Cuba, yes?

There’s a lot about Cuba that I just don’t get.

There is Cuba itself, said to be the last country to officially espouse old-school Leninism. I don’t know if that claim is true, but certainly Cuba is one of the last unabashedly Communist regimes, a political stance that seems kind of silly to me. It’s like being the last feudal kingdom, or the last doctor to treat diseases with bloodletting – someone has to be last, but it’s nothing to be proud of.

I don’t get the way Cuba seems to dominate American politics either. The world is full of interesting challenges – nuclear tensions in south Asia, the rise of Jihadism, how to police Afghanistan, how to salvage something from the mess of Iraq, the negotiation of multilateral trade deals that could affect millions of people. But instead of paying attention to that, we’re transfixed by the image of an old man with a scruffy beard and a green military hat.

I’ve never understood our policy toward Cuba, or rather our lack of policy toward Cuba, and I surely don’t understand why events in Cuba are given considerably more coverage than events in Russia.

Russia: Huge geographic size, large population, immense petroleum reserves, powerful nuclear arsenal, large if somewhat demoralized army, competent nuclear and chemical scientists, and a substantial and deepening role in the industrialized economy.

Cuba: Geographically tiny, small population, no oil reserves I’ve ever heard of, no ability to attack targets off of Cuba itself, and essentially no world role at all except as a nebulous example to other vaguely leftist Latin American governments.

Based on news coverage, one could be excused for imagining that Cuba was Russia and vice versa. We analyze every random rumbling from Castro’s bowels with the seriousness of a Dan Brown fan trying to interpret a late medieval tapestry, while momentous things happen in Russia and we shrug and say “Eh, it’s some kind of Slavic deal, we don’t know.”

The easiest way to defeat a Communist regime is to let its own people subvert it from within. It happened in Russia, it happened throughout Eastern Europe, and it’s happening in China and Vietnam. Allow the citizens of the communist regime to perceive the vast gulf between what was promised and what was delivered, allow them to appreciate the western economic model, allow them to appreciate western ideas in participative government, and pretty soon the whole Lenin-encrusted edifice collapses. And it usually collapses peacefully, the old-line Communist regime simply being rendered irrelevant by economic and cultural facts on the ground.

Why don’t we do this with Cuba? Why do we treat Cuba with the seriousness of a rogue nuclear state? Why do we issue veiled threats of military action? All this does is unite the Cuban people behind their leadership and give them the feeling they are rallying in the face of an external enemy. All of this over a country that has no missiles, no effective air force, no ability to carry out attacks on US territory, and no superpower benefactor.

I just don’t get it. I’m told that we can’t engage with Cuba without somehow legitimizing Castro. But we engaged with the Soviets without legitimizing them. We engaged with Vietnam without legitimizing them. We engaged with China without legitimizing them either. What’s different with Cuba?

I honestly don’t know what’s different. I think in some cases old Cold Warriors are reluctant to part with the Cuba-as-an-enemy stance because it’s the last morsel of the Cold War left for them to savor. I can actually almost understand that position. Whatever else the Cold War was, it offered a certain bracing moral simplicity. One was either a capitalist pig or a Commie stooge; there was no real middle ground. The conflict was uncommonly clearly defined, and almost any kind of political or economic activity could have Cold War overtones (even high school chess tournaments got wrapped up in the Cold War eschatology, imbuing them with a kind of faux drama that apparently appeals to high school chess players and Cold Warriors).

The post-USSR world is scary and ambiguous. In the old days we knew who the enemy was, and we knew it could be held at bay by a combination of horrific nuclear deterrence and ideological rigor. Or so we were told, and in truth there were effectively no major confrontations between the West and the USSR. Proxy wars, sure, but in the end American and Soviet missile-men never came to blows.

The modern world is much scarier. Our fleets of bombers don’t deter terrorists. Our ballistic missile submarines, each loaded with enough nukes to transform a continent into a wasteland, don’t stop masked men from heaving RPG-7s at us. Our comforting Cold War eschatology suddenly shudders to a halt and bursts into flames when confronted with religious and ethnic struggles that we don’t understand and can't win in any meaningful military sense. Being a superpower doesn’t mean squat these days.

Maybe that’s why we vapor over Cuba. It reminds us of simpler times. It’s like a photo album of those heady days when B-52s and Minuteman IIs delivered as much security as they promised.