Gerardo Hernández Nordelo attempted to discredit the warnings from the U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, by highlighting an alleged contradiction: Cuba could not be both a failed state and a threat to U.S. security at the same time.
The reasoning appears clever, but it is conceptually weak. It confuses a government's ability to control and repress its population with its capacity to fulfill the essential functions of a state. It also ignores that internal fragility can pose risks beyond borders.
A state does not cease to fail because it maintains police forces, prisons, intelligence services, and a single party. It also does not stop posing a threat because its economy is in ruins.
The concept of a failed state is debated and there is no universal definition. However, the main frameworks for analyzing state fragility assess factors such as economic decline, loss of legitimacy, population exodus, collapse of public services, human rights violations, and the actions of closed and extractive elites.
The Fragile States Index from Fund for Peace, for example, specifically examines economic decline, the exodus of people and human capital, state legitimacy, public services, human rights, and demographic pressures. It does not require that a government has lost all territory to acknowledge a process of institutional failure.
Cuba exhibits many of those characteristics. The regime maintains a significant coercive capacity, but it is increasingly less able to ensure stable electricity, food, medicine, transportation, housing, or economic prospects.
Blackouts of up to 20 hours a day, severe shortages of food and medicine, and constant failures of the national electrical system have been documented by non-governmental organizations such as Human Rights Watch, which also emphasized in one of its latest reports on Cuba the request for assistance from the World Food Programme to provide milk for young children.
Additionally, the NGO noted that the Cuban population decreased by 10% between December 2021 and December 2023, mainly due to emigration.
That scenario does not depict a lack of government. It describes something different: a government that has maintained the tools to rule, but has failed in its duty to serve.
The apparent Cuban paradox is resolved by distinguishing between coercive capacity and institutional capacity.
Freedom House classifies Cuba as a “not free” country and describes a one-party system that prohibits political pluralism, suppresses dissent, controls the media, and severely restricts civil liberties.
Its report on internet freedom highlights the blocking of independent media, imprisonments for digital publications, and new measures to monitor content.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has also documented the absence of democratic institutions, the subordination of public powers, and patterns of persecution, criminalization, and harassment against activists, dissidents, journalists, and human rights defenders.
Therefore, the regime is not weak in all areas. It is strong where it needs to monitor, punish, and maintain power, but extraordinarily inefficient when it comes to producing food, managing infrastructure, protecting rights, or creating conditions for the population to live a dignified life.
That combination does not contradict the idea of state failure. It reinforces it.
Fragile states can pose international risks in multiple ways: mass exoduses, human trafficking, the expansion of illicit economies, humanitarian crises, regional conflicts, or the use of their territory by foreign powers.
In the case of Cuba, the most visible external effect is emigration. The departure of hundreds of thousands of people is not just a demographic tragedy caused by poor governance: it exerts pressure on the immigration systems of other countries, fuels human trafficking networks, and offloads part of the cost of the crisis created by Havana onto the outside world.
There is also a dimension of security and intelligence. The report from the State Department titled “Cuba: the capital of communism in the 21st century” portrays the regime as an actor that for decades has combined espionage, political infiltration, propaganda, and cooperation with America’s adversaries.
The document cites judicially proven cases, such as those of Ana Belén Montes and Víctor Manuel Rocha, to support the claim that the material poverty of Cuba never diminished the operational capacity of its intelligence services.
The report is a government document with a political purpose, not an independent academic study. However, its central argument is hard to dismiss: a weakened regime can maintain intelligence networks, ideological connections, influence, and alliances with powers seeking to project themselves close to U.S. territory.
Being poor does not mean being harmless.
Hernández Nordelo presents a false dilemma by treating "failed state" and "threat" as incompatible categories. They are not.
Cuba may fail in providing welfare, rights, public services, and opportunities, while retaining instruments for internal repression and causing destabilizing effects abroad.
It may lose population, suffer nationwide blackouts, and depend on humanitarian aid, while simultaneously maintaining an experienced intelligence apparatus and providing geopolitical value to Washington's allies.
The decisive question is not whether the regime controls the country. It does. The question is what it uses that control for.
After more than six decades, the Cuban regime has demonstrated greater ability to perpetuate itself than to govern effectively. This is precisely the crux of its failure and one of the reasons why its consequences no longer end on the shores of the island.
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