SYMPATHY
IS NOT A
FOREIGN
POLICY

On February 27, 2026, Donald Trump walked out of the White House toward Marine One, stopped at the press scrum, and said something no American president had said in sixty years. The Cuban government, he announced, was talking to the United States "at a very high level." And then, almost casually: "Maybe we'll have a friendly takeover of Cuba." He said it twice. Then he boarded the helicopter.

The room that erupted was not a press briefing room. It was history itself. Because that sentence, however offhand, however unscripted, represented the first time since John F. Kennedy stood at the Orange Bowl in December 1962 and made a promise he never kept that an American president had spoken plainly about what the United States actually owes Cuba, and what Cuba actually needs.

What Cuba needs is not our sympathy. It has had our sympathy for sixty years. It needs our intervention — military, economic, and diplomatic, sustained and unapologetic, with a defined objective and the will to see it through. The argument for that intervention is not new. It is 127 years old. What has always been missing is not the argument. It is the courage to make it.

AMERICA WROTE THE
OBLIGATION

The story of American responsibility for Cuba does not begin with Castro. It begins in 1898, when the United States went to war with Spain, drove colonial power off the island, and then declined to simply leave. What followed was not liberation in the full sense of the word. It was the replacement of one form of external control with another, more paternalistic one.

The Platt Amendment of 1901 made this explicit in the most consequential way possible: it was written directly into Cuba's own constitution. The United States reserved the right to intervene in Cuban affairs to preserve Cuban independence and maintain a government adequate for protecting life, property, and individual liberty. America did not merely suggest it had a role in Cuba's future. It codified that role in the foundational document of the Cuban nation.

The Platt Amendment was formally abrogated in 1934 — but the moral logic it expressed was never repealed. You do not establish legal sovereignty over another nation's constitution and then walk away from the consequences of what that nation becomes. The obligation America created in 1898 did not expire. It was simply ignored, decade after decade, until ignoring it became its own tradition.

EISENHOWER PLAYED
GOLF.

In April 1959, Fidel Castro — thirty-one years old, beard and fatigues, riding the international attention of a successful revolution — flew to Washington. He had been invited by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He was not a confirmed communist. He was not yet aligned with the Soviets. He was, by most assessments, a Cuban nationalist with a messy ideology and enormous popular appeal, who had not yet decided which direction to fall.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower was in Augusta, Georgia, playing golf. He was there for all five days Castro was in Washington. The deliberate snub — sending the Vice President as a stand-in — whether calculated or reflexively dismissive, registered as a signal of low regard. What it actually signaled was American condescension, and Castro took it personally. He was thirty-one years old. He had just overthrown a dictatorship. And the most powerful nation on earth could not be bothered to cancel a tee time.

Vice President Richard Nixon got the meeting instead. The meeting had been listed on Castro's program as a 15-minute courtesy call. They talked for nearly three hours. Nixon, a skilled political operator and lifelong anti-communist, came away with a clear verdict. In a memorandum to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles dated April 25, 1959 — now in the U.S. State Department's Foreign Relations of the United States archive — Nixon wrote of Castro: "He is either incredibly naive about Communism or under Communist discipline."

The memo did not stop there. Nixon also wrote that Castro's "ideas as to how to run a government or an economy are less developed than those of almost any world figure I have met in fifty countries." Nixon saw the danger and the incompetence simultaneously — and documented both with precision. He was right on both counts within months.

And the United States did nothing decisive about it. This is the original template for sixty years of American policy toward Cuba: accurate intelligence, clear analysis, and then — nothing. The pattern that would define seven subsequent administrations was established in the spring of 1959 on a golf course in Augusta, Georgia.

The calculation was not hidden. It was institutional. Cuba was never seen as a moral obligation; it was seen as a political liability. The exile community voted reliably Republican regardless of what was done. The American left would scream imperialism at any intervention. The international community would invoke sovereignty. The media would find casualties. So every president from Eisenhower forward ran the same spreadsheet, reached the same conclusion — Cuba wasn't worth the career cost — and passed the problem to the next administration wearing the costume of principled restraint. What looked like foreign policy was actually political self-preservation, compounding for six decades.

BRIGADE 2506
NEVER SURRENDERED.
AMERICA DID.

