Cuba’s communists have become very adept at outmaneuvering U.S. presidents — that’s how they have managed to stay in power for 67 years. Their luck seems to have run out with President Donald Trump, however. Acts of sorcery that may have worked in the past are now blowing up on their scowling faces.
Take the offer the regime made on Monday to allow Cuban Americans to invest on the island. It was as ludicrous as it sounds: communists once again begging their victims to come and bail them out. But it was accompanied with much fanfare on Cuba’s state TV, and useful idiots in the U.S. media touted it as Cuba’s communists opening up the economy.
But the attempt at manufactured excitement had a very short shelf life. Barely a few hours after the announcement was made, Cuba’s electrical grid suffered a total collapse, plunging the entire serpentine-shaped island into complete darkness, from Cape San Antonio in the westernmost end to Cape Maisi in the east.
It reminded everyone that communism has pauperized the island of Cuba, which cannot produce anything of value, let alone oil to power itself.
It was poetic justice, yes, but also the new Trumpian reality. Since Trump had the head of former dictator Nicolas Maduro arrested on Jan. 3, Cuba has been cut off from its main source of energy: oil-rich Venezuela.
The South American regime has made the world’s deepest oil reserves available to its ideological Marxist mentor since Hugo Chavez first gained power in 1999, keeping the Cuban Revolution alive artificially by sending over millions of subsidized barrels of oil. With Maduro now living in a correctional facility in Brooklyn, that practice has come to a screeching halt.
The grid’s collapse comes after decades of mismanagement and underinvestment, the wages of communist central planning.
As for oil, Cuba does have some, around 124 million barrels of proven reserves and perhaps billions in potential reserves, if U.S. Geological Survey estimates are to be believed. But the problem with oil is the same as the one with the grid itself. Cuba’s regime is led by a band of economic incompetents who can’t produce even sugar, the export of which once made the island the world’s richest colony, which must now be imported.
Cuba’s goons are good at one thing: repression. When U.S. Special Forces went to Caracas to get Maduro, they had to go through Cubans — not Venezuelans — guarding him, killing 32 of them. Venezuelans who have been interrogated in their country’s prisons often talk about how, at one point, a thug with a Cuban accent will come in to extract extra information, one way or another.
And of course, in Cuba itself, these thugs have refined oppression, producing a form of state terrorism that has kept 10 million souls living in fear for 67 years.
Now that Trump is breathing heavily on the neck of the Castro family, which has run Cuba uninterruptedly since Fidel Castro won the revolution on New Year’s Day 1959, some of that fear may be breaking.
But the economy? No, communism can never run an economy efficiently. For one thing, it gets rid of the market’s price-discovery mechanism, and without that function, economic actors are running around like blind mice, making wrong guesses about the price of goods and services, which sometimes leads to wasteful overproduction but more often to crippling shortages.
For another, people are chosen to lead not because of their talent, but because of their slavish loyalty to the ideology and to the pestilent Castro Clan.
In Cuba’s particular case, because of the dynastic quality of the regime, advancement also comes through family connections. For that, go no further than the man who made the offer to let Cuban Americans come back and invest, Oscar Perez-Oliva Fraga.
Since early last year, Perez-Oliva has been the head of the powerful Ministry of Foreign Trade and Foreign Investment. Then, last October, Perez-Oliva also became the country’s vice prime minister, keeping his title as MINCEX minister. In fact, in the past two years leading up to late 2025, he has been promoted continuously.
That is a very rapid rise, which must mean that Perez-Oliva is quite an accomplished man, right? Well, it’s Cuba. Let’s see what other attributes the stocky 54-year-old has.
His mother is Mirsa Fraga Castro. If that second surname rings a bell, it should, as Mirsa is the daughter of Angela Castro. Angela is the sister of Cuba’s supreme leader, Raul Castro, making Perez-Oliva grandnephew of the 94-year-old.
Raul Castro is still the head of the military and Cuba’s real leader, pulling the strings behind the scenes for the figurehead president, Miguel Diaz-Canel. And of course, Raul Castro got his job because he is the brother of Fidel Castro, who led Cuba for 60 years between 1959 and 2009.
Search NBC News farcical interview with Perez-Oliva, and you will find zero information about the family connections of this “economic czar.”
Perez-Oliva’s investing scheme was, on its face, ludicrous because the people who fled Cuba were treated like pariahs for the sin of thinking differently politically, and they knew the regime best. The regime called them traitors and “worms” and made them wait for many years before allowing them to escape from what the communists had turned into a veritable Devil’s Island.
OPINION: HOW TRUMP CAN INCREASE PRESSURE ON THE CUBAN REGIME
But there was an outside chance that the offer might have worked in one way — by sowing division and suspicion in Miami, Florida. Cuba has planted so many of its agents inside the United States that it can activate its cells at will, and create the appearance of momentum with the impression that, yes, there are Cuban Americans dumb enough to want to invest back in Cuba and make Miami, ironically, the regime’s third sugar daddy after the Soviet Union and Venezuela.
The blackout has dimmed these hopes.
