Six months have passed since the events of January 3 in Venezuela unleashed an avalanche of predictions about what would immediately happen in Cuba. At the time, an almost automatic “domino effect” was taken for granted—linked to the island’s energy dependence on Venezuelan oil—and fueled as well by the initial fascination with the US strategy toward Caracas. A hasty assessment of its success ended up being enthusiastically embraced by nearly the entire Cuban opposition.
Half a year later, expectations of a collapse through sheer inertia have collided with the true nature of the Cuban regime and its architecture of power, which is focused on survival and capable of absorbing the impact of external pressure while turning internal collapse into an excuse to mutate from Soviet socialism into its Russian, Vietnamese, or Chinese variants. All the while, the daily lives of Cubans are sinking into an underworld of scarcity, hardship, and repression.
Confidence in the “Trump formula for Venezuela” and the possibility of replicating it in Cuba has not been exclusive to a yearning exile community and a frustrated opposition. In February of this year, I warned in an article about the risks of drawing automatic parallels, and I was critical of the insistence on searching for a Cuban “Delcy Rodríguez.” I was concerned by the enormous number of overly enthusiastic analyses assessing possible candidates and timelines with the urgency of someone who does not want to arrive too late before the betting window closes.
Many have contributed to turning the Venezuelan process into the ideal mirror of an accelerated transition for Cuba: political actors, analysts, activists, and even representatives of the US government, with fairly explicit statements to that effect. And so we have arrived at the paradoxical situation—predictable, if you ask me—in which, while many Cubans both on and off the island await a “Venezuela-style” outcome. However, Venezuela’s democratic recovery is slowing to worrying levels, in a climate of opacity and uncertainty in which citizens’ demands are losing priority to Washington’s economic interests and the reshuffling of elites.
Half a year after those expectations arose, it is time to take a critical look at what has happened in order to understand why the collapse predicted in January has yet to occur. Let us try to clear away the fog of those initial forecasts and examine: How does the “Trump formula” work in practice? Why did maximum pressure lead to a reshuffling rather than the collapse of the regime? And where does Cubans’ real ability to influence their own destiny lie today?
Evidence of the Escalation
Understanding Cuba’s current situation requires reviewing what has happened over the past several months based on the facts. A systematic review of news about the Trump administration’s statements and actions during this period shows that the post-January 3 scenario in Cuba has not fulfilled predictions of the regime’s collapse, but instead has seen the implementation of a strategy of prolonged attrition in which two central dynamics intersect: an escalation of verbal threats shared by Washington and Havana, and a progressive economic strangulation that directly affects an impoverished society left to fend for itself, while the humanitarian crisis takes a back seat for the parties to the conflict.
A review of public actions reveals the predominance of verbal pressure and symbolic gestures over forceful measures. Between April and June 2026, statements by Washington officials and warnings from some opposition leaders about an imminent outcome remained at high levels, while Havana amplified the threat to justify its political entrenchment. High-impact events such as the visit by the head of US Southern Command to the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, the arrival of the CIA director in Havana, and the leaking of conversations with the favored grandson, Raul Guillermo Rodriguez Castro—alias “El Cangrejo”—served to amplify the conflict through microphones and secret diplomacy. This imbalance shows that the Trump administration’s strategy was leaning toward psychological attrition, using expectations of an imminent collapse merely as a tool of pressure.
On the island, this strategy had a twofold impact. For the leadership, it provided an excuse to dust off the rhetoric of a besieged fortress and justify a package of 176 measures aimed at economic opening. This pragmatic shift dovetails with demands from reformist voices within the regime for the “liberalization of the productive forces” and is nothing more than a display of the regime’s adaptive capacity—one we have seen before. To survive, Castroism is showing its willingness to set aside socialist principles—although it denies doing so rhetorically—and abandon its responsibility for social protection, opening up the economy but without offering the legal and political guarantees needed to ensure that the changes will last. It is a cynical instrumentalization that—as occurred in the 1990s—the regime could reverse as soon as circumstances become more favorable.
Unlike the rhetoric, which remained at fever pitch from the outset, economic pressure tightened the screws gradually, moving from diplomatic probing to direct strangulation. While exploratory efforts and demands for the release of political prisoners prevailed in March and April, beginning in May the situation entered a phase of financial pressure against the support structures of the Cuban regime, with measures accumulating such as the cancellation of commercial licenses and the expansion of sanctions against key components of the military-economic power structure—GAESA, CUPET, and ICAP’s finances. However, by repeatedly targeting the same structures, the pressure ultimately eroded the country’s overall economy without managing to fracture the hard core of military or Communist Party power. Castroism remains in power, and Miguel Díaz-Canel remains president.
Beyond the speeches and sanctions, the record of these months exposes a critical failure to address the needs of ordinary people. Although Washington approved aid funds and turned to organizations such as Caritas and to consular channels to provide targeted assistance in vulnerable areas, the actual impact of those actions was barely noticeable compared with the scale of the need. The gaps between the aid announced, the complexity of distributing it, and the magnitude of the crisis demonstrate that protecting the population was not a priority of the strategy. Caught between the ineffectiveness of sporadic and insufficient foreign assistance and the Cuban state’s enormous inability to provide basic necessities, citizens have had to activate their own mechanisms of protection: mutual assistance, neighborhood solidarity, and community support have become the only real survival network.