The Bay of Pigs invasion is almost always remembered as a failure of American planning. That framing is wrong — and the distinction matters enormously, because the lesson most people drew from it was the wrong one.

The plan, conceived under Eisenhower and inherited by Kennedy, was not without logic. A CIA-trained force of Cuban exiles, designated Brigade 2506, would land at a well-chosen site near Trinidad, establish a beachhead, and trigger a popular uprising against Castro. The plan required air superiority — specifically, the destruction of Castro's small air force on the ground before the landing. Without that, the Brigade would be exposed on the beach to attacks from the air it could not answer.

The original landing site was Trinidad — a large coastal town in south-central Cuba, adjacent to the Escambray Mountains where anti-Castro guerrillas already operated. Trinidad offered defensible terrain, a local opposition presence, and a viable escape route into the mountains if the landing faltered. Kennedy's advisors changed the site to the Bay of Pigs: a remote, uninhabited swamp on Cuba's southern coast with no mountains, no nearby population, and no escape route — chosen because its isolation would provide "plausible deniability" of U.S. involvement. They traded a militarily sound position for political cover that collapsed within hours anyway, when the repainted B-26 bombers were identified by the Miami press.

Then, days before the April 17, 1961 landing, Kennedy scaled back the pre-invasion air strikes. Then, as the invasion faltered on the beach, he canceled the follow-up air strikes entirely. Brigade 2506's 1,297 men — outnumbered more than fifteen to one — found themselves facing 20,000 Cuban troops with approximately one day's worth of ammunition, no air cover, and the knowledge that their American sponsors had abandoned them.

They fought for three days. They ran out of ammunition. More than 100 were killed; 1,189 were captured and imprisoned in conditions that could not be described as humane. They were held for twenty months. The Kennedy administration finally ransomed them for $53 million in baby food and medicine — negotiated personally by the Attorney General of the United States with the dictator who had imprisoned them.

THE DEAL THAT
BOUND EVERY
PRESIDENT AFTER

A nation of roughly 7 million people — smaller in population than New York City — nearly ended human civilization in October 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world closer to nuclear war than it has ever been, before or since. Its resolution is remembered as an American triumph — the Soviets blinked, the missiles were removed, catastrophe was averted. What is less remembered is what America gave up to make that resolution possible.

On the night of October 27, 1962, Attorney General Robert Kennedy met secretly with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The deal: the Soviets would remove their missiles from Cuba; in exchange, the United States would pledge not to invade Cuba, and would secretly remove its own Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Kennedy then called former presidents Eisenhower, Truman, and Hoover to inform them the Soviets had simply backed down — making no mention of any quid pro quo. Those calls are documented in the ExComm tape recordings at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and confirmed in Michael Dobbs' definitive 2008 work One Minute to Midnight.

Here is what the declassified State Department record shows: the non-invasion pledge was never formally completed. Castro refused to allow UN verification of the missile removal, which was a condition of finalizing the agreement. The U.S. therefore never made a formal, binding non-invasion pledge. What existed was, in the words of an internal Nixon-era National Security Council (NSC) analysis, "an implicit understanding — never formally buttoned down." A gentleman's agreement, communicated through back channels, never ratified, never signed, never legally binding on any successor administration.

And yet every president from Lyndon B. Johnson to Biden behaved as if it were carved in stone. The other party to the deal — the Soviet Union — ceased to exist in 1991. The implicit understanding, such as it was, dissolved with it. What remained was not a treaty obligation. It was institutional cowardice wearing the costume of principled restraint. Every administration that followed Kennedy inherited not a legal constraint but a political excuse — and chose to use it.

14,000
CHILDREN

Between 1960 and 1962, more than 14,000 Cuban children were airlifted to the United States. Their parents sent them. The operation, run by the Catholic Archdiocese of Miami in coordination with the U.S. State Department and Cuban underground networks, was called Operation Peter Pan — and it was born of a specific and terrifying fear: that the Castro regime would strip parents of legal custody of their children and use the schools to indoctrinate the next generation into the revolution.

Parents put their children on planes not knowing when — or whether — they would see them again. Some were reunited within months. Others waited years. Some never saw their children again at all. The children arrived alone, speaking no English, and were placed in foster homes, orphanages, and church shelters across the United States. Many were as young as six years old.

