Michael Crowley

And in late January, President Trump issued an executive order threatening tariffs against any country that supplied Cuba with oil.

So now we have already seen another major blow for the Cuban government, which is that the president of Mexico has said that she has suspended oil shipments to the island.

And Mexico had actually overtaken Venezuela recently as the island's top supplier.

So that's the second major supplier to the Cuban government that has stopped sending oil just this year.

You're absolutely right.

But I think what we're seeing is the reality today that American economic might, coupled with President Trump's willingness to use that economic power in ways that other presidents have not.

And then I think this long, slow dimming of the glamour of the Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro and the impact he had on people around Latin America, I think that it's probably a little more doable than it was, say, a generation ago.

It's not easy.

And, you know, honestly, it's not clear to me that they have it entirely figured out because there's just not a simple way to do this.

You know, it's very clear that Rubio in particular

wants to see this regime brought down and consigned to the dustbin of history.

But at the same time, I think Rubio recognizes that this is not something you can do overnight for a bunch of reasons.

And one of them is that it comes with real risks.

I've been talking in my reporting to a lot of people who track Cuba extremely closely.

And what they warn is that this is a monolithic, brittle,

political system, there's no political opposition because the government there has been repressive for so long.

It's going to be really hard to find some kind of a opposition leader who could take over or even to do some kind of a short-term transition to a different government.

And if you bring down the entire government without something to replace it,

You risk total chaos, violence, mass migration from Cuba toward Florida, a lot of conditions that would put the Trump administration in a very uncomfortable position of having to make choices about what they do next.

So the question is, is there a way that you can kind of engineer a soft landing?