From "Trump Administration Said to Tell Cuba That Its President Has to Go/The United States has told Cuba that for meaningful progress to be made in negotiations, President Miguel Díaz-Canel must step down, said people familiar with the talks" (NYT).
The article at the link on "force regime compliance" is especially interesting: "Trump and Rubio’s Vision of War: The Art of Destroy and Deal/Unleashing his inner hawk, Secretary of State Marco Rubio plans President Trump’s military interventions. So far, they favor regime compliance, not change":
... Mr. Rubio is not trying to convert Mr. Trump to George W. Bush-era neoconservatism, which sought to remold other nations’ political systems, sometimes with military force, American officials and analysts say. Instead, he seems to be pursuing a new approach built on power free of principle. It is a merger of neoconservatism with Mr. Trump’s transactionalism, and it amounts to using U.S. military and economic power to turn authoritarian countries into client states. It is regime compliance rather than regime change, a doctrine of destroy and deal....
“For Rubio and other members of this younger group, foreign policy isn’t as much about regime change as much as it is about power,” said Emma Ashford, a scholar at the Stimson Center, a research group in Washington. “It is about sustaining American military primacy, making other states fear and respect us.”
Mr. Rubio laid out that idea at the Munich Security Conference last month in a speech in which he lamented the passing of the “great Western empires” and vowed that America would carry on their mantle.
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31 comments:
Yeah i trust the Times account about this (when pigs fly)
News reports saying now that Cuba is under a nationwide grid blackout. No power.
The regime has crushed the lives and the souls for three generations (literally and metaphorically)
Punitive expeditions. Spank them hard. Then have them figure out what to do to keep from being spanked again. CC, JSM
This cool weather won’t reach Cuba until Wednesday. Until then, temperatures are 80 to 90.
So it would appear Cuba is having their John Galt moment now. I guess we're moving into the post-script territory from here on.
Does anybody else think it's screamingly funny, the psy-ops campaign being waged on Iran? The way I see it, very similar to the one that placed Saddam under enormous strain, recalling him blinking rapidly on camera, like Chief Inspector Dreyfus, as George HW Bush kept pronouncing his name in an insulting way. 'Sad - em'. Hegseth today, talking about Iran's Khameni, his injuries, his supposed dim-wittedness, the potential of him being 'gay', and certainly a hisory of impotence. Feels like the same CIA-type psy-op. And Trump, laughing at the 'gay' part. Freakin' brilliant. If Trump tried this with any western leader, the furious condemnations would be filling the airwaves, but 'queer-shaming' the impotent leader of a country that declared war 47 years ago and regularly has 'Death To The Great Satan' rallies? How do you say 'Trump's being too mean again !' to that? He'll just spread his arms: 'Hey: I don't have a problem with it - but it's on my CIA briefing note . And they throw people off buildings for that, there.'
And Khameni can't be too stupid, if he has amassed a real estate empire overseas. Go psy-ops.
He seems to be more fredo then sonny but still he has a lot of blood on his hand
The negotiation is supposedly with rauls grandson (we thought grandpa was light in the loafers) so i have concerns
1) NYT is a bunch of traitors. They will publish anything - independent of truth - to advance liberalism and hurt America.
2) They hate Trump. See 1)
3) Every time Trump seemed wobbly - like he's not going to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities and later like he's not going to destroy their military - it turns out to be a head fake and he does what is necessary for America's strength.
4) I have no idea what he'll do with Cuba. But whatever the news reports - is unrelated to what he will do. "We're not going to negotiate forever with the mullahs. I'd say we should know what's going on within a week." Then 7d + 0h + 0min when he said that bombs were dropping on nuclear facilities.
Whatever he says seems completely random and its purpose is to give listeners no idea as to what he really thinks or is planning.
I love freedom and liberty and I hate despotism and slavery. I really hope the Venezuelan and Cuban people see freedom. It seems to me all we have to do is wait for Cuba. Maybe arm opposition. Everyone is saying Iran won't fall. No one is talking about arming the Iranian people and letting them fight. That scares me a little or makes me unhappy. Then I think Trump always fakes everyone out and everyone ends up being proven wrong. Hopefully this is that case too.
