“Godfatheresque” US Politics towards Cuba and Latin America

By Manfred Sing

Andrés Pertierra, an IEG research fellow specialising in the history of Spanish-Cuban relations and regime survival in Cuba, is currently in high demand by the international media as an expert on the worsening situation in Cuba. He recently appeared on Deutsche Welle’s English-speaking news channel DW News and commented on the repeated power cuts on the island as well as on US President Donald Trump’s remark that he simply could “take” Cuba.

Following the US intervention in Venezuela earlier this year, Cuba lost its access to Venezuelan oil support. Andrés Pertierra, a PhD student from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, sees a clear shift taking place in the US strategy towards Cuba which “is not really in line with how the US has usually approached the topic of Cuba.” In the interview broadcast on 18 March 2026, he described Trump’s latest remark on Cuba as an expression that could just as well stem from the movie “The Godfather.” “If this was coming out of a writer room for a TV movie or something, it would have gotten nixed as being too over the top,” he said.

“US efforts to step up pressure on Cuba were an ‘incredibly weird strategic decision’”

Pertierra further said that Cuba is no “soft target” because the Cuban government “has been preparing for a guerrilla war for decades” and that US action in the region is “feeding the official Cuban government’s line on what the US has always been about.” In that sense, US efforts to step up pressure on Cuba were an “incredibly weird strategic decision,” especially because “attempts at more democratic peaceful institutional reforms and changes” in Latin America were often frustrated by the US, a “major intervening and meddling power” since the Cold War, thus supercharging “more extreme elements in the region.”

“A blowback is likely because Latin American countries might start working more closely together”

Pertierra is sceptical that the new US strategy which also tries to curb Chinese influences in the so-called backyard of the United States will be successful in the long term. He thinks that a blowback is likely because Latin American countries might start working more closely together to become less dependent on Washington. As Russia’s engagement does not go beyond words at the moment, Pertierra does not believe that Russia wants to return to its Soviet role as a patron of Cuba. Firstly, because Cuba was a financial “black pit” for the USSR, and secondly, because Russia is wary of tensions with the USA and an “overextension of their military.”

The whole interview is available here. Andrés Pertierra is also quoted in a recent New York Times article on the riots in Cuban city Morón.

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Header image: Andrés Pertierra, currently research fellow at the IEG in Mainz.

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