Trump’s Cuba Rhetoric and the Slow Collapse of a Revolutionary Myth

JAMAL DEMLOJ

SALAMONA POST

At José Martí International Airport in July 2006, while war was raging between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, a Cuban employee at the Air France counter looked at my passport and smiled.

“Lebanese?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“We love you,” he replied warmly. “You are strong fighters.”

I remember answering, somewhat awkwardly, that I did not necessarily share his enthusiasm for the war unfolding back home. He laughed gently and said: “We will not disagree, my friend. You are my guest now.”

Moments later, he upgraded my ticket from economy class to first class in exchange for 100 pesos.

At the time, I understood the encounter merely as an amusing anecdote from a country famous for its contradictions. Years later, however, I came to see it differently. That brief conversation revealed something deeper about Cuba itself: the island’s enduring emotional attachment to the mythology of resistance, even as the realities sustaining that mythology were already beginning to crumble.

Today, nearly two decades later, Cuba once again finds itself trapped inside the gravitational pull of American power.

When President Donald Trump recently described Cuba as a “failed state” heading “only downward,” his words were not merely another example of rhetorical escalation. They carried the unmistakable echoes of the Cold War, reviving memories of an era when the island stood at the center of the most dangerous geopolitical confrontation in modern history.

Trump even hinted at the possibility of deploying military assets near Cuban shores, casually suggesting that an American aircraft carrier positioned close enough to Havana could force surrender without firing a shot.

For many observers, such remarks may sound theatrical. Yet in Cuba, history has taught people never to dismiss American threats entirely.

The trauma of confrontation is woven deeply into the Cuban national psyche. From the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion to the Cuban Missile Crisis, generations of Cubans grew up believing they were living on the front line of a global existential struggle.

And in many ways, they were.

What makes the current moment particularly striking is that Cuba appears weaker than at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The revolutionary charisma that once surrounded Fidel Castro has faded into history. The ideological fervor that allowed Havana to survive decades of sanctions, isolation, and economic deprivation no longer carries the same emotional force, especially among younger Cubans.

Under President Miguel Díaz-Canel, the island faces chronic fuel shortages, rolling blackouts, inflation, food scarcity, and a deepening social crisis that has driven many Cubans to emigrate in despair.

Yet the deeper tragedy may not be economic collapse alone. It may be the slow transformation of the Cuban Revolution itself into a tourism artifact.

Walking through the old streets of Havana years ago, I was struck by how the revolution had already begun packaging itself for foreign consumption. American cars from the 1950s rolled through crumbling colonial avenues like moving museum pieces. Former monasteries and churches—once closed by the revolutionary state for ideological reasons—had quietly reopened after the fall of the Soviet Union, not out of spiritual reconciliation, but for tourism revenue.

Even revolutionary memory had become part of the economy.

The house where Ernest Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea became a pilgrimage site. The yacht Granma, which carried Castro and his comrades from Mexico to Cuba in 1956, rested like a sacred relic inside the Museum of the Revolution.

Cuba was no longer merely preserving its past. It was selling it.

And yet, despite everything, the island still possessed an emotional gravity difficult to explain to outsiders.

Two months after my first visit, I returned to Havana to cover the 2006 summit of the Non-Aligned Movement.

What I witnessed there felt surreal.

A Jordanian delegate accidentally thanked “Korea” instead of Cuba in his opening remarks. Iraq’s vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, began his speech by insisting that Iraq remained sovereign—a statement that triggered laughter among journalists listening nearby.

Then came Lebanese President Émile Lahoud, who spoke passionately about spreading a “culture of resistance.”

That evening, however, diplomats and delegates gathered over glasses of remarkably good wine. Curious about its origin, I asked a Cuban acquaintance where it came from.

“A Cuban-Israeli joint venture,” he replied casually. “Israeli expertise.”

I remember staring silently at the glass in my hand.

In that moment, Havana suddenly felt like a metaphor for the entire post-Cold War world: a place where ideology survived mainly as theater, while reality quietly moved according to entirely different rules.

Perhaps this is why Trump’s recent rhetoric resonates so uneasily.

Because beyond the geopolitical calculations, Cuba now embodies something larger: the exhaustion of twentieth-century revolutionary dreams in the face of twenty-first-century realities.

To be clear, a full-scale American military intervention against Cuba still appears unlikely. Washington understands the enormous political costs such a move would carry across Latin America and beyond. But the danger lies elsewhere—in the possibility of intensifying economic strangulation, psychological pressure, covert destabilization, or military intimidation designed to exploit the island’s extraordinary fragility.

And Cuba is fragile today in ways Fidel Castro never allowed it to appear.

Still, history suggests that the island should never be underestimated entirely.

For more than six decades, Cuba survived sanctions, isolation, Soviet collapse, and repeated predictions of imminent regime failure. It endured because revolutionary systems often survive long after their original beliefs begin to decay.

But survival is not the same as vitality.

And that may be the central tragedy of modern Cuba: the revolution that once promised to reshape history now struggles simply to outrun time itself.