No political argument reaches the moral core of the Cuba question more directly than this. These were not adults making a calculated decision about emigration. These were children whose parents looked at what the revolution had become — the executions, the property seizures, the shuttering of civil society, the regime's explicit claim over the formation of Cuban youth — and concluded that sending their children into the unknown was safer than keeping them home. That verdict, rendered by tens of thousands of Cuban parents in the space of two years, is the most honest assessment of the revolution ever made.

NEVER JUST
CUBA'S INTERNAL
AFFAIR

The standard objection to intervention — that Cuba's internal politics are Cuba's own business — collapses the moment you examine what the Castro regime actually did beyond its own borders. Cuba was never content to be a revolutionary experiment. It was a projection of Soviet power into the developing world, and it played that role aggressively for decades.

At peak deployment, an estimated 50,000 Cuban soldiers were fighting in Angola — a commitment that began in 1975 and continued for fifteen years. Cuban military advisors operated in Ethiopia. Cuba played a direct role in destabilizing Grenada. The regime sent troops, advisors, and weapons to leftist movements across Latin America and Africa with the explicit goal of expanding the communist sphere and undermining American influence. This was not ancient history: on January 3, 2026, when U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, 32 Cuban military and intelligence officers were killed in the operation. They belonged to Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces and Ministry of the Interior and were running Maduro's internal security apparatus — confirmed by Cuba's own government, which declared two days of national mourning and repatriated their remains. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated publicly that Cubans had "basically colonized" Venezuela's security services. Cuba's foreign projection did not end with the Cold War. It was still active, at the highest level, in 2026.

The argument that Cuba was "someone else's problem" was always a convenient fiction. The regime was a Soviet force-multiplier operating in America's strategic backyard, and the United States watched it export its revolution across three continents while calling it a matter of Cuban sovereignty. Sovereignty is not a shield that covers the export of armed insurgency. It never was.

CUBA'S MAIN
EXPORT ISN'T
CIGARS.

On February 24, 1996, two unarmed Cessna aircraft operated by Brothers to the Rescue — a Miami-based humanitarian organization that searched for Cuban rafters in the Florida Straits — were shot down by Cuban MiG fighter jets in international airspace. Four men died: Armando Alejandre Jr., Carlos Costa, Mario de la Peña, and Pablo Morales. All four were American citizens or residents. The Cuban government celebrated. President Clinton signed the Helms-Burton Act. Washington produced paperwork while the families buried their dead.

What was not known at the time was that the Cuban regime had been running the largest spy ring ever discovered on American soil — and that this spy ring had provided the intelligence that made the shootdown possible. The network, known as La Red Avispa — the Wasp Network — was dismantled by the FBI on September 12, 1998. Ten agents were arrested; the total network included at least 27 Cuban intelligence operatives. They had compiled the names, home addresses, and medical files of the top officers of the United States Southern Command and hundreds of officers stationed at Boca Chica Naval Station in Key West. They had infiltrated exile organizations including Brothers to the Rescue, providing the flight schedule intelligence that enabled the shootdown. Per the criminal complaint in United States v. Gerardo Hernandez et al., they also attempted to sabotage aircraft and planned terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. The network's spymaster, Gerardo Hernandez, was convicted of murder conspiracy specifically for the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown.

And then there is Ana Montes. For seventeen years — from 1985 until her arrest ten days after September 11, 2001 — Ana Belén Montes served as the Defense Intelligence Agency's senior analyst for Cuba. She was known in Washington as the "Queen of Cuba." She briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council, and the State Department. She was, by institutional consensus, the most authoritative American voice on Cuban military capability.

Cuba's intelligence services have penetrated the highest levels of American national security, provided operational intelligence for the murder of American civilians in international airspace, and systematically shaped U.S. policy assessments to minimize the perceived Cuban threat — for decades, from inside the building where those assessments were made. This is not the behavior of a small island minding its own business. This is the behavior of a hostile intelligence state that has been conducting active operations against the United States since 1959. The symmetry is stark: while America debated the political cost of intervention, Cuba was busy intervening in America.

PEOPLE DON'T DIE
ON RAFTS BECAUSE
LIFE IS MERELY DIFFICULT.