The Limits of the “Trump Formula for Venezuela”: Lessons for Cubans
The dynamics analyzed above compel us to look again at the scenario that served as inspiration, since, after all, the premise that “Cuba is next” remains tied to expectations of change that are still unfinished business in Venezuela. By mid-2026, the Venezuelan reality remains far from consolidating the long-awaited democratic transition, in a context in which opposition forces coexist with the continued presence of a repressive apparatus that, although restrained, remains intact and continues to hold hundreds of political prisoners behind bars. At the same time, geopolitical pragmatism has prioritized oil agreements and operational stability over the demands of civil society and the needs of an everyday economy in which inflation devours the purchasing power of the vast majority.
This paralysis exposes the flaws in the model that fueled the illusion of a domino effect, a fantasy rooted in the assumption that international politics is driven by ethical commitments rather than cold calculations of national interest. The Cuban opposition’s confidence in the formula applied to Venezuela centers its expectations on the threat of military action rather than an increase in sanctions, a strategy whose effectiveness has been widely questioned after decades of embargo. Moreover, Trump’s rhetoric—suggesting that the cost of the intervention could be recouped through oil—laid bare a transactional logic conditioned on tangible benefits for the United States, a pragmatic factor that changes the rules of the game when an attempt is made to apply the same recipe to Cuba.
What is happening in Venezuela illustrates the gap between promises of maximum pressure and realpolitik. The recent opening of negotiations between the power bloc led by Jorge Rodriguez (Delcy’s brother and head of the National Assembly) and sectors of the opposition—under Washington’s tutelage—shows how priorities are being reordered. Faced with the global oil market, the flow of crude to the United States, and the urgency of containing migration, the stabilization phase is dragging on amid opaque reshufflings, the postponement of citizens’ priorities, and the exclusion of political leaders, leaving a landscape of growing political uncertainty.
There is a key lesson here for Cuba’s democratic forces. Washington’s pressure certainly weakens the regime’s architecture and opens a window of opportunity for change; however, the problem lies in the absence of strategic thinking capable of taking advantage of that opportunity. The dilemma is clear: if leaders with enormous popular support such as María Corina Machado have been sidelined by agreements among elites, Cubans can expect little unless they demonstrate organizational capacity and coordination.
Becoming a key political actor in an eventual transition urgently requires what in political sociology we call the rearticulation of historical agency: civil society’s capacity to organize itself, build networks of trust, and contest the political initiative, preventing any reshuffling among elites from once again marginalizing the citizenry.
From Catharsis in the Streets to Political Organization: Overcoming the “Day After” Trap
In the daily lives of people on the island, the crisis translates into growing impoverishment. Amid the hardship, however, protests occur every day, especially at night, when banging pots and pans and burning garbage express people’s frustration and dignity, although they function primarily as a cathartic exercise. The cumulative logic of any collective action sustained over time—protests have not ceased since July 11, 2021—should lead to the formation of a citizens’ movement capable of directly confronting those in power.
In Cuba, the transformation of ordinary people into political actors runs up against seemingly insurmountable structural barriers: the extreme state surveillance, Internet shutdowns, restrictions on movement, and the physical exhaustion produced by a life consumed by the struggle for subsistence. When those obstacles cannot be overcome, individual solutions ultimately prevail over collective action as a means of resolving the conflict between citizens and despotic power.
Compounding this internal exhaustion is a recurring failure among the opposition and activists: the obsession with the “day after.” Among political groups, academics, and activists, there is no shortage of draft constitutions, transition plans, and government programs designed for the moment after the regime falls, while debate and action focused on the “day before” are scarce. This tendency usually takes for granted that change will be driven by the collapse of the system or by the actions of an outside force—a surrender of agency that relegates Cubans both on and off the island to a secondary role, reserving the starring role for Washington or for that figure within the regime who will supposedly break ranks and whom people still insist on searching for.
Venezuela serves as the latest reminder that, even when citizens are organized in advance and involved in bringing about change, the “day after” offers few guarantees when agreements among elites displace citizens’ aspirations. Nevertheless, only through such prior organization is there a genuine possibility of contesting the initiative and redirecting the country’s political course.
Looking toward the coming months, perhaps the most fruitful path for activists and the diaspora is not to speculate about hypothetical scenarios, but to build a transnational network capable of providing the resources and tools needed to sustain citizen organization both inside and outside Cuba. Such a relationship requires constant dialogue between the experience of exile and everyday life on the island, aimed at nurturing local resistance and projecting its demands internationally, especially when the humanitarian price being paid by ordinary people is already devastating.
Ultimately, rather than continuing to wait for an unlikely external intervention or an automatic rupture of the regime, the sustainability of any transformation rests on recovering collective agency. The question that remains is how each of us, from our own position and with the means and possibilities available to us, can help support that process.
This article was translated into English from the original in Spanish.