The vile evil Castro family live in lavish splendor… with the best of everything… while their people live in poverty.
Of course leftists adore the Castro family.
I hope they are slaughtered.
The striving in moron might be like the fall of the wall
The Castro family
Off with their heads.
Open the prisons . Let the dissenters have their freedom
Fuck the left
Ceaușescu Cuban-style
What is telling to me is how fast the cord has been yanked on reporting on the Venezuelan situation. I've only seen a couple of terse articles on the oil revenue being returned, a little bit on how the expenditures are being structured, which (from what I've read) is mostly along humanitarian lines, medicine and food.
These are events that represent profound social re-structuring of an entrenched, kleptocratic revolutionary dictatorship with a record of spawning regional instability over the past 25 years.
From the western World Class Legacy press, a few hundred miles north: Crickets. Nothing interesting here. We'll let you know.
No one is talking about arming the Iranian people and letting them fight. That scares me a little or makes me unhappy.
I'm pretty pissed about that. Civilian access to the weapons of the common soldier is the most basic of all human rights, in my view.
If the people are armed, and retain the power to slaughter the government scum if they get too big for their britches, all other civil rights can be seized at will.
If not, all civil rights are dependent on the good graces of the government scum, who have proven themselves unworthy of this privilege time and time again.
Government is the #1 enemy of humanity, by a vast margin, and can never be permitted a monopoly on armed violence.
It's time to give the people of Iran and Cuba hundreds of thousands of firearms and ammunition, and encourage them to deliver a bloodbath to the government scum.
One that will be a lesson to a lot of other tyrants and would-be tyrants in other places, not excluding Europe. If they use their military and police to bully their citizens, we can supply their people with enough weapons that they will be hunted down and slaughtered like hogs.
You need a pillow the size of a drogue chute
Cabello (the sydney greenstreet character) has been very quiet
You need a pillow the size of a drogue chute
Cabello (the sydney greenstreet character) has been very quiet
Aggie said...
What is telling to me is how fast the cord has been yanked on reporting on the Venezuelan situation. I've only seen a couple of terse articles on the oil revenue being returned, a little bit on how the expenditures are being structured, which (from what I've read) is mostly along humanitarian lines, medicine and food.
These are events that represent profound social re-structuring of an entrenched, kleptocratic revolutionary dictatorship with a record of spawning regional instability over the past 25 years.
From the western World Class Legacy press, a few hundred miles north: Crickets. Nothing interesting here. We'll let you know.
3/16/26, 8:12 PM
...
I think that means it's going great! Seriously! The left run all the media (except Fox). They despise the president and hate our country. If there were the slightest negative situation it would lead all day all night. The fact that there is no news on Venezuela or Cuba means it must be going toward freedom.
Newsmax americas watching oann
Ceaușescu Cuban-style
One of the greatest days I can recall. Christmas 1989.
There should have been hundreds or thousands of Ceausescus to follow. The UN has what, 190 member states or something like that? In my view a quarter to a third of them would be improved by having the top 100 politicians and bureaucrats and generals put before a peoples' tribunal and then summarily machine-gunned into hamburger, in 4k living color for worldwide distribution.
The example would be salutary for every other country's government too, again not excluding Europe. Or the US.
Hassayamper - I'm not saying it's not being done. I hope it's being done. I would assume it's being done. We have pretty smart people running the US government now, and CERTAINLY there are smart people running Israel's government. Surely they've thought about it. Obviously boots on the ground will be necessary for Cuba and for Iran. Just doesn't have to be OUR boots. Why not Iranian boots? Kurd boots? It makes sense to me.
It would make sense that we dropped a ton of Starlink and light weapons.
Do recall that information is a weapon also. Whatever we see the news report - it is unrelated to reality. Trump is the king of misinformation. He lets the media know what HE wants it to know and I think understands the media and the Democrats are America's enemies.