In the spring of 1980, Fidel Castro announced that anyone who wished to leave Cuba was free to do so through the port of Mariel. Over the next six months, 125,000 Cubans left. What Castro did not disclose was that he had taken the opportunity to empty his prisons and psychiatric hospitals. Cuban Americans who had chartered boats to bring relatives home were told by Cuban port authorities: your family does not board unless you also take the passengers we assign you — criminals, the mentally ill, political undesirables. It was not a choice. Families who refused lost their relatives. Families who complied delivered Castro's unwanted to American shores. It was not an act of generosity. It was a calculated act of aggression: Cuba used the desperation of Cuban American families as the delivery mechanism to flood the United States with people the regime wanted removed from Cuban society.

Fourteen years later, in the summer of 1994, another mass exodus began. Cubans built rafts from inner tubes, wooden planks, and whatever else could float, and set out across ninety miles of open ocean for Florida. The U.S. Coast Guard intercepted tens of thousands; many were held in makeshift camps at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. An unknown number died at sea. People do not risk death by drowning, exposure, and sharks because they are mildly dissatisfied with their government. They do it because they have concluded, after exhausting every other option, that the risk of the open ocean is lower than the certainty of what lies behind them.

These two exoduses — and the dozens of smaller ones before and between them — are the Cuban people's own verdict on the revolution, delivered at the cost of their lives. Sixty years of American observers have spent enormous energy debating what Cuba's government means for regional stability, for international law, for Cold War dynamics. The Cuban people settled that question for themselves. They voted with their feet. They voted with their lives. America kept looking away.

THEY CHANTED
LIBERTAD.
BIDEN ISSUED A STATEMENT.

On July 11, 2021, thousands of Cubans poured into the streets of Havana and dozens of cities across the island. They were hungry, they had no electricity, they had no medicine. The COVID pandemic had collapsed the tourism sector. And they had simply had enough. They chanted "Libertad" — Liberty — and "Patria y Vida": Homeland and Life. That phrase was not accidental. For sixty years, the regime's foundational slogan had been "Patria o Muerte" — Homeland or Death — a demand that Cubans choose between total allegiance to the revolution and dying. "Patria y Vida" was its direct dismantling. Not a counter-slogan, but a refusal of the premise itself. You don't have to choose between your homeland and your life. That binary was never real — it was manufactured by the same regime that made both impossible. Three words undid sixty years of revolutionary doctrine.

The regime's response was swift, systematic, and brutal. Thousands were arrested. People were pulled from their homes in the middle of the night. Show trials produced sentences of up to thirty years for the crime of walking in the street. The internet was shut down. The government deployed Cuba’s elite special operations forces — the Boinas Negras, the Black Berets — against unarmed civilians chanting “Libertad” and “Patria y Vida.” The same units trained and equipped to defend Cuba against foreign military threats were turned on Cuban citizens in their own streets. The government deployed Cuba's elite special operations forces — the Boinas Negras, the Black Berets — against unarmed civilians chanting "Libertad" — and "Patria y Vida," the three words that had just dismantled sixty years of revolutionary doctrine. The same units trained and equipped to defend Cuba against foreign military threats were turned on Cuban citizens in their own streets. International observers documented beatings, forced disappearances, and the use of plainclothes security forces to infiltrate and suppress the protests. The tools of the totalitarian playbook, refined over six decades, were deployed in full.

President Biden issued a statement expressing solidarity with the Cuban people. He announced targeted sanctions against individual Cuban officials. He said that the United States "stands firmly with the Cuban people." The Cuban government cracked down harder. The prisoners remained in prison. The sanctions were largely symbolic. The solidarity statement was filed, and the world moved on. The Cuban people had reached out their hands, and the most powerful nation on earth responded with a press release.

THE NUMBERS
DESTROY
THE NARRATIVE

For sixty years, the Cuban regime has had a single explanation for every failure it produces: el bloqueo — the blockade. The choice of that word was deliberate and masterful. A blockade is a military act — ships intercepting ships at sea, an act of war. The word conjures guns and gray hulls and starvation under siege. What actually exists is an economic embargo: a body of U.S. law restricting American companies and citizens from certain transactions with Cuba. There are no ships. There is no siege. There is accounting regulation. The Cuban government turned administrative paperwork into a visual of warships and used it for sixty years to dress up incompetence as heroic resistance to American aggression.

The Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000 explicitly authorizes the sale of food, medicine, and humanitarian goods from the United States to Cuba — precisely the categories the regime claimed "the blockade" was denying them. The core embargo restricts U.S. persons and companies only — it is a bilateral restriction, not a global one. Cuba has been free to trade with the rest of the world, and has done so. The Helms-Burton Act of 1996 added extraterritorial provisions allowing Americans to sue foreign companies trafficking in confiscated Cuban property, with Title III activated by Trump in 2019 — but the fundamental freedom of Cuba to trade internationally has never been blocked.

The country that supposedly blockades Cuba sold it over $370 million in agricultural goods in 2024 alone — frozen chicken, soybeans, corn, wheat, medicines, and medical equipment. In February 2025, monthly sales hit $47 million, the highest single-month figure since 2014. Cuba also trades freely with Canada, the European Union, China, Russia, and most of Latin America. The United States embargo is bilateral — it does not prevent Cuba from building a functional economy with the rest of the world.

Cuba's tourism industry generated $3.185 billion in 2019. By 2023, that had collapsed to $1.216 billion — nearly 62% — despite $24 billion in hotel construction by GAESA, the military's commercial conglomerate. The Dominican Republic earned $7.5 billion in tourism in 2019 — more than twice Cuba's figure. Jamaica outperformed Cuba's post-2020 recovery by every available metric. Meanwhile, American chicken brands have been documented on the shelves of Cuban dollar stores at prices no ordinary Cuban could afford, the markup captured entirely by the military retail apparatus. If "the blockade" were preventing food from reaching Cuba, how does American chicken get to Havana? It gets there because there is no blockade. There is a regime that imports American food and sells it to its own people at a 400% markup while telling those people that America is starving them.

The regime claims to offer its people free healthcare, free education, free housing. For decades this was the revolution's most durable export. But there is a phrase that cuts through all of it: they are not free. You are paying for them with your liberty. The doctor, the school, the roof — they cost you your vote, your voice, your right to leave, your right to disagree, your right to exist outside the revolution's permission structure. That is the price. It has always been the price.

Cuba's problem is not "the blockade." Cuba's problem is the regime. "The blockade" is the alibi they were handed — and they have used it brilliantly for six decades to dress up administrative incompetence as geopolitical victimhood and institutionalized corruption as heroic resistance.

LEGITIMACY
GIVEN FREE

In December 2014, President Obama announced the normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba. It was framed as a new approach — a recognition that the embargo had failed to produce democratic change and that engagement might succeed where isolation had not. Obama traveled to Havana in March 2016, became the first sitting American president to visit Cuba since Calvin Coolidge in 1928, and watched a baseball game with Raúl Castro.

The normalization deal was announced on December 17, 2014 — the same day the United States released three Cuban intelligence agents, including Gerardo Hernandez: the spymaster convicted of murder conspiracy for the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown. In exchange, Cuba released Alan Gross, an American USAID subcontractor who had been imprisoned five years for delivering satellite communications equipment to Cuban Jewish communities, plus an unnamed CIA intelligence asset who had provided critical intelligence on Cuban spy operations. One American contractor and one CIA asset, in exchange for a convicted murderer and two of his accomplices. That is the math of normalization.

The Cuban government received full diplomatic recognition, increased travel and remittances, loosened sanctions, and the removal from the State Sponsor of Terrorism list — without making a single democratic concession. Not one political prisoner was freed as a condition of normalization. Not one election was scheduled. Not one independent journalist was protected. It is worth stating clearly: sanctions of any kind fall hardest on ordinary Cubans, who have no cushion against economic pressure. The Communist leadership — insulated by GAESA's revenues, military privilege, and access to hard currency — does not miss meals when American policy tightens. The men who run Cuba eat well regardless of what Washington does. The people who suffer are the ones the regime claims to represent.

What Obama surrendered was not just leverage: it was America's higher moral ground. For sixty years, the United States had held one negotiating asset that no amount of Cuban espionage or international pressure could erode: the principled refusal to confer legitimacy on a dictatorship that had jailed its opponents, executed its enemies, and exiled its children. That position cost America nothing and cost the regime dearly. Obama gave it away, unconditionally, in exchange for a photo op at a baseball game. The regime's most senior officials greeted the American president on the tarmac and smiled for the cameras. It was the unconditional surrender of America's higher moral ground.

