Armando Chaguaceda
(A Critical Reading of Prospective Scenarios for Political Evolution)
The worsening and prolongation of the crisis in Cuba has drawn attention to bets on a change in the status quo, renewed by the reinforcement of pressure from the United States government on its island counterpart. As this text is being written, the situation appears to have reached an impasse, in which external sanctions and popular protests are increasing, yet the structure of Castroism holds firm. Drawing on the diagnoses previously put forward by former diplomat and academic Adrian Chrobot(2026) —negotiation, regime collapse, military intervention, and continuation of the status quo— and by GAPAC (2026) —authoritarian reinforcement, a negotiated transition, regime collapse, U.S. intervention— as well as on my own prior analyses (2026) of Cuban autocratic conduct, and on historian Juan Antonio Blanco’s work (2026) on the architecture —and the indecision— of U.S. policy at the present moment, this text poses an uncomfortable question: what happens when Washington does not decisively choose any of those paths, but instead manages, with ambiguity, a sustained indeterminacy between them?
The hypothesis developed here is that the policy of maximum pressure toward Cuba, as it has been carried out through mid-2026 following the official declaration of the Castro regime as a threat to U.S. national security, is a bet on increasing and prolonging sanctions over time without undertaking any form of direct intervention that would effectively fracture the leadership and compel a segment of it to negotiate the transition. That ambiguity between diagnosis, ends, and means is not a prudent middle ground between containment and force: it is, in itself, athird scenario of sustained indeterminacy with its own logic, one that, in my view, is profoundly mistaken. This is because it pushes further away the possibility of a negotiated transition, which aggravates the cost of a crisis that —for structural reasons stemming from the regime’s own design— is shifted onto the Cuban population, and restores the regime’s confidence that it can survive this administration’s reinforced siege.
The Starting Diagnosis: Scenarios, Entrenchment, and Indecision
Pure economic collapse rarely brings down a consolidated authoritarian state on its own, as Venezuela itself demonstrates; and direct military intervention carries costs and consequences that Washington has avoided since 1962. That leaves two scenarios with real weight: a negotiated transition toward a market democracy aligned with the West, following —with due caveats— the Polish precedent of 1989; or an unmanaged continuation of the status quo, whose cost, far from stabilizing, keeps accumulating. Three internal pressures are already eroding the regