Lizette Alvarez is a Miami-based journalist.
“We’ll work a deal,” President Donald Trump recently told reporters aboard Air Force One. “We’re going to work a deal with Cuba.”
After 67 years of bungled U.S. invasions, armed incursions, attempted assassinations, rhetorical thrashings, and countless rounds of economic sanctions, I can only say: It’s about time.
In 1961, my parents and older siblings fled Cuba for Miami, leaving behind jobs, family, an apartment and, ultimately, their homeland in the wake of Fidel Castro’s revolution. They were among the first wave of Cuban exiles to shape Miami into a powerful city, a place steeped in not only Latino flash but also the fury and desire for vengeance ingrained in our community’s multigenerational trauma.
Far too many decades have since plodded along, netting no progress toward détente. Cuban exiles in Miami could never acknowledge the failure of their all-or-nothing, hard-line approach. The Castros and their surrogates could never admit the folly of their slavish devotion to an unworkable communist economic system, abandoned by even its fiercest believers — the Soviet Union and China.
But Trump’s love of the deal and Cuba’s imminent collapse present a golden opportunity to finally drive meaningful change on the island.
The president, who I believe is wrong about many things, is correct about this: A deal — not violence or a military raid, which could trigger chaos and mass migration — is the only way to bring about that change. The moment is now: Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was raised in Miami by Cuban parents. Although he is a hard-liner on Cuba, he’ll do what Trump tells him to do. Even if he embraces a softer deal, Miami’s exile community will accept it.
The linchpin in a potential deal is the template Trump has created for American interference in Latin America: go-slow regime change. After U.S. Special Forces hustled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of Caracas, Trump made the surprising decision to hand power not to opposition leaders but to Maduro’s number two, Delcy Rodríguez, a more compliant firebrand. In return, Trump seized Venezuela’s oil while pushing Rodríguez to begin freeing political prisoners, which she is doing, albeit slowly. Venezuelans in Miami hope free elections are next.
A similar kind of arrangement can — and should — play out in Cuba, minus military involvement. The United States could lift the embargo on the island, proffering economic and strategic help. In exchange, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel would have to agree to deadline-driven reforms: releasing political prisoners, eliminating restrictions that hamper private investment and business, removing constraints on the press and other forms of free expression. And, eventually, holding open elections.
The U.S. possesses nearly all the leverage. Cuba’s leadership knows it has no options. The island’s fuel scarcity is immense; on Tuesday, it ran out of jet fuel. Venezuela and Mexico have closed the spigots (Trump has threatened tariffs on those who provide it). And while the children of Cuba’s elite live lavishly, the island’s people are starving.
“It’s time for Cuba to talk,” Hugo Cancio, a Miami businessman who deals regularly with Cuban officials because his online supermarket chain exports food to the island, told me. “It’s no longer reasonable to keep asking for sacrifices from a people already living at the limit in order to sustain a dysfunctional system of government.”
Not a single pillar of Fidel Castro’s seismic revolution remains. Babies and adults go hungry. Sick people must haul their own medicine, sheets and even surgical tools, sent by Miami relatives, to decrepit hospitals. The education system is gutted. Cubans sift through trash for scraps. Twelve-hour power outages cutting off the water supply paralyze the country. Garbage heaps onto streets. An astonishing 2 million Cubans reportedly fled the island between 2021 and 2023. Those who remain are desperate for peaceful change.
Meanwhile, Cubans in Miami suffer, too. Some are being detained and deported. Cold War immigration privileges are gone; Cubans with temporary legal status are no longer safe and are chased by immigration agents.
Cuban Americans helped deliver the presidency to Trump in 2024. Now some tell me they regret it. The status quo — here and there — is unacceptable.
Of course, Cuba is not oil-rich Venezuela. But it offers other opportunities. Trump loves a gorgeous beach as well as the prospect of new construction projects. The real prize for the president, though, would be taking credit for transforming Cuba — an island that has bedeviled the U.S. since the Cold War — into a free society.
Radical change in Cuba won’t be easy. There is no Delcy Rodríguez in the wings. The island is in ruins, and rebuilding it will take a decade or more. Opposition leaders live abroad or sit in prison. Democracy is an alien concept. And Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother and a guardian of the revolution, is still alive.
If nothing changes soon, Cubans, starved of basic goods, will risk heading to Miami by sea in a new wave of mass migration while the island crumbles behind them.
Cuba’s leadership says it wants to talk — the two governments have exchanged messages — but certain issues are off the table. “We are ready to sit down and have a meaningful, serious and responsible dialogue,” deputy foreign minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío recently said on CNN, adding that Cuban sovereignty is not on the table.
The Cuban diaspora wants to help. Large, rich and powerful, it can assist in rebuilding Cuba — but it must check its lust for revenge at the door.
“The whole point of this struggle was to find a solution,” Joe Garcia, a former Democratic congressman from Florida who served as a go-between for Havana and Washington in the Obama and Biden administrations, told me. “So let’s find a solution.”
I’ve been to Cuba many times as a reporter, and each time, it felt like home. Cubans are Cubans wherever they are, with their sense of humor, kinetic energy, love of music. The “chispa,” as we say — the spark; that is our bond.
It’s time to find a way forward that will unite all Cubans in freedom.
correctionAn earlier version misstated the year when Cuban Americans helped deliver the presidency to Donald Trump.
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