Allowing foreign investors to buy stakes in Cuban companies and opening the door to private banking are exactly the kinds of openings U.S. interests have pushed for. Cuba is no military threat. The issue has always been access and influence. A weakened Cuba is easier to reshape, and the end result usually looks like a command economy where a small elite captures the benefits. That’s the American model now. We call it a free market, but political power has replaced price as the mechanism that decides who gets what. A thing is what it does, not what it calls itself.

That’s the point I made in my earlier article, “The Salvation of Cuba.” The United States is defined as a republic, but it hasn’t functioned like one in a long time. Citizens get surface‑level information while anything meaningful is tucked out of sight. People trade freedom for comfort, and once comfort settles in, the appetite for reform disappears. That’s how a republic drifts into a political marketplace.

Cuba sits on the opposite end of the same problem. Its economy is failing because command systems always fail. Nothing improves until free markets appear, and free markets cannot exist without at least a few democratic principles standing guard. Democracy and free markets can be corrupted—as we see in the United States—but in Cuba they are simply absent.

The irony is that Cuba could be better off almost overnight if even a sliver of free‑market behavior were allowed. The demand is there. The supply is not. Cuba is in a perfect position to satisfy consumer needs that go unmet everywhere else. They could build basic cars designed to be repaired instead of discarded. They could build simple smartphones that aren’t loaded with corporate clutter. Linux is free. A Cuban‑built phone that does the essentials well would sell faster than they could make them.

In short, Cuba could manufacture the very items of high utility that are intentionally kept off the American market. The world is hungry for practical goods. Cuba could feed that hunger if it chose to.

But corruption is the wall they keep hitting. All governments are corrupt to some degree—power does that—but Cuba’s leadership holds nearly total power over its citizens. When power approaches 100%, corruption follows right behind it. Absolute power still behaves the