In February, at the Munich Security Conference, Marco Rubio articulated with a clarity rarely heard from a diplomat why negotiating with Iran is so challenging: on the other side of the table are radical Shia clerics making geopolitical decisions based purely on theology. He added that no one has ever successfully reached an agreement with Tehran. In July, he went further: every time those in charge in Iran sign something, they either break it or seek to change it. And in April, he described the underlying issue: American negotiators do not negotiate with the Iranians, because those Iranians then have to negotiate with other Iranians, the ones who truly decide.
It is an impeccable diagnosis. That is why it is so difficult to understand that the very Secretary of State, a son of the Cuban exile community, who knows Castroism better than any U.S. official in recent decades, continues to treat the Havana regime as if it were a different interlocutor.
It isn't. It's the same type of power. The prayers change, but not the liturgy.
Mr. Secretary: you already know how a regime that decides by dogma negotiates.
A theocracy without God
Fundamentalism does not require a religion. It needs a dogma that transcends the nation, an infallible prophet, a sacred book, and a mechanism ready to punish heresy. The Cuban dictatorship has all four.
It has its prophet, Fidel, whose words are often cited as scripture even though he has been dead for ten years. It has its sacred text: a Constitution that declares socialism "irrevocable," meaning that it legally prohibits Cubans from changing their minds. It has its clergy, the Communist Party, and its Revolutionary Guard, known in Cuba as FAR, MININT, and GAESA. And it has its own Council of Guardians: the Castro family, which does not hold visible positions but decides what is signed and what is not.
Rubio describes Iran as a country where the president speaks but the Supreme Leader commands. In Cuba, Díaz-Canel speaks and Raúl Castro commands. The real conversations, as reported this year, do not go through formal channels but rather through Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, El Cangrejo, the grandson of the general and colonel of MININT. If that is not negotiating with some so that they can negotiate with others, it certainly resembles it closely.
The same technique: buying time
What Rubio says about Iran, that it signs to break or to rewrite, is exactly the story of Washington's dealings with Castroism.
Under Obama, the dictatorship achieved in two years what it had not accomplished in half a century: removal from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, an embassy, flights, cruises, unlimited remittances, and a U.S. president strolling through Havana. In exchange, it released around fifty political prisoners, many of whom were subsequently re-arrested. Repression did not decrease; it increased. And just a few days after Obama's visit, Fidel declared that Cuba did not need the empire to gift it anything. The regime held onto everything it was given and offered nothing of significance in return.
It was not an accident. It is the method. Castroism negotiates like the ayatollahs: it agrees to sit down when pressure threatens its survival, stretches deadlines, demands payment upfront, and when the air begins to flow again, reopens what seemed closed. It did this with Mariel, during the balseros crisis, with the prisoners from the Group of 75 whom it released in exchange for exiling them to Spain. Each concession was a transaction to breathe, never a change in course.
What they themselves say
There's no need to interpret. Just listening to them is enough.
On September 8, Chancellor Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla stated that there have been no negotiations with the United States, nor agreements, nor roadmaps. On Tuesday, while Trump confirmed at the UN that Rubio is personally leading the talks with Havana, the Cuban delegation walked out and left the plenary session. On Thursday, Deputy Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío explained that it is impossible to speak of progress while Washington continues to impose sanctions, which in his words means: first lift the pressure, and then we will see.
That is the complete script. Deny in public what is done in private. Demand concessions as a precondition. Declare sovereignty, the political system, and political prisoners as non-negotiable, which is precisely what should be negotiated. Pezeshkian said this week in New York that any future conversation is contingent upon Washington first meeting Iran's conditions. Change the name and the accent, and it is Fernández de Cossío.
The error of the technocrats
On Wednesday, Rubio stated that the Cuban regime "is quite intransigent" and that there are figures with blood on their hands with whom the United States will never be able to engage. However, he also spoke of individuals with whom collaboration could be possible if they are willing to lead the country towards political and economic freedom. In June, he had already mentioned "technocrats" within the system before Congress.
There lies the risk. When it comes to Iran, no one in Washington buys the tale of the moderate ayatollah anymore: even Rubio has dismissed the distinction between moderates and hardliners. In Cuba, the story of the reformist technocrat is the same trap dressed in another suit. A technocrat within the Castro regime is an official who has survived decades in a sect that punishes heresy. If they have made it this far, it is because they have never been a heretic. And a grandson of Raúl Castro in a MININT uniform is not a transition; it is continuity with a surname.
What Washington already knows how to do
The lesson from Iran is straightforward: with a fundamentalist regime, negotiations are not about promises but about verifiable facts, and in the correct order. They provide first, then they receive.
Applied to Cuba, this means that there cannot be a single relief from sanctions, nor a single gesture before irreversible actions take place: the release of all political prisoners without exile, the legalization of independent parties and press, an electoral calendar with international observation, and the dismantling of GAESA as the power's financial hub. Any other sequence is repeating 2014, and we already know how that ended.
Rubio summed it up well in February speaking about Iran: it's complicated, no one has succeeded, but we will try. With Cuba, we must also try. But we must try knowing who we are sitting at the table with. A sect that has written in its Constitution that it will never change is not looking for an agreement. It is looking for time. And the time gained by the dictatorship is paid for by millions of Cubans in darkness, without food and without medicine.
Mr. Secretary: you already know how a regime that decides by dogma negotiates. No one has explained it better than you. All that's left is for you to apply it to the island of your parents.
Filed under:
Opinion article: Las declaraciones y opiniones expresadas en este artículo son de exclusiva responsabilidad de su autor y no representan necesariamente el punto de vista de CiberCuba.