Is Cuba Next? | Mario Braga, RANE

**Adam Taggart** (0:00)
And we should be live. Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money founder and your host. Welcoming you here for another special report on the geopolitical stage. We've been in a lot of these recently. Today, we're going to talk about Cuba with RANE's Latin American geopolitical strategist, Mario Braga. Mario, thank you so much for joining us today.

**Mario Braga** (0:22)
Thanks for having me. It's great to be back.

**Adam Taggart** (0:24)
All right. Well, Mario, we've had you on before a couple of times, talking about Venezuela.
It's funny. We thought that was going to be a big deal. It's not even yesterday's news at this point. It's ancient history. Now, we've got obviously the world very involved in a broiled with Iran. I've been talking to your colleague Ryan Boll about that. But we're now hearing lots of rumblings that Cuba may be the next domino to fall here. President Trump went as far as to say that he thinks he might have the honor of taking Cuba, whatever that means. What I'd like to do is spend the hour here, just helping the audience understand. First, let's understand the situation in Cuba. What is it like today and how do we get here? Then talk about what may happen next. What would a post Castro regime Cuba look like? What difference would it make for America if Cuba normalized its relationship with America? What would that mean for the people of Cuba ahead? How do you want to roll into this? Do we want to do a little bit of a history lesson first of how we got here?

**Mario Braga** (1:34)
Yeah, definitely. We can start with that. It's a long history.
When you think about Cuba, we cannot miss the idea that since the 60s, the US has imposed an embargo because of the Socialist Revolution that Fidel Castro carried out, enacting a socialist regime on the island. Then of course, there is the broader context that in the following decades, we had the Cold War and the ideological dispute between the United States and the Soviet Union, which meant that Cuba represented this adversarial stakeholder and presence just like 90 miles far from the US coast. And that has resulted in various attempts by different US administrations to financially and economically strangulate the regime, to weaken the kind of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. There are also reports of CIA operations. We had 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis. I think these are all elements that show how far back this kind of bilateral relation goes. And to which extent this has become kind of a thorny issue when you think about US politics. So I don't think we need to go into like a lot of the details, but just this idea that this has been an issue for a long time. And I think we can fast forward to two main things, because I think they are interconnected. As I mentioned, during the Cold War, you had the Soviet Union being a key ally of Cuba. And to some extent, given the economic inefficiencies, the struggles that the Cuban government faced, it was a major supporter. It was an enabler and a provider of oil and supplies that allowed the Cuban regime to remain because it was in the interest of Moscow to have this influence in the Western Hemisphere. What happened is with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 90s, Cuba loses its main ally. And that means it starts to face a significant economic crisis, which is known as the Special Period. So without the oil, you have shortages, you have inflation, you have deterioration in living conditions. And that was a harsh period for Cubans. But for the luck of the socialist regime, in a different country in the hemisphere, you have political change in the late 90s. And I think that's exactly what we discussed the last time I were here on the show. That's Venezuela. That's when Hugo Chávez comes to power in Venezuela, and then he implements a socialist revolution. And basically, Cuba, that had lost its main ally in the Soviet Union, and Russia was no longer able to provide as much support, it starts to increasingly rely on Venezuela. And the ways that that partnership operated was that Venezuela would provide oil to Cuba at, like, highly subsidized, basically in exchange for various types of kind of services and to some extent benefits. But the Cubans provided doctors to Venezuela, the Cubans provided intelligence service. So, since Chávez was trying to kind of form this autocratic state, he needed to ensure the loyalty of the armed forces, and the Cubans had decades of experience in that. So, it dates from back then, the fact that you have Cuban officials taking part in purging the Venezuelan military, in being part of kind of the special kind of protection of the president. They're called like the Vispas Negras, the Black Wasps. And if you think on that on January the 3rd, when there was the US operation, you had, I think, more than 30 Cuban officials that were killed in that action, because that was how, was part of this partnership between the two countries.