We really don't know. Maybe we did drop off a ton of Starlinks and weapons. He did say to the Iranians stay inside. It's dangerous out there. We'll let you know when it's time to move.
And there were enough brave Iranians to protest, KNOWING the regime would kill thousands of them. If they are brave enough to be killed, why would they not be brave enough to kill their tormentors?
We really just don't know what's going on. It's been TWO WEEKS! We are still in the "bomb all their stuff" phase. But we are running out of targets because we destroyed almost all their stuff.
Now we're reading that we have slow flying drones just spending all day over Iran waiting for IRGC to come out and kill them. As long as we don't have our soldiers in Iran proper this can probably continue for weeks more before we would think to see the population revolt.
What do you think about it?
I wonder about the ordinary grunts, enlisted personnel in the Iranian and Cuban armed forces. How dedicated are they to the regimes they serve? Considering the hoo-hah aroused here when it was suggested that our servicemen consider disobeying orders they find distasteful, the same might apply to them. It is proposed that we arm the ordinary citizens of Iran or Cuba so they could do battle with their fellow citizens in uniform, when their true enemy are the brass.
The Cubans living in this country won't stand for half-measures, and what Trump's negotiators is proposing sure looks like a half-measure. Things will improve as talks move forward since the regime in place in Cuba have NO bargaining power.
Trump is always ready to deal. If you like your palace, you can keep your palace. In return, allow the citizens to keep what they earn. And stop shipping fentanyl. In Venezuela the exiles are returning under some such deal.
Iran would be different because Trump makes a deal, he doesn't enact a kabuki foreign policy ritual.
And it works because it was time for a change. The settlement that followed WW II has become outdated. Israel is a power; Iran and Saudi Arabia are powers; China is a power; computers are a power. By making deals you can trace out the actual topography of present-day realities. Later, this can be analyzed into principles.
But here's our new reality - we, America, we don't get to choose whether we pay attention to Iran or not. Carter could say it was too small and powerless for our notice. Not true any longer. Head in the sand is default US policy but it won't work any more.
Where is Rick Blaine when we need him?
Something significant is going to happen in Cuba and it's going to happen very soon. The challenge now for the press and for Ivy League scholars is to detail how this is a calamity for Cuba and a stunning defeat for Trump........Historical note: When the Bourbons were restored to France, it was said that they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Maybe so, but at the end of the Napoleonic era, 30% of the male population of military age was either dead or disabled. The French left over the years has been much dumber and more unforgiving than the French right.
@tcrosse: "...I wonder about the ordinary grunts, enlisted personnel in the Iranian and Cuban armed forces. How dedicated are they to the regimes they serve?..."
I think it's a different math, with brutal repressive regimes like these. It's less about party loyalty, and more about survival. Even down to the street level, the ranks have been granted latitude to dispense violence to keep the populace in check, for decades. The ranks are full of petty tyrants, then. The one thing that cannot be repressed though, is the community network that forms, based on solidarity. The community knows who these people are, knows where they live, knows what they have done. Under the regime, the tyrants are protected. Without the regime? The lamposts might be dark right now, but they are still useful. The petty tyrants will cling to the shredded regime to the bitter end, because their life depends on its influence.
> when their true enemy are the brass.
Sure, but an AR shoots a colonel just as dead as it shoots a corporal.
Editor's Note | To properly allocate resources for Iran War reporting, we will be sunsetting coverage of:
- Trump's crypto bribes
- Trump's real estate, golf, and hotel bribes
- US military strikes on Venezuelan fishing boats
- Alex Pretti and Rene Good
- Data theft by DOGE
- the Epstein files
Next week | To properly allocate resources for Cuba War reporting, we will be sunsetting coverage of:
- The Iran War
- Oil prices
- Any prices/inflation
There is a hierarchy in the far from the grunts to the chiefs on the corporate boards
The NYT is nothing but a propaganda outlet. By the end of the month CUBA will be a much different country.
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