Let's talk about Cuba. Take away the Soviet checks, the Venezuelan oil, the Chinese rescue boats and the Iranian friends. What is actually left?
An island with nothing to sell and nobody left to pay the bill. No oil worth seizing. No industry worth taking. No strategic mineral buried under the sugarcane.
By every material measure that a normal country is judged on, Cuba leads nowhere. It is a sixty year money sink that bled every patron foolish enough to adopt it, and then outlived them.
So you might be asking, why has Trump set his sights on it? Why is Marco Rubio counting the minutes like a man watching the last grains run out of an hourglass he flipped over himself?
Why are they even bothering?
Not for what's under the ground, for sure. There's nothing under the ground. They're going after what's above it.
Because Cuba was never a country to the people who ran it. It was a billboard. The single surviving advertisement that filthy communism could plant itself ninety miles from the most powerful nation on earth and refuse to die.
That was the whole product. Not sugar. Not rum. Not nickel. The export *was* the communism.
Cuba sold the world a story that communism could outlast America, and for sixty years it kept that story on life support so every campus radical and every jungle guerrilla and every tin pot revolutionary had a poster to point at, while the island was crumbling under the weight of the Castro regime.
That propaganda abomination is about to die and I, for one, couldn't be happier about it.
You cannot sell the dream of the worker's paradise while the workers cook on firewood in the street and the hospitals run on flashlights.
What is collapsing on Cuba, besides the buildings and the barely functioning cars, is the last functioning piece of evidence that the filthiest idea of the last century ever worked anywhere.
Cuba's only real export was communism, and it's about to be permanently discontinued.
And the world will be lighter for it.