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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. President Trump says he plans on taking Cuba. We're already at war with Iran, and the conflict has spread to over a dozen other countries in the Gulf region. Cuba is at a very vulnerable moment. It had depended on Venezuela for fuel and supplies. But those shipments ended after the U.S. arrested Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and
and then the vice president, Elsie Rodriguez, became president, and she has complied with Trump. Cuba is bankrupt. The power grid is now being slowly repaired after it completely failed, and that wasn't the first time Cuba was recently in the dark. There's hardly any food or fuel, and an estimated one in five Cubans have left the country in the last few years.
Here to explain how we got to this point is John Lee Anderson.
Chapter 2: What does President Trump plan regarding Cuba?
He recently returned from a reporting trip to Cuba. He writes about Cuba in the new issue of The New Yorker where he's a staff writer. His piece is titled Is Cuba Next? Trump's Campaign to Topple Foreign Adversaries Encounters a Battered but Defiant Regime.
Anderson lived in Havana for several years in the 90s while he was researching his book about Che Guevara, who, along with Fidel Castro, led the revolution against the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. Anderson is also the author of the 2025 book To Lose a War, The Fall and Rise of the Taliban. He's reported from conflict zones around the world. We recorded our interview yesterday.
Let's start with what Trump said Monday of last week about what he might do in Cuba.
You know, all my life I've been hearing about the United States and Cuba.
Chapter 3: Why is Cuba currently vulnerable?
When will the United States do it? I do believe I'll be the honor of having the honor of taking Cuba seriously. That's a big honor. Taking Cuba. Taking Cuba in some form, yeah. Taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it, I think I can do anything I want with it. You want to know the truth? We're a very weakened nation right now.
John Lee Anderson, welcome back to Fresh Air. What was your reaction to the statement that we just heard?
Thanks, Terry. Dismay and shock. I'm just at the tone that the man who is the president of the United States, used in referring to another country.
And, of course, the dismay is not just at the type of degraded language used, but also the fact that what he just said was very counterproductive because anybody who knows the Cubans and Cuban history, this island nation just off our shores, knows that it has...
to an unusual degree, a profound nationalist sentiment when it comes to its own sovereignty, its independence, and especially vis-a-vis the United States. And that goes way beyond the history of the Marxist revolution of the past 60 odd years. It goes back to the 19th century. So this kind of dismissive language is deeply humiliating, hurtful, and would get anyone's back up on the island.
And I gather that it has.
Why does Trump want to intervene in Cuba and possibly take it over? I mean, they're bankrupt. He often wants resources like fuel or rare minerals. What does Cuba have to offer that President Trump wants?
Well, it's a 700-mile-long Caribbean island with unexploited, undeveloped beachfront property. Let's put it that way. It's a real estate tycoon or entrepreneur's dream of dreams. There is simply no place like it in the hemisphere. Cuba has barely developed its tourism potential, quite apart from the fact that, yes, it's true, it does not have oil and has very little else that's exportable.
It has massive tourist potential. there are some beach resorts, but they're on a scale, you know, minimal compared to what we have or what we've seen in the United States or for that matter elsewhere in the Caribbean. So for a real estate guy like Trump, you know, Cuba is just a bonanza waiting to happen. A friend of mine in Cuba sort of said, do you think if we
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Chapter 4: What insights does Jon Lee Anderson provide about Cuba's conditions?
If we offered him Varadero, talking about the, it's an iconic beach resort in Cuba that goes back to the mid-20th century. He said, do you think he would stop? El Trump Varadero, he said, it has a ring to it. And people both said that cynically, but also genuinely.
They actually thought, because they've heard so much about his famous transactionalism and his pecuniary motivations, apparently, and some of his policy initiatives.
It sounds like you believe that, that you believe what he wants is beachfront property.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in the, I think it was 2013, the Trump organization sent people down, executives down to the island to explore the potentials for golf courses, marinas, etc. Nothing came of it, as far as I know, but they had meetings. So that's there.
Chapter 5: How did Trump's campaign affect Cuba's regime?
Would you describe the conditions you found in Cuba on your trip in January and February?
Yeah, look, it was shockingly bad. I was there also last year in May, which was also, and I had not been in a couple of years, and I found that return just, you know, very revealing because I had been hearing about the exodus from Cuba since 2021. Up to 20% of the population is believed to have left. And the emptiness of the island is what struck me on that occasion.
