On the menu today: A deep dive into the current state of U.S.–Cuban relations, and the Havana regime’s attempt to liberalize the Cuban economy.
Looking South
On April 30, 2020, while the rest of the world was thinking about the Covid-19 pandemic, 42-year-old Alexander Alazo drove from Middletown, Pa., to 16th Street in Washington, D.C., and stood in front of the Embassy of Cuba, ready to confront his “enemy.” He had long believed that members of “Cuban criminal organizations” were surveilling him and wanted to harm him and his family.
He raised what court records referred to as “an AK-47-style semi-automatic rifle” and fired 32 rounds at the embassy building. Cuban diplomatic staff was in the building at the time, but thankfully no one was injured in the attack. Alazo was arrested and charged with four federal offenses. Alazo pled not guilty by reason of insanity. (At the time of his arrest, Alazo told officers he “had voluntarily sought mental health services at a psychiatric hospital in late February or early March 2020 at his wife’s insistence, but he denied that he had any mental illness. He stated that he was prescribed an antipsychotic medication at that time, but occasionally misses doses.”) Under U.S. federal law, people found not guilty only by reason of insanity are held until a court finds their release would not create a substantial risk of bodily injury to another person. Probation officials approved a conditional release plan for him in July 2024, and federal prosecutors declared that a U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons medical examiner found that any risk Alazo posed due to his mental illness could be mitigated by treatment.
So now Alazo is a free man, walking the streets, after serving four and a half years of incarceration and psychiatric treatment. Unsurprisingly, the Cuban government was more than a little displeased by Alazo’s release; Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared back in 2024, “The decision taken sends a dangerous message of impunity for those who propose to take violent actions against diplomatic headquarters in the city of Washington.”
It did not help that in September 2023, some unknown assailant hurled two Molotov cocktails over the guardrail fence in front of the embassy and then promptly fled the scene. Thankfully, no one was hurt, and the damage to the building’s façade was minor, but the perpetrator was never caught.
That strange sensation you’re probably feeling right now is the unfamiliar sentiment of sympathy for the Cuban government. No matter how appalling the regime’s human rights record is, its diplomatic representatives on American soil deserve to go to work free from fear of gunshots or Molotov cocktails.
Don’t worry, that feeling of sympathy will pass. The regime botched this moment of genuine victimhood by also blaming Alazo’s church, claiming that the Doral Jesus Worship Center in Miami “was known, where people with recognized behavior in favor of aggression, hostility, violence and extremism against Cuba.” (You know those dangerous . . . churches.)
The Cuban government also contended that Alazo — who, remember, claimed that voices in his head were telling him that Cuban criminals were out to harm his family — acted as “a direct result of the policy and aggressive discourse of the United States government against Cuba, of the permanent instigation of violence and hatred by American politicians and anti-Cuban extremist groups.” Apparently, the Cuban government believes one of the voices in Alazo’s head was Marco Rubio.
Nonetheless, it was bad enough that our lenient judges are failing to protect the citizens; now they’re embarrassing us by making us look soft on crime in front of the Commies.
I know all this because Wednesday morning I attended a meeting at the Cuban Embassy; you can still see the effects of Alazo’s attack, pock marks in the columns and a bullet hole in a wall on an upstairs floor.
Wednesday’s meeting was off the record, so I can’t say much about what was discussed there, beyond a short on-the-record statement.
Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, is visiting the U.S. for the upcoming United Nations General Assembly. Regarding relations with the U.S., he said, “Cuba poses no threat to the United States, and it is illogical to believe that it could be become one. We are engaged in a profound process of changes in the country while suffering an unrelenting economic aggression by the United States that equates to collective punishment on the whole of the Cuban people.”
I can’t repeat anything that Cossío said during the meeting, but from that quote . . . I think you get the gist. You can find more of the deputy foreign minister’s perspective from his interviews with PBS and The Atlantic.
This is an intense time of transition for the Cuban regime, as it is attempting large-scale economic reforms. Not political reforms, of course. Cuba’s national legislature is the National Assembly, where every member is a member of the Communist Party, and where, in the preceding election, only the communist candidate was on the ballot. With the amazing variety of options on the ballot, turnout in the most recent election in 2023 hit a record low, as electoral abstention became a form of protest.
Back in June, the National Assembly passed a package of 176 reforms that “includes more space for private businesses, imports and exports without state intermediation, free hiring of personnel, authorization for private banks and investment by Cubans abroad. It even permits fast-food chains to establish themselves on the island.”
The vote in the 470-member National Assembly was unanimous, on all 176 proposals. (Let the record show that back in 2014, one guy in the Russian Duma voted against the occupation of Crimea, and another guy abstained. Of course, the guy who voted “no” was exiled, moved to Ukraine to lead the Russian legion against Putin’s army, and the Russians tried to kill him with a drone. But I’m just saying that on paper, Putin’s Russia has more discernible dissent than Havana’s legislature this year.)
Sofia Lagos, of Columbia Law School’s Cuba Capacity Building Project, characterizes the enacted changes as “less as a uniform liberalization than as an expanded — and still discretionary — list of exceptions to the general rule of state control.” She points out that the changes “do not establish that a contract will be enforced, that a currency will convert, that a counterparty is free of sanctions exposure, or that an approval will survive the discretion of the body that granted it.”
