Recent conversations between representatives of the US and Cuban governments have attracted the attention of international actors and generated intense media coverage. This avalanche of information has provoked very diverse states of opinion, and has even accentuated polarized positions regarding the probable scenarios of the supposed ‘negotiation’ and the interests of the actors involved.
For the Cuban regime, the adverse geopolitical and regional context, the persistent structural crisis and its systemic effects, the ‘Venezuela’ effect and the energy blockade caused by Trump’s January 29 executive order, have created a scenario of unprecedented isolation and vulnerability. This has forced the island into a process of limited ‘negotiating’ opening under conditions of maximum coercive pressure.
We are in the presence of a tactical dialoguenot a strategic negotiation, given the lack of a ‘core of possible agreement’. Autocracies are averse to negotiation, and when restrictions force them to dialogue, their preference is inelastic: survive by controlled adaptation of the political model.
I propose focusing the analysis on the actors with the capacity to strategically influence the negotiation. Firstly, the statements of the US presidency, mainly its Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the architect of the exchange, and eventually, President Trump, as well as government spokespersons, legislators and senators. This information flow has not always been coherent or constructive in dialogic terms.
Marco Rubio’s statements have moved from the optimism of ‘economic liberalization’, given the ‘structural incapacity’ of the regime, to the normative conditionality of ‘democracy as a non-negotiable condition’. This reflects the persistent tension between the strategic interests of regional stability and the political pressure of the Cuban exile, especially its maximalist ‘hard’ sector.
In addition, there is another sector of moderate exile, with a pragmatic, business orientation, which seeks economic investment as a condition for progressive political liberalization. The capacity for influence of this veto actor, exile, explains the duality and oscillation between pragmatism and maximalism in the projection of the US government, more oriented by the dynamics of domestic politics than by a consistent strategy of international politics.
From the communicative point of view, the discursive radicality of Trump’s statements “It will be a great honor to take Cuba… I can do whatever I want with it”, misinform and raise the costs of a possible negotiation, generating a perverse effect that legitimizes the political closure of the regime, intra-elite cohesion and the reinforcement of the anti-imperialist narrative.
The absolute monopoly of the regime on information in Cuba is known. The recent statements by President Miguel Díaz Canel have been defensive reactions that dialogue with ‘rumors’ viralized on digital platforms and international media. Some important decisions have taken the Cuban president himself by surprise; for example, the sudden replacement of the former Minister of Economy. And given the opacity and verticality of the regime, we can assume that strategic decisions are made by a small civil-military leadership headed by Raúl Castro and figures with historical ties, fundamentally military.
The limited calculation of these is compensated by the presence of two negotiators who are members of the historical leader’s family, Alejandro Castro Espín and Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, and is subsequently publicly ratified in the state bodies and the Cuban Communist Party (Political Bureau, Central Committee, National Assembly). The Foreign Ministry is in charge of its international dissemination and the official press is in charge of its internal communication.
As is known, the Cuban position has fluctuated from ‘mutism’ to ‘denial’ and from acceptance of ‘constructive dialogue’ to rejection of the terms of negotiation. This shows that Cuban negotiators are willing to talk about common ‘technical’ issues (security, migration, drug trafficking, etc.), including economic investment and small concessions in human rights, but not about structural reforms that imply decisive changes in the economic and political nature of the regime.
In this sense, negotiation or dialogue, for the Cuban regime, means a defensive interaction aimed at authoritarian survival. In other words, the regime tolerates economic deterioration, perceives structural reforms as risks, and eliminates political change as a likely option. Their priority is not to maximize economic well-being, but to minimize the risks of collapse and loss of political control, activating their adaptive authoritarian resilience resources.
While it is true that economic sanctions function as pressure mechanisms that alter the costs and benefits of certain political decisions, comparative studies on authoritarianism have demonstrated the ability of certain regimes to survive prolonged crises by activating mechanisms of limited adaptation, institutional control and selective repression. In this sense, the current interaction between both governments could be defined as a case of negotiation under coercion in conditions of structural asymmetry rather than a normalization process.
The US attempts to capitalize on Cuba’s systemic vulnerability to induce structural economic and political changes, while the Cuban regime responds with controlled economic reforms aimed at preserving political continuity.
Everything seems to indicate that the US strategy of sustained structural coercion produces a strategic effect of negotiating resistance on the part of the Cuban government. If Marco Rubio assumes structural political changes as a negotiating principle and the Havana regime sets an absolute red line “the political system is not negotiable”, we are in the presence of an asymmetric negotiation without intersection of preferences (or without a zone of possible agreement) whose result will be an unstable balance between coercion, resistance and limited dialogue.
This fragmented and unstable negotiation tends to produce partial, reversible and contingent agreements whose probable result would be economic adaptation, tactical concessions and political continuity of the regime. The great paradox will be, then, whether the strategy of sustained structural coercion can produce structural political change in Cuba or whether it reinforces the defensive logic of the regime.
*This article was originally published in Latin America 21.