I'm talking about nine months ago now. And then when I returned this time, it had worsened significantly. So there were very few tourists, which of course is an important source of foreign revenue for Cuba.
back in may and when i returned at the beginning of this year there was literally almost none i mean i i found there's a few chinese here and some jazz enthusiasts from new york there and that was kind of it and almost the you know the the squeeze on on gas with him had already begun and And so there were many, much fewer vehicles on the road.
There's always been very little in Cuba, and now there was almost none, as well as some Chinese three-wheelers. And if you leave Havana, the city itself, you find a lot of horse carts, much as you might have found in the 1920s or the 1890s. So the lights were often off throughout the city. Back in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union imploded, it was bad as well.
But now the electrical grid really has just fallen apart. And with it, virtually all public transport that existed before. And no economic activity. I mean, people simply aren't doing anything. So it was striking to see Cuba really on the ropes like that.
You also write about malnutrition, mosquito-borne illnesses, thousands of people with few doctors and people on the verge of starvation in some situations.
You know, Cuba, whatever else its critics said about it over the years, they conceded that it had this extraordinary medical health care service, which was true. Fidel Castro put a huge amount of effort and... into creating really a world-class healthcare system that it in turn exported. Human doctors are all over the world.
And whatever else was going on in Cuba, you could rely on medical specialists or the hospitals to treat illnesses. And they even had made breakthroughs in certain areas. in certain areas like retinitis pigmentosus or orthopedic and pediatric care and so on.
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Chapter 6: What resources does Cuba offer that may attract U.S. interest?
And that persisted through the Chavez years. He died of cancer in 2013. He was succeeded by his vice president, Nicolas Maduro, 2013. And the oil continued, but coinciding with Maduro's arrival in power came the collapse of the world global oil prices, which had been hugely high and became very low, which caused the implosion of Venezuela's economy.
And so we also saw a huge exodus of people from Venezuela that had gone throughout the hemisphere, as much as a third of the population left. But one way or another, Maduro managed to keep the oil coming to Cuba. Now, it ebbed and flowed. By the time Maduro was abducted by the Americans in January,
the amount of fuel that Venezuela regularly sent to Cuba had shrunk to about less than a third of what they had been sending before. Once upon a time, I think it was 100,000 barrels a day, and now it was around 25,000, 27,000, 30,000. So Cuba's oil needs are around 100,000 barrels a day. It produces its own about 40,000 barrels. As things stood at the beginning of this year,
It was getting a little bit from Venezuela and a bit more than that from Mexico. And all of that ended with the Maduro capture.
I'm wondering where Secretary of State Marco Rubio stands. So far he's been carrying on the negotiations with Cuba. And I don't think they've been officially announced, but as you say, people know that they're going on. Do you know what his goal is? Now, he's of Cuban descent, and he has been an opponent of the Castro government for a long time.
But is he on the same page as Trump in terms of what he wants the intervention to look like and the outcome to be?
In what he's said with regards to Cuba, he's been surprisingly circumspect in For a Cuban-American, you would have expected perhaps a more heated response. But he's measured his words quite carefully. He's said things like, there has to be a change in Cuba. It doesn't mean that we have to make the change. In other words, what he's saying there is he would like to see a change.
It doesn't have to happen all at once is another thing he's said. So in other words, he's sort of softening things. But he's also saying, Look, they have to change. They don't have anywhere to go. And so we're here to help. That's his sort of approach.
Rubio is basically saying through his meetings that we believe are happening or were happening, the last week seems to be an impasse, that, look, you guys need to fix things because it's not working for you. Yeah, we're withholding your oil, but we can provide you with oil. But you've got to give us something. So give us an economic opening initially.
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Chapter 7: What are the dire conditions reported in Cuba?
They could have smartphones. It was very difficult to leave Cuba before under Fidel. It was less so under Raul, etc. So he made life easier for them, although the security state stayed in place, as it has to this day. So the idea that one of Fidel's grandsons has suddenly broken with all of that familial austerity and, you know, face to the flag kind of behavior is interesting.
And of course, it's caught people's attention. And Cubans are aware of it, too, because they're now on the Internet. They weren't 10 years ago, you know. But he's like a kid of the present day. He's more like... What is he, Gen X? I don't know how you, I can't do the categories series, but you know what I mean.
That's okay.
He just does what he wants, which is sort of what an American kid would do, right?
And he also seems to satirize the government.
Yeah, yeah. You know, it's interesting that one of the Castros has produced the first, you know, in your face, I say what I want, I do what I want person on social media. Isn't that interesting?
Yeah.
Doesn't that have in part to do with the fact that he's privileged enough to be able to do it?
Yes.
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