Cuba and the United States: A Window That Cannot Be Wasted

An analysis of confirmed talks and their implications for Cuba, the region, and the future of the blockade

Serafín Seriocha Fernández Pérez · March 2026

On March 13, 2026, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel confirmed before the highest structures of the Communist Party what Washington had already been hinting at for weeks: officials from both governments have held conversations aimed at identifying bilateral problems and exploring solutions. The confirmation comes at Cuba's worst economic moment in decades — three months without receiving oil, massive blackouts, postponed surgeries, bakeries burning firewood — and in the context of a Trump who has oscillated between threatening regime change and proposing a deal. These are dramatic circumstances. They are also circumstances that, paradoxically, open a historic opportunity Cuba cannot afford to waste.

I. The fact of talking: a partial antidote to anxiety

Trump is, by definition, unpredictable. He has threatened regime change. He has compared Cuba to Venezuela in the wake of Maduro's arrest. He has hinted at a "friendly or otherwise" takeover. None of this can be ignored. And yet, there is one fact that deserves analytical attention: both parties publicly acknowledge that a communication channel exists. That mutual acknowledgment, in itself, has political value.

In the logic of international crisis management, the total absence of communication is the most dangerous scenario. The risk of uncalculated escalation, of misunderstandings becoming incidents — such as the February 25 boat incident that Díaz-Canel described as a "terrorist attack," and for which the FBI's arrival to cooperate in the investigation is now expected — diminishes substantially when there is a hotline, even an informal one. The talks are not a guarantee. But they are a factor that lowers the temperature, and in a context as volatile as the current one, that is no small thing.

Yet there is a darker reading that analytical rigor demands we not dismiss. Trump's unpredictability is not merely rhetorical noise: it includes the structural possibility that negotiation itself is being used as cover. The arrest of Maduro — a night operation, swift and surgical, executed while diplomatic channels remained formally open — is a precedent that Havana cannot afford to forget. If the U.S. military is unusually quiet on any given day, that silence may not be a sign of restraint. It may be the calm before a covert operation.

 Washington has done it before. The history of U.S. policy in Latin America is, in no small part, a history of handshakes that preceded destabilizations.

This cuts both ways. Cuba, too, has every legitimate reason to use negotiations as a window for buying time — to stabilize, to reorganize, to secure alternative alliances. That is not cynicism; it is the rational behavior of a small state under existential pressure.

 The uncomfortable truth is that both parties may be negotiating in good faith on the surface while hedging their bets beneath it. Recognizing that dynamic does not invalidate the talks. It simply means that the existence of a channel, however valuable, is not the same as the existence of trust — and that neither Havana nor Washington should confuse the two.

Díaz-Canel was careful in his language: a "sensitive" process, approached with "responsibility and seriousness," still "far from" concrete agreements. The Vatican — the historic mediator since the 2015 thaw — has reappeared on the scene. Mexico and its president Claudia Sheinbaum have played a facilitating role that, though discreet, was acknowledged. These international actors are procedural guarantees, not substantive ones. But they matter.

II. The tourism equation: dollars, diaspora, and development

Cuba has spent decades building an impressive tourist infrastructure that, under normal conditions, would have much to offer: beaches, historic heritage, gastronomy, culture, medical services. That infrastructure was built largely through state investment and international cooperation, and it has been the country's primary source of foreign currency for the past thirty years. The problem is that the blockade and the travel restrictions imposed by the United States have artificially ruined its potential.

A lifting of travel restrictions for American citizens — and especially for the Cuban community residing in Miami and throughout Florida — would have economic effects that can hardly be overstated. The Cuban diaspora represents one of the most powerful tourist markets Cuba could activate immediately: people with family ties, with direct cultural interest, with real spending power. This would not be anonymous mass tourism, but tourism of reconnection, dense in both affection and money.

For this opening to translate into genuine development for the Cuban people, rather than simply becoming a business between Miami entrepreneurs and the State — in which Cuban residents can and should also participate — the State needs an intelligent fiscal framework. Taxes on tourist activities, if structured equitably and without being confiscatory, can provide resources not only for the basic services currently in collapse — electricity, transportation, food, healthcare — but also to finance compensation mechanisms that facilitate new investment. And those basic services, in turn, are a precondition for tourism itself. The logic is circular and virtuous: more funded tourism, better services; better services, more sustainable tourism.

III. The Latin American dividend

There is a dimension of this rapprochement that is often analyzed in exclusively bilateral terms, and which deserves a broader reading: the impact on relations between the United States and Latin America, and particularly with the Latin American left.

Cuba has been, for sixty years, the most potent symbol of injustice in the American progressive political imagination across the region — from the blockade to the interventions to the destabilization attempts. All of it has had an effect of negative cohesion, uniting ideologically very different governments around the defense of Cuban sovereignty. As long as Cuba remains an open wound, the Latin American left will have an unbeatable argument against Washington.

A genuine normalization process, negotiated with respect for Cuban sovereignty, would radically change that scenario. It would not eliminate historical tensions or resolve the structural contradictions of U.S. foreign policy in the region. But it would deactivate the symbol. And in politics, symbols carry their own weight. The Trump administration, which has obvious commercial and strategic interests in Latin America, should be calculating that dividend more seriously than it appears to be doing.

IV. The mixed economy as horizon: from the Constitution of 1940 to Moncada

If tourism is the most immediate gateway to economic opening, the underlying question is what economic model is built from there. Cuba has a constitutional heritage that is often forgotten: the Constitution of 1940, admired throughout Latin America for its social and democratic character, envisioned a mixed economy combining state, private, and cooperative ownership, regulated by the State in pursuit of collective wellbeing. It was not an orthodox socialist model. It was a model of regulated capitalism with a strong social component, analogous in many respects to what the Scandinavian countries were building in the same era.

The Moncada Programme itself — the political document that articulated the revolutionary movement of 1953 — included among its commitments the participation of workers in company profits. Not as rhetorical decoration, but as a structural measure of redistribution. If Cuba is to open its economy to private capital, national and foreign, that opening should include real mechanisms for labor participation in profits: co-ownerships, participation funds, representation on boards of directors. Not because it is utopian, but because it is the only way for economic opening to honor the original spirit of the revolution and avoid reproducing the extreme inequalities that have been generated in other post-market-transition contexts riddled with corruption.

A gradual and organized opening — not a neoliberal shock, not a disorderly privatization — could give rise to that mixed economy model which has deep roots in Cuba's own political history. The incorporation of both the Cuban community living abroad and those residing in Cuba would rescue that national tradition. Gradualism is not timidity. It is strategic intelligence: it allows the State to retain regulatory capacity, for state enterprises to be restructured rather than liquidated, and for the domestic market to develop before being exposed to global competition.

V. Sovereign pragmatism: reforms and lifting of the blockade, two sides of the same coin

There is an argument frequently raised in the most orthodox circles of Cuban politics: to link internal reforms to the lifting of the blockade is to surrender sovereignty, to accept that Washington has the right to condition Havana's decisions. It is an understandable argument in symbolic terms. It is, however, a political mistake of the first order.

Cuba needs reforms. It needed them before the current energy blockade, before the fall of Maduro, and for at least a decade before that. The existing economic model is not failing solely because of the blockade: there are structural inefficiencies, institutional rigidities, an absence of productive incentives — all of them endogenous — that the Cuban government itself has acknowledged at various moments. To deny that is to do Cuba a disservice.

That said: with an active blockade, many of those reforms would be ineffective or simply unviable. What is the point of opening the domestic market if there is no foreign currency or fuel? What is the point of modernizing the state enterprise if there is no access to technology or international credit? The blockade is not the sole cause of all of Cuba's problems, but it does act as a multiplier of all of them. The current economic war is devastating. To link these pressure measures to the reform process is not a surrender of sovereignty: it is pragmatism. It is killing two birds with one stone — as popular wisdom puts it with more shrewdness than elegance — implementing the necessary reforms at the same time as Cuba is freed from an economic war that has been eroding its productive and social fabric for more than six decades.

Sovereignty is not measured by the refusal to negotiate. It is measured by the ability to negotiate on equal terms and to obtain concrete results for one's own people. Díaz-Canel was precise on this point: any process must take place "on the basis of equality and respect for the political systems of both States." That condition is not rhetorical: it is the red line. And within that line, there is enormous space for pragmatism.

Conclusion: History does not wait

The conversations between Cuba and the United States are, still, a promise without content. There are no agreements. There is no roadmap. There are no guarantees that Trump will not blow it all up tomorrow with a tweet or a sanction. All of that is true. And yet, the moment exists. The window is ajar.

Cuba has survived sixty years of systematic hostility through a combination of ideological conviction, international solidarity, and a popular resilience that has been, simultaneously, its greatest source of pride and its greatest sacrifice. That resistance carries a cost measured in blackouts, in postponed surgeries, in young people who emigrate, in bakeries burning firewood in the twenty-first century. There is no room for romanticism before that balance sheet.

If there is an opportunity to negotiate a way out of that situation without sacrificing social justice, without reproducing the inequalities of other post-transition models, rescuing the original legitimizing foundations, without surrendering real sovereignty — not the sovereignty of symbol, but the sovereignty of reconciliation — Cuba has a historical obligation to try. Not for Washington. For Cubans.

Serafín Seriocha Fernández Pérez · March 2026