There is a distinct, almost comforting rhythm to the pronouncements of Senator Marco Rubio, whose lifelong ambition to liberate Cuba has consistently manifested as an urgent instruction for other people to get themselves shot. Speaking to the long-suffering denizens of the island this week, Mr Rubio announced that now is the time to act. It is always, in the calculus of the Florida political class, precisely the time; the calendar in Washington is perpetually flipped to the morning of the assault, provided the ammunition, the batons, and the subsequent prison sentences are borne entirely by someone else.
To observe this ritual is to understand the supreme luxury of modern American diplomacy, which has long preferred the theatrical exhortation to the messy complications of actual statecraft. The Cuban regime is, by any sensible measure, a bankrupt, decrepit ruin, clinging to power through the dreary machinery of state terror and the stubborn incompetence of its central planners. Yet the notion that its collapse awaits only a spirited pep talk from an air-conditioned studio in the United States—delivered to a population currently preoccupied with the elusive procurement of cooking oil and basic electricity—suggests a detachment from Caribbean reality that verges on the magnificent.
This brand of performative statecraft is hardly unique to Havana’s watchers. One need only cast an eye across the morning cables to see the global ledger dominated by rhetoric that vastly outpaces reality. In Ukraine, officials have found themselves quietly clarifying that vital restrictions on Starlink remain entirely intact, despite Donald Trump’s confident pronouncements that they had been swept away by sheer force of his will. In Argentina, President Javier Milei finds an inconvenient investigation into cryptocurrency fraud quietly dissolved, governance having been reduced to ideological pantomime and digital alchemy. The modern statesman does not resolve crises; he dictates an alternative universe and leaves the mortals on the ground to navigate the wreckage.
What Mr Rubio and his admirers conveniently omit from their stirring calls to arms is the brutal mechanics of authoritarian survival. Totalitarian regimes do not collapse merely because their subjects suddenly discover an appetite for liberty; they collapse when the men holding the rifles decide that defending the palace is more dangerous than abandoning it. To instruct unarmed citizens, weakened by decades of systemic malnutrition and state surveillance, to confront a security apparatus that has spent sixty-five years perfecting the art of internal repression is not strategic leadership. It is an evasion of responsibility, disguised as moral clarity.
The cruelty of this posturing lies in its utter costlessness for the speaker. Should the Cuban people heed the call and take to the Malecón, they will be met with water cannons, black Maria vans, and the dismal hospitality of the Combinado del Este prison. Mr Rubio, meanwhile, will take to the Senate floor to denounce the predictable brutality of the regime, basking in the grim satisfaction of an outcome that was both inevitable and politically convenient. The exile machinery will secure its donations, the think-tank panels will convene in the capital to discuss democratic transitions, and Havana’s dungeons will quietly fill once more.
If Washington genuinely possessed a coherent strategy for the Caribbean, it would acknowledge the tragic limits of long-distance cheerleading. It might even reckon with the uncomfortable fact that its own embargo, far from starving the regime of power, has provided the dictatorship with a half-century of convenient alibis for its own squalor. But strategic sobriety and unvarnished truth do not win primaries in South Florida. It is far easier to sound the trumpets of Jericho from afar, waiting for the walls to tumble down, and expressing righteous indignation when the only thing that shatters is the lives of the people who believed you.
Rupert Halloway