Michael Crowley

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?

Well, it could be.

But the experts that I talk to say, in the words of one of them, it's a fool's errand to try to find Adelce Rodriguez in Cuba.

Hmm.

Why?

Because of the nature of their political system, number one, it's very unlikely that you would have somebody who was willing to kind of

step out of the political culture and allow themselves to be seen as a sort of American puppet.

At least in Venezuela, you have a substantial part of the population that has some sympathy for the United States.

But there's just going to be very little of that in Cuba.