Cuba and Trump Fear or Control?

 The relationship of the United States with Cuba over 200 years has been examined from the point of view of both fear and imperialism. 

Fear of Cuban Life and Health?

Some observers cite fear of Cuba that may have originated in the time of the Monroe Doctrine of the “imminent domain of the United States” or the abolition of slavery in Cuba as a threat to the economy of the Southern States.

In the sixty years since the Cuban Revolution, the contrast between the health and education systems of Cuba and the United States is most visible in the priority that the Cuban administration puts in a health system that focuses on state paid care that places medical professionals in the communities and focuses on preventive health care, helping people be well, as opposed to “sick” care curing disease. At the same time, Cuban medical research centres have focused on developing vaccines for the many diseases that are particularly prevalent in tropical regions.

https://cubaheal.com/2018/12/11/made-in-cuba-medicine/

 

A small but growing number of U.S. citizens are travelling to Havana for a breakthrough new treatment for Alzheimer’s, Cuba’s NeuralCIM. Alzheimer’s is a disease that systematically destroys a person's memory, personality, and ability to function.

Cuban medical schools train medical personnel for Cuba and many countries of the Global South. Cuban medical professions assist in providing health care in many other countries. The metrics of live births and life expectancy have continuously improved in Cuba until the recent genocidal blockade of Cuba by the Trump Regime that has denied oil for generating electricity for refrigerators, water pumps, schools, and hospitals. Some of the increased deaths since the embargo have been in the neo-natal wards of hospitals.

The argument that the “Private Enterprise” health care favoured by many, including “Big Pharma” in the United States, may feel threatened by a lower cost, innovation focused, universally accessible, internationally celebrated, research and development based health system focused on the ideal that “health is a human right” deserves careful consideration.

The military strategists advising the Trump regime have renewed the 19th Century imperialism that the United States is the proper and destined governing influence in the American Hemisphere (Western Hemisphere) and that includes the Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico). Under this imperialist resurgence, Cuba (and Canada) are territories that may exert influence on access to the United States much like Iran can influence access to Middle East countries by controlling the Strait of Hormuz. Unlike Iran, Canada and Mexico, have trade, social, commercial, resource, and military alliances with the United States that would make life more expensive for Americans if a “rupture” in relationships continues. 

The imperialist promoters of American exceptionalism need to recall that the “melting pot” of the American Republic owes its exceptional position to the integration of people and ideas from all nations of the world. The history of empires that tried to reign from power and false notions of superiority is one of “Rise and Fall”. 

On the brink of dictatorship

As President Trump wields more and more control of the Government of the United States, some experienced political analysts have cautioned that the Great Republic may be on the brink of dictatorship.

Neighbour on the Brink?

Andrew Coyne writing for the Globe and Mail opinion column claims Donald Trump is on the brink of becoming a dictator and asks if he can be stopped?

At some point, American democracy will find it is caught, immovably, a colossus in quicksand. The question is whether it has reached that point, or, if it has not reached it yet, whether it can still avoid doing so.

The examples pile up by the day. In recent days, weeks and months, Mr. Trump and his officials have:

• Installed National Guard troops and other military forces in the centre of major American cities, first Los Angeles, then Washington, and soon (if Mr. Trump’s threats are to be believed) Chicago, Baltimore and New York, under the guise of fighting crime. Some of the guardsmen are armed; some have been conducting arrests, for which they have neither training nor authority. The D.C. police force was likewise taken under federal control.

• Seized thousands of suspected illegal immigrants off the streets, the snatchings carried out by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents without badges, their victims bundled into cars without markings, to be sent in some cases to barbaric foreign prison camps, in some cases to their domestic counterparts, without trial, without even charges. ICE is increasingly seen as Mr. Trump’s personal police force.

• Initiated criminal investigations into various of Mr. Trump’s antagonists, from Letitia James, the Attorney-General of New York who prosecuted him for fraud, to Jack Smith, the special counsel who prosecuted him for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and for his handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, to John Bolton, his own former national security adviser who has since become one of his severest critics, to Adam Schiff, the Democratic Senator and lead manager on his first impeachment, to Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve governor who stands in the way of his desired takeover of the U.S. central bank.

