The Day After in Cuba
Key takeaways
- Foreign Service Officer who served on the National Security Council as President Barack Obama’s adviser for the Americas from 2012 to 2015 and participated in Obama’s diplomatic opening to Cuba.
- What American Military Force Can and Cannot Do
- On the beaches east of Havana, you can still see rusted remnants of watchtowers on the roofs of buildings along the island’s northern coast.
RICARDO ZUNIGA is a retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer who served on the National Security Council as President Barack Obama’s adviser for the Americas from 2012 to 2015 and participated in Obama’s diplomatic opening to Cuba.
What American Military Force Can and Cannot Do
On the beaches east of Havana, you can still see rusted remnants of watchtowers on the roofs of buildings along the island’s northern coast. Constructed in the early 1960s, after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, these emplacements were designed to provide early warning of an attack by the United States—or “the Empire,” in Cuban revolutionary parlance. But by the time I saw them in 2002, during my time in the country as a young U.S. foreign service officer, they seemed like relics of a bygone era, monuments to Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s inability to accept the end of the Cold War and thus the island’s geopolitical irrelevance. Although its relations with the Bush administration were strained, and harsh rhetoric flew in both directions, Havana was, at best, of peripheral importance to a White House focused on expanding NATO, managing relations with China, and fighting in the Middle East. It seemed truly ludicrous to think the United States would ever bother invading Cuba.