There’s barely any pretense that Trump cares about Cuban democracy. This is about privatizing Cuba’s public assets and getting them into the hands of Trump’s cronies.

That was the Venezuela playbook: fossil fuel companies donated heavily to his campaign, and Trump then kidnapped Venezuela’s president so that he could open the country to U.S. oil producers. This is precisely what is happening in Cuba: Trump is starving the country in the hopes that the government will institute “economic reforms” (read: privatization) that allow Trump’s donors to get rich.

One of the sticking points in negotiations with the Cuban government is that the U.S. is demanding Cuba, a poor country, pay billions of dollars to Miami businessmen to compensate them for property nationalized after the 1959 revolution. Like Haiti having to pay back the “debt” to slaveowners from their lost property values after the revolution (much of that property being human beings), Cuba is expected to pay for treating its assets as belonging to the people as a whole rather than belonging to a small moneyed elite.