The final act came on January 12, 2017 — eight days before leaving office. Obama ended the "wet foot, dry foot" policy, which since 1995 had allowed any Cuban who reached American soil to remain in the United States. Its elimination was a long-standing demand of the Cuban government. It was ended without congressional approval, through executive action, in the final days of an administration that had already given away everything else. The Cuban people, who had been choosing open ocean over the revolution — at the cost of their lives — for sixty years, found the only door to freedom closed in their faces.

The argument that the embargo had "failed" and that engagement would succeed assumed that the Cuban regime's behavior was a rational response to American pressure that could be modified by changing the pressure. This misunderstands the regime's interest. The regime's interest is not economic development. Its interest is survival and control. Sanctions that impose costs on the regime are not failures — they are functioning as intended. The failure is not having a coherent objective attached to the pressure. The embargo did not fail because it was wrong. It failed because for sixty years it was never part of a strategy with a defined endgame and the will to see it through.

THE ONLY THING
NEVER TRIED:
RESOLVE.

Every tool in the American foreign policy toolkit has been applied to Cuba at some point in the last 127 years. Military force, in 1898 and in the abortive disaster of 1961. Economic pressure, through the embargo that has existed in various forms since 1960. Diplomatic engagement, through Nixon's meeting, through Carter's partial openings, through Obama's normalization. Covert action, through Operation Mongoose and the dozens of CIA plots against Castro's life. Every tool. None sustained. None attached to a clear objective. None executed with the commitment required to produce a result.

Every president from Kennedy to Biden operated within the same unspoken calculation: Cuba isn't worth the political cost. The exile community votes reliably Republican anyway, so there is no electoral upside for Democrats. The left will scream imperialism. The international community will invoke sovereignty. The media will find casualties to put on the front page. So you do nothing, dress it up as principled restraint or pragmatic engagement, and pass the problem to the next administration. Sixty years of that calculation produced sixty years of a communist dictatorship 90 miles from Miami, 14,000 children separated from their parents, four men shot out of the sky in international airspace, a Pentagon analyst feeding American secrets to Havana for seventeen years, and a generation of Cubans dying on rafts and in streets while Washington issued statements.

Donald Trump does not process political cost the way conventional politicians do. He removed Maduro from Venezuela and, within weeks, eliminated Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei in a joint strike with Israel — two operations every previous administration had deemed too dangerous, too destabilizing, too politically costly to attempt. He has Rubio — arguably the most Cuba-focused senior official in the history of American foreign policy — as his Secretary of State. He has declared regime change in Cuba a national security objective for 2026. The fuel blockade he imposed in January is the first effective economic pressure on Cuba since the Missile Crisis. And he raised the possibility of a "friendly takeover" on the White House lawn as casually as if it were a real estate deal — because for him, it probably is.

Cuba doesn't need a diplomat who has memorized all the reasons this is complicated. It needed someone who hadn't read the memo that said this was impossible. Sometimes the thing a broken system requires is someone who doesn't know — or doesn't care — that you're not supposed to touch it.

The argument for intervention is not an argument for imposing something foreign on Cuba. In the 1950s, Cuba ranked among the top five countries in Latin America by per capita income. It had one of the highest literacy rates in the hemisphere, one of the best doctor-to-population ratios in the region, and Havana was by any measure one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the Western Hemisphere. The revolution did not rescue a failed state. It dismantled a country that had genuine momentum. A free Cuba is not a foreign imposition, it is a restoration.

The argument for intervention in Cuba is not an argument for recklessness. It is an argument for clarity. Military, economic, and diplomatic — sustained, coordinated, and attached to a non-negotiable objective: a Cuba that holds free elections, releases its political prisoners, and permits the existence of civil society. Not a Cuba that is friendlier to American business. Not a Cuba with a more pliable authoritarian. A free Cuba. The kind of Cuba those 14,000 children were sent away to find, that four men died trying to protect the idea of, that a generation of rafters chose open ocean over.

The shackles are gone. The pledge was never signed. The party we made it with does not exist. The current administration has the will, the stated objective, the key personnel, and the historical moment. What happens next will determine whether February 27, 2026 is remembered as the day America finally meant it — or as one more entry in a long list of moments when we said the right words and then played golf.