There are some glimmers of progress from previous reforms; last year the Cuban government announced that in 2024, 55 percent of retail sales in Cuba were from private establishments, with the remaining in state-run establishments, a figure that was as low as 4 percent in 2020. To the extent we can trust the Cuban government’s economic statistics, 1.6 million Cubans work in private establishments.
Another one of the changes is that foreign entities will be permitted to build and fully own new tourism projects on the island, no longer needing a 50-50 partnership with a state-owned entity. The Cuban government has always hungered for foreign investment; strangely, there are still international businessmen willing to pour money into joint projects, even though “nearly 6,000 U.S. companies and citizens’ properties were nationalized in the first years of the Revolution.”
In fact, one prominent wealthy New York developer has sought to build a golf course in Cuba and sent representatives of his company to the country in 2015 to scout potential sites, although the discussions never amounted to much. That New York executive, of course, is the current president of the United States. In 2016, during an interview with the CBS Miami affiliate, Trump said, “I think, at the right time, Cuba would be a good opportunity for investment. I think probably the time is not right now.” Trump added that he himself had never been to Cuba.
Cuban officials envision private sector companies operating alongside state-run industries in tourism, food production, and banking. Because ownership of shares in a private company is now theoretically possible under the changes the Cuban government is enacting, I asked a Cuban official if someday there could be a Havana stock exchange. “Possibly,” he answered. He said that his government would likely need to examine other stock exchanges, like the ones in New York, London, and China.
The Cuban government is pursuing these reforms because it has little choice. Some parts of the country have blackouts for 20 hours a day or more. Venezuela, now under new management, is no longer supplying Cuba with oil; in July, the New York Times reported Cubans “are swapping their gas-guzzling 1950s American cars for electric motorcycles and rickshaws from China.”
As Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, concluded after a recent visit to Havana, the regime is surviving while the country falls apart:
In central Havana, a giant mound of sand-colored rubble fills an entire city block. It is all that remains of the Superior Institute of Industrial Design — a stately building that in its 166 years housed a Spanish officers’ club, U.S. occupation forces after 1898, Cuba’s health ministry, and, finally, the design school. Declared uninhabitable years ago, it suffered two partial collapses in 2025. The state never sent anyone to fix it. This past February, what remained suddenly fell, entombing several squatters. When I visited in June, skinny men scaled the craggy surface, prying loose bits of brick that they carted off to build makeshift houses.
Cuba, on its current trajectory, is headed for the fate of the design school: what lies ahead is an accelerating collapse of the state and economy. Unless this course is reversed soon, rebuilding the island as a stable, prosperous, and democratic place could become virtually impossible. . . .
It’s a familiar story with sanctions against a rogue regime; the U.S. aims to weaken the government, but the collateral damage to the civilian population is considerable.
There is an enormous amount of skepticism that the Cuban government will follow through with these reforms on a scale large enough to create anything that even remotely resembles a thriving capitalist system. Promising a more free-market economy is one thing; delivering one is another. But if you’re a free-marketeer, or you just want the Cuban people to have a slightly better and easier life, you probably want to see these changes succeed. The People’s Republic of China has taught us that greater economic freedom does not always lead to greater political freedom, or a greater respect for human rights and civil liberties.
Cuban officials told me comments that echoed what Cossío said to the Times, that his government wanted a “constructive and respectful relationship” with the United States.
I was tempted to tell them that Canada and our European allies can’t get that sort of relationship right now, so I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for a courteous and considerate tone toward Havana.
Of course, the Cuban government would have a stronger argument for mutual respect if their intelligence apparatus wasn’t acting as a subcontractor to the Russians and Chinese, acquiring an attack drone arsenal targeting “the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, U.S. military vessels and possibly Key West,” constantly helping China attempt to intercept our communications, working with every anti-American faction and state under the sun, or if Cuba’s regime hadn’t spent a few decades attempting to spread leftist communist indoctrination on American soil. It’s rather difficult to have that constructive, respectful relationship when you’re working hand-in-glove with geopolitical foes who want to see us defeated.
The Cuban Embassy has a bar on the third floor, named after Ernest Hemingway.
May the only future shots at the Cuban Embassy be rum and tequila at that bar.
ADDENDUM: Someone out there thinks I claimed that Mitch McConnell was dead, which I never wrote. I did write that as a U.S. senator, McConnell owed his constituents a clearer, more detailed, and more frequent update on his health condition during his multi-month absence from the U.S. Senate. I’ve been writing this for years, since McConnell had those on-camera “freezing” moments. I made similar arguments about the late former Senator Dianne Feinstein, the late former Representative Kay Granger, and the current Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton. I wrote about Joe Biden’s obvious problems with his advanced age frequently, some argued obsessively. I am spectacularly clear and consistent on the issue of our gerontocracy.
Earlier this week, McConnell needed a lot of help to cast a voice vote in a Senate committee meeting. He’s in really rough shape. He really shouldn’t be in the Senate in his condition. But he will remain there until his term ends on January 3, 2027.