The Cuban Revolution of 1959 is now over sixty-five years old. The Ole Black Magic of the dashing revolutionary Fidel Castro in his fatigues coming down out of the mountains into Havana has been long missing as most Cubans face daily life there of shortages of everything. Communism failed its chief benefactor in Russia and has never made life better in Cuba.
Fidel’s charismatic revolutionary sidekick, Che Guevara was dead in 1967. His bland, brutal brother who followed Fidel, Raul, is ninety-four years old and retired. Cuba’s current lack-luster leader since 2017, President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who was born the year after Castro deposed the prior dictator, is an engineer and has been a communist apparatchik for forty years. The Revolutionary fire in Cuba is long gone. The realization of life in Cuba is daily misery!
The United States has squandered lives and resources thousands of miles from our shores from Vietnam to Afghanistan pursuing the elusive goals of nation building, security, retaliation, and ideology with uncertain successes, but we have never figured out how to deal this nation of eleven million inhabitants just ninety miles off our southern coast that is prone to siding with our adversaries. Cuba just provided the thirty-two Cubans hero’s funerals who died protecting Maduro and his wife during our daring capture of him.
Without an economy that can provide for its population, its communist rulers have provided mercenaries, intelligence-trained security agents, and medical personnel from their captive population as indentured workers to pay for their extravagant lifestyles as the nation’s elites. With Venezuela and Mexico, they were paid for these worker services with oil. They confiscated agriculture products and livestock from the rural area farmers to fatten their bellies with the remnants trickling down to the starving populace. Electric energy was rationed daily to the poor, its availability dependent on when the latest oil tanker arrived.
Now that President Donald Trump is Venezuela’s new de facto oil minister would be an excellent time to make Cuba’s President Diaz-Canel an offer he and aging Raul Castro looking over his shoulder cannot refuse! “If you want oil in the future, Cuba must embark on a new national agenda mandated from Washington D.C.”
Should they refuse to comply, they should consider how life would be in Guantanamo’s American prison facility for crimes against humanity or some other international crimes alleged to be the world standard. Or they may be reminded about the Iranian and Hezbollah leaders that were taken out in specifically targeted locations by American and Israeli intelligence and air attacks.
Like Venezuela, Cuba will be in economic and political receivership until it becomes sufficiently strong to maintain a responsible, non-repressive government and economy.
President Diaz-Canel might be asked to begin by requiring that all Russian and Chinese security forces leave the country, and if the alleged Chinese signal intelligence facility was ever established, it will be shut down. All indentured workers and military forces should be recalled back to Cuba for reassignment at home. The military types will be discharged or those of criminal nature sentenced to prison. The others in Cuba’s military service will be greatly reduced in number. Doctors and other medical individuals will be gainfully employed at reasonable wages in a revised Cuban clinic system.
The resort industry will be greatly expanded, offering Cuba’s beautiful beaches and landscapes for visiting foreign vacationers. The resorts will provide income to raise the living standards in Cuba for ordinary citizens and fund needed government services. Others will work in service industries like restaurants, bed and breakfast accommodations, and island tours.
The United States has maneuvered itself into a rare unique geopolitical position in which it may be able to control the actions of three adversarial governments within a narrow window of opportunity – Venezuela, Cuba, and perhaps even Iran! By interrupting the prior flow of oil from Venezuela, Cuba is remade. If Iran buckles, its oil export markets could change. With both Iran and Venezuela under different regimes and its oil customers compromised, Russia might find a more rapid conclusion of its war with Ukraine advantageous.
Whenever the opportunity arises, it’s a good time to clean up the neighborhood! The natives living in the neighborhood have suffered long enough, and it should be achievable at this moment at minimum cost and risk to the United States!
TW3
January 15, 2026
John Whitmore Jenkins
