felt like a house of cards, because he was so thankful to the Cuban-Americans, I think, for handing him Florida, that I think it was his quid pro quo, was to undo everything they didn't like in Cuba. He is a Florida man to all intents and purposes, and he's listening very closely to Marco Rubio.

[00:13:49] Speaker 2: You mentioned Marco Rubio, and I want to follow up on that, because here in Washington, there's been a lot of interest and curiosity in the Secretary of State, and how perhaps his personal identity, his politics might be factoring into this all. Marco Rubio, who we all know, his family moved to the U.S. from Cuba, and his political identity as the son of Cuban immigrants has been central to his politics over the years. How much of an impact do you see Rubio having on what happens next in Cuba?

[00:14:24] Speaker 3: I think he's absolutely key. I think he's essentially the architect of it. And it's clear that, as you say, this ties in to an existing political DNA for Marco Rubio. And I think that he sees himself as being able to effect change, an end of the Cuban revolution, and to create the conditions of, as it were, inverted commas, a free Cuba, the one that they always talk about in Miami, that vision of a free Cuba, i.e. one without state-run socialism. And he would do almost anything, and certainly stay loyal to Donald Trump for the next three years, I think, if this is the means to make that a reality. He has seen the roadmap to making the change in Havana possible through the removal of Nicolas Maduro, because that is how you turn off the tap of crude to Havana, and then create the conditions by which the Cuban revolution topples on its own. A big gamble, in a sense, because, as we've said, the one thing that the Cuban revolution knows how to do is dig in its heels. It has dealt with decades of an economic embargo. It has brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1962 over its principles under Fidel Castro, and a refusal to back down in the face of the ideological opposite 90 miles away. I wouldn't expect to hear any public declarations of anything other than double down, hold fast, push back, hasta la victoria siempre. Now, if the reality behind the scenes is different and there's conversations, we don't yet know, but it will be extremely difficult to stay the course without being propped up by Venezuela and oil. This isn't happening in the context of a Cuba that was otherwise healthy and doing well and had the tourist numbers that you saw under Obama. The tourism has dropped off a cliff since that high point of the Obama-era thaw. There's rolling blackouts. The length and breadth of the island. There were parts of Havana when I was there just now that were more often without power than with. That's food rotting in fridges. That's no fans or air conditioning to keep the mosquitoes at bay. There's an outbreak of chikungunya and dengue fever that is affecting people. So the island's in a really difficult place. Take away the Venezuelan oil on top of that, and then that's what Donald Trump is referring to, when he says it's ready to thaw.

[00:17:01] Speaker 2: But do you see, Will, really Cuba being next in that same way? Or is the goal here to economically squeeze Cuba, cut off access to oil, and then force an uprising?

[00:17:14] Speaker 3: I think it might be that latter path, but ultimately the destination is the same, which is regime change. And I think the question that people are asking themselves in Cuba is, is the ultimate goal of what Donald Trump and Marco Rubio did in Caracas and with Nicolas Maduro, not regime change in Caracas so much, particularly if they're prepared to talk and work with the interim government of Delsi Rodríguez, but actually regime change in Havana. I think that when it comes to Marco Rubio's personal goals, it is equally about Havana as it is about Venezuela, if not more so. I mean, Donald Trump's joked about him being the next president of Cuba.

[00:18:02] Speaker 2: So, Will, let me take you back to some of the words from President Trump that we began our conversation with. Him saying that Cuba is ready to fall, that it's hanging on by a thread. You know Cuba well, you've reported from there for years. On this last reporting trip that you took, just this month, did you get a sense that that's accurate? Does the Cuban government really appear like it's hanging on by a thread?

[00:18:31] Speaker 3: Definitely it looks like it's in the face of an existential threat right now. And I think that they appreciate that. They know that, that this is about as serious as it gets in the 21st century to lose the support of Venezuela, which we don't have completely confirmed yet. It never looks like it's about to fall, in the sense that it is so ingrained into society. I was standing there on the front row as all of these military men and young cadets and military officials and state employees come trooping past the boxes of the remains of the 32 who were killed on Venezuelan soil. And I just got a sense of like, this thing is so riven into the DNA of Cuba that it would be extremely difficult for Washington to achieve. I mean, it hasn't done in six and a half decades. You know, what would make this moment any different? But this moment is different after what happened on the 3rd of January. This moment is unprecedented, I think, actually. Certainly in the 21st century for Cuba. And I think it's possible that there could be military force used in Cuba. I would have said not. I would say it's not part of the equation. But I think the one thing that we can take from the past few weeks is that nothing is off the table when it comes to Donald Trump and his current set of goals.

[00:19:54] Speaker 2: Will, I do want to hear from you, because you have been on the ground reporting in Cuba about what people are feeling. I mean, it strikes me that Cuba Occupy is such a unique place in US foreign policy mythology, right? You refer to it as being 90 miles off the coast of Florida. I too have been to Key West, where there's that little sign marker pointing you in the direction of Cuba. It is so close. And yet in the minds of so many of us, it is so, so distant and so far away. And so I really want to hear what you heard from people.

[00:20:28] Speaker 3: First and foremost, it's the only topic of conversation. It's all people are talking about. They're obsessed by it. Now, how could they not be? I mean, you know, politics is thrust down your throat from a very young age in Cuba. And so you grow up as a sort of politically conscious being all the way through your life, even if you later on go on to reject it. People are talking about it because even if they don't want the Cuban Revolution anymore, even if they felt Maduro was an autocrat and, you know, riding roughshod on people's human rights, even if they want change, they are frightened about what that change might be. It's like a toxic relationship. It's like the kind of boyfriend that somebody should leave, but they don't know what life would look like without it, or that kind of a thing. It's this paternalistic thing that Cubans have had their whole lives. So even if things are bad, then it still has this slight safety net of free healthcare, of schooling, of every month subsidized food. But each of those things have been sort of picked away at. There isn't this sort of blanket support for the revolution that once it enjoyed. I've heard people say this. We don't know what's coming, but whatever it is, it's got to be better than this because the constant blackouts, the constant lack of food, the prices compared to the wages, it's beginning to turn. I honestly do not know what the future holds in terms of the government's ability to hold on. They will try. That much I'm sure of. Raul Castro is 94. He's an old man. When he is no longer in any way part of the equation of what happens in Cuba, perhaps there'll be an opening or an opportunity for change there. Then that throws it back to what will be acceptable to Washington. As far as I can see, Marco Rubio's red line is nothing less than complete regime change. It's not like they would work with a watered down version of the revolution. They want no revolution in Cuba.

[00:22:31] Speaker 2: On that note, Will, I just want to say thank you for bringing your reporting, your expertise to the show. We always appreciate it.

[00:22:37] Speaker 3: Real pleasure. I love speaking to you guys.