The Trump Administration’s ‘Magical Thinking’ on Cuba

In November 1999, Havana’s Latinoamericano stadium sold out for a baseball game that was billed as a friendly rivalry between Latin America’s oldest and newest revolutionary leaders. Hugo Chávez had been Venezuela’s president for less than nine months when he took the field opposite Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who had led his country’s revolution 40 years earlier, when Chávez was just 4 years old. The crowd roared “Chávez! Chávez!” as the energetic Venezuelan leader trotted onto the field, dressed in white pinstriped pants and a red-blue-and-yellow windbreaker with white stars across the sleeves—a nod to his country’s flag. Castro, dressed in green slacks, a red cap, and a blue windbreaker emblazoned with the letter C, spent most of the night calling the plays in the manager’s box.

Castro saw Chávez as a loyal protégé, a fellow socialist traveler who shared his dream of creating the united Latin America that Simón Bolívar, known as El Libertador, strived to build as a soldier and statesman in the early 19th century. U.S. sanctions were stifling Cuba, and Castro was still trying to recover from the loss of his country’s top benefactor, the Soviet Union, when it collapsed in 1991. He saw Chávez’s ascendance as a turning point, the baseball game epitomizing the ideological union between Havana and Caracas. The relationship proved so symbiotic that it outlived both Castro and Chávez, surviving decades of geopolitical tumult and hostility from Washington.

Today, that relationship is being tested in new ways. The Trump administration has forecast that the arrest and extradition of Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, is only the first in a series of dominoes to fall, with Cuba perhaps the most important and symbolically resonant. “We are not big fans of the Cuban regime, who, by the way, are the ones that were propping up Maduro,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on NBC’s Meet the Press the day after Maduro was seized.

“If I lived in Havana and I was in the go