The Wall Street Journal reports the White House is seeking to identify Cuban officials willing to cut a deal as part of a ‘regime change’ bid.
A US official told the newspaper that meetings have been held with Cuban exiles and civic groups in Miami and Washington, DC, in a bid to identify a government official in Cuba who might “want to cut a deal”.
Trump has also directly threatened Cuba, writing on his Truth Social platform earlier this month: “I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”
David Smith, an expert in US politics and foreign policy at the University of Sydney’s US Studies Centre, told Al Jazeera that the White House may be “too optimistic” in thinking that threats alone will be enough to topple the Cuban government, which is led by President Miguel Diaz-Canel.
“We saw in Iran recently that Trump seemed to believe there that if there was a sufficient threat then the Iranian government might just cave,” Smith said.
“He was really encouraging the protesters and suggesting the Iranian regime was very weak, but it turned out the Iranian regime was still strong enough, repressive enough and certainly determined enough to hold on,” he said.
The situation in a country such as Cuba is also opaque to outsiders, Smith said, including the actual power of the government and the loyalty of its officials.
Ricardo Zuniga, a former official with the administration of US President Barack Obama, who helped negotiate a short-lived detente between Havana and Washington from 2014 to 2017, said Cuba’s leadership would be “a much tougher nut to crack” than Venezuela’s.
“There’s nobody who would be tempted to work on the US side,” Zuniga told The Wall Street Journal.