Now, as always, Cuban politics matter more than Cuban people | Opinion

Deeper Cuban suffering has sparked new protests, writes WLRN Americas Editor Tim Padgett. But don't expect either the Cuban regime or Cuban exile leadership to soften their stances in ways that might actually ease that misery.

Hundreds of Cubans were thrown behind bars for 20 years or more in 2021 because they’d taken part in unprecedented anti-government protests. So it took a special brand of courage for folks there to take it to the streets again last week.

It means Cubans are feeling a special brand of desperation. As the communist island’s economy sinks ever deeper into the Caribbean, the endless food shortages and power outages and regime oppression seem to weigh more heavily on them than the risk of long prison sentences does.

What it doesn’t mean, however, despite all the bloviating we’re hearing on both sides of the Florida Straits, is that either the Cuban dictatorship or the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba is about to fall.

Both those things are what the people of Cuba need — but they’re not what the politics of Cuba want. And when it comes to Cuba, there and here, politics always matters more than people.

So don’t expect much of anything from the Cuban regime, or from the Cuban exile leadership that controls the U.S.’s Cuba policy, in the way of helping actual Cubans survive. Both sides are driven only by the survival of their zero-sum agendas.

For the regime, that means keeping its perpetual, pyrrhic chokehold on power and scoring the immediate end of the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba. For the exiles, it means the regime’s immediate surrender of power or else the perpetual, pyrrhic continuation of the embargo.

Sure, we can remind ourselves all we want that the exiles and the regime are obdurately out of step with their respective countries.

Polls have long indicated that while most Americans revile Cuba’s dictatorship, they also think it’s time to lift the embargo. After 62 years, they see what it glaringly hasn’t done — topple the regime — and what it glaringly has done — namely, add to the misery the regime has already heaped on the average Cuban while gifting said regime a handy scapegoat for all the misery.

More than 30 years of reporting on and in Cuba have also shown me that even Cubans who still believe in the Castro revolution are fed up with the economic and human rights yoke the regime keeps clamped on the population. And they see the realpolitik writing on the wall: They know they can’t expect the U.S. to drop the embargo as long as their regime keeps ruling like North instead of South Korea.

But none of that matters. The exiles and the regime are the duopoly, the Google and Apple, of the Cuba situation.

So all we’re hearing now from Cuban regime leaders are the usual delusional denials that their iron-fisted statist incompetence has anything to do with the Cuban people’s suffering and the new burst of protests. “It’s solely the criminal U.S. economic blockade!” were the screams from Havana pressers this week.

All we’re hearing from Cuban exile leaders now are the usual disingenuous declarations that their sledgehammer sanctions have nothing to do with the Cuban people’s suffering and this new burst of protests. “No protester has mentioned the embargo!” were the screams from Miami pressers this week.

Yet what really screams to be mentioned this week is that both sides, in fact, have recently had the opportunity to help the Cuban people — by helping the island’s fledgling private sector — but kicked it in the teeth.

Just about everyone outside the exile-regime complex agrees that pymes — the small- and medium-size private enterprises Cuba legalized three years ago — are the only thing about the nation and its economy that works and works independently of the regime.

The prospect of the pymes thriving scares the Bolshevik bejesus out of the regime hardliners, because it would mean an ideological concession to the capitalist exiles. So those dinosaurs are keeping the pymes reined in.

The prospect of the pymes thriving also scares the diaspora daylights out of the exile hardliners, because it would mean the Cuban people themselves can thrive without the Miami-engineered annihilation of the regime. That too is intolerable — so the exile bosses have worked tirelessly to thwart the pymes and falsely discredit them as accomplices of the regime.

Whether it’s the regime or the exiles, that takes a special brand of cynicism.

Tim Padgett is the Americas editor for WLRN, covering Latin America, the Caribbean and their key relationship with South Florida. Contact Tim at tpadgett@wlrnnews.org.