• Fired or demoted police officers and prosecutors responsible for bringing the Jan. 6 rioters to justice, having earlier issued a blanket pardon for the rioters themselves.

• Threatened television networks whose programs or performers irritated him with suspension of their licences, or adverse regulatory rulings.

• Extorted massive settlements from the same networks, or law firms who had acted for his antagonists, or universities he deemed too liberal, or even corporations, like Intel, he fancied a piece of.

• Demanded Texas, Florida, Indiana and other states redraw their electoral maps, in a transparent attempt to gerrymander more Republican districts into being in time for the midterm elections; at the same time, Mr. Trump talks openly of banning mail-in ballots, while issuing executive orders demanding “proof of citizenship” for voting and requiring federal review of state electoral rolls.

• Fired the head of the Bureau of Labour Statistics for issuing unemployment numbers that displeased him; fired the head of the Defence Intelligence Agency for issuing after-action reports on the U.S. bombing of Iran that likewise disagreed with Trumpian dogma.

• Defied court orders with regard to various of the above.

• Defied Congress with regard to the spending of money for the purposes for which it was appropriated by Congress, while imposing tariffs that must constitutionally be approved by Congress.

• Issued a series of executive orders for which he has likewise no constitutional authority.

As if to give visible signs of his intent, Mr. Trump has been furnishing himself with various of the accoutrements of a dictator, from the giant portraits that now hang on government buildings, to the gold-encrusted palace that was once the White House, to the military parade on his birthday, to the endless public displays of sycophancy he requires of his cabinet members. Indeed, he has taken in recent days to musing about dictatorship as a possibility – “a lot of people are saying ‘Maybe we need a dictator’” – as if he were not just trying out the description with the public, but habituating them to it. (Coyne & Drolet, 2025)

Dan Vergano, a senior editor at Scientific American, comments on a May report in Politics & Policy written by political scientist Daniel Stockemer of the University of Ottawa.

Rather than a coup, Trump’s attacks on law firms, universities, immigrants and others constitute “a more incremental form of democratic erosion,” he writes, one that follows a six-step theory of incremental autocratization based on research on the democratic backsliding seen worldwide in recent decades. 

The model arose in major part from the work of political scientist Marianne Kneuer of the Dresden University of Technology. She looked at the last quarter-century’s collapse in Venezuela, examining how states turn from democratic to autocratic in stages, as opposed to a sudden coup.

The U.S. has already breached the first three steps of Stockemer’s theory. The first step is one of social turmoil; this originated with the Tea Party movement during the Obama administration. Marked by angry politics, backlash against minorities and immigrants, and distrust in institutions, the U.S. has in the last two decades changed from a “full” to a “flawed” democracy, according to the Economist’s global democracy index.

The second step requires a “project of radical change,” like the populist movement of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in the 1990s, or in the U.S. case Trump’s MAGA movement, which defends white, male privileges and holds prime loyalty for many Republicans.

The third step is a “decisive electoral victory,” applicable to Chavez in 1999 or Trump in 2024, the latter a vote that also brought Trump control of a subservient Congress.

That leaves us at the edge of the fourth step, the dismantling of checks and balances on executive power. (Vergano, 2025)

“If my theory is correct, the U.S. is still in this transition phase between democracy and autocracy,” says Stockemer, by e-mail. 

“If they move more in the direction of autocracy, we would see that the administration tries to defy more court orders.” One key part of the fourth step is the declaration of fabricated emergencies, such as the “red scare” of the McCarthy era, to trample checks and balances, such as the judiciary’s control of the legal system. In May, for example, the White House deputy chief of staff suggested Trump could unilaterally suspend habeas corpus, a legal remedy for unlawful detention that dates at least to the Magna Carta and is in the U.S. Constitution, to summarily round up immigrants. He cited an imaginary “invasion”—even though border crossings are at their lowest point in U.S, history, according to Trump’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency—as a reason. (Vergano, 2025)

Sara Dorn, a Forbes news reporter who covers politics, reports on Trump addressing Generals and Top Military about an ‘Invasion From Within’ that necessitates military response to ‘Straighten Out’ major cities. 

• Trump said “we are under invasion from within” that’s "no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms,” as he said he wants the military to focus more on domestic security, including tamping down on crime in major cities and illegal immigration.

• The president made the comments as he addressed top military generals gathered at Quantico for a last-minute meeting called by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (who separately blasted what he described as “fat generals” and an out-of-shape military).

• Trump said previous presidents “used the armed forces to keep domestic order and peace,” lamenting “now they say you aren’t allowed to use the military.”

• The remarks build on Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to cities including Memphis, Portland and Washington, D.C., in what he says is an effort to reduce crime there. (Dorn, n.d.)

Observers of politics in the western democracies are raising alarms about the descent of the Great Republic into dictatorship. The public actions and plans of the figurehead of this movement, when analysed scientifically, support our need for concern and collective opposition to dictatorship that will make “the land of the free” a footnote in history.

References

Coyne, A., & Drolet, G. (2025, August 29). Opinion: Donald Trump is on the brink of becoming a dictator. Can he be stopped? The Globe and Mail. Retrieved September 30, 2025, from https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-donald-trump-brink-of-dictatorship-can-he-be-stopped/? 

Dorn, S. (n.d.). Invasion From Within. Forbes. Retrieved September 30, 2025, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/09/30/invasion-from-within-trump-tells-generals-military-needed-to-straighten-out-major-cities/ 

Vergano, D. (2025, May 14). Science Tells Us the U.S. Is Heading toward a Dictatorship. Scientific American. Retrieved September 30, 2025, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-tells-us-the-u-s-is-heading-toward-a-dictatorship/ 

Three Strikes and?

The policies of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu have come under scrutiny since the horrible attack of Hamas terrorists on Israeli citizens on October 7 2023. At least “three strikes” against Netanyahu have been the subject of news commentary. Is it now time to call him out of this conflict?

Calling Netanyahu Out

Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, a weekly columnist for The National (UAE) and Now Media, and a monthly contributing writer for The International New York Times in an interview with Matt Galloway on CBC The Current defines Hamas in this way.

this is a religiously millenarian group, that it is apocalyptic and that it believes that it's doing the will of God. And so all of this is divinely mandated and there's a kind of religious imperative here. So I think there is also an irrational belief on the part of Hamas that in the end, if they are sufficiently fervent that there will be some kind of divine aid as well. (Monday October 16, 2023 Full Transcript, 2023)

Ravi Nessman, Associated Press, and  Amy Teibel, Associated Press, reporting for PBS comment that many Israelis are furious at their government’s chaotic recovery efforts after the Hamas attack. STRIKE ONE!

“It has to be clear. The government is completely incompetent,” said Ruvi Dar, a clinical psychologist and Tel Aviv University professor who has been counseling survivors evacuated from their homes.

Critics have accused Netanyahu of recklessly ignoring a raft of issues. The police force is understaffed, and the military was caught off guard on Israel’s southern flank as forces were more heavily stationed in the occupied West Bank, home to half a million settlers. The government did little to address the spiraling cost of living and rampant killings in Israel’s own Arab communities, while ultra-Orthodox Jewish and pro-settlement coalition partners have received billions of dollars for pet projects. (Chehayeb & Teibel, 2023)

Evan Dyer of CBC News reports notes Netanyahu's Hamas policy came back to haunt him — and Israel. STRIKE TWO!

A symbiotic relationship between Netanyahu and Hamas has been remarked on for years, by both friends and enemies, hawks and doves.

Yuval Diskin, former head of Israel's Shin Bet security service, told the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth in 2013 that "if we look at it over the years, one of the main people contributing to Hamas's strengthening has been Bibi Netanyahu, since his first term as prime minister."

In August 2019, former prime minister Ehud Barak told Israeli Army Radio that Netanyahu's "strategy is to keep Hamas alive and kicking … even at the price of abandoning the citizens [of the south] … in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah."

The logic underlying this strategy, Barak said, is that "it's easier with Hamas to explain to Israelis that there is no one to sit with and no one to talk to." (Dyer, 2023)

Matt Galloway on the CBC program, the Current, discussed the Israel-Hamas conflict and its deadly impact on civilians inside Gaza on Nov. 2, 2023  with Rami Khouri, a distinguished fellow at the American University of Beirut.

Rami Khouri observes that the situation has been disastrous. He focuses on the Palestinian territories, Middle East geopolitics and American foreign policy in the region.

But, you know, part of it is the Palestinian leadership's fault, and part of it is by design of Israel to divide and conquer the Palestinians. And they've worked that very well, including by helping entrench Hamas in the Gaza Strip. I mean, this is the plan from Netanyahu as well. I mean, it's been leaked and reported in the Israeli press that he found Hamas's governance of Gaza Strip useful to him and useful to the Israelis. (The Current With Matt Galloway | Live Radio, n.d.)

The lessons from past wars on terror indicate that Netanyahu’s policy to obliterate Hamas is unrealistic. STRIKE THREE!

policy to obliterate Hamas is unrealistic

The Economist International article on Fighting Hamas comments that Hamas is at the same time a religious idea, a social movement, a political party, a government and a hybrid militia wedded to terrorism. Whatever happens in Gaza, Hamas remains a powerful political force in the West Bank.

“We will obliterate Hamas. We will triumph. It might take time, but we will end this war stronger than ever.” The words of Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, are intended not only to convey resolve, but also to signal that his war in Gaza is different. No longer is Israel aiming to punish and deter Hamas. Now it wants to destroy it altogether.

In private conversations, Israeli military officials are defining the objective more narrowly: to seize the main urban centre, Gaza City; wipe out Hamas’s top political and military leadership in the territory; and destroy as much of its military capacity as possible. (Israel Needs to Resist Irrational Retaliation, 2023)

Yossi Melman, in Tel Aviv, is a defense and security analyst for Haaretz. Dan Raviv, in Washington, is a former CBS News correspondent. They write that Israel’s vow to ‘eliminate Hamas’ is unrealistic. 

Among the clearest voices saying the hostages’ welfare must come first is that of Tamir Pardo, a former head of the Mossad who was himself an IDF commando soldier. Known for thinking outside the box, he expressed to us that military rescues—even with the well-practiced expertise of Israel’s most elite fighters—would be impossible, with hostages divided into many groups in perhaps unreachable underground lairs. Pardo, and now many others in the security establishment, have reached the conclusion that negotiations are the best route to save hostages’ lives. Using Egypt and especially Qatar as mediators, four women were set free in the first releases.

While Netanyahu and the army promise to “eliminate Hamas,” that is not realistic. Hamas is an extreme Islamic ideology, a set of ideas—including total refusal to accept a Jewish state right alongside—that cannot be wiped out. But their quasi-government in Gaza can be shut down. Of course, there will then be the challenge of finding someone to govern that poverty-stricken areas needing reconstruction and a new, hopefully more positive, beginning. (Melman & Raviv, 2023)

Three strikes and you are out. The track record of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu should make the insistence on policies of Gaza occupation and continuous conflict instead of negotiations toward cessation of war very likely to fail and should not be supported by the community of nations, including the United States, NATO, and the EU.

References

Chehayeb, K., & Teibel, A. (2023, October 26). Many Israelis are furious at their government's chaotic recovery efforts after Hamas attack. PBS. Retrieved November 13, 2023, from https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/many-israelis-are-furious-at-their-governments-chaotic-recovery-efforts-after-hamas-attack 

The Current with Matt Galloway | Live Radio. (n.d.). CBC. Retrieved November 4, 2023, from https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-63-the-current 

Dyer, E. (2023, October 28). How Netanyahu's Hamas policy came back to haunt him — and Israel. CBC. Retrieved November 1, 2023, from https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/netanyahu-israel-gaza-hamas-1.7010035 

Israel needs to resist irrational retaliation. (2023, October 16). The Economist. Retrieved November 10, 2023, from https://www.economist.com/international/2023/10/16/israel-needs-to-resist-irrational-retaliation 

Melman, Y., & Raviv, D. (2023, October 28). Column: Israel's Vow to 'Eliminate Hamas' Is Unrealistic. Time. Retrieved November 13, 2023, from https://time.com/6329637/israel-hamas-war-netanyahu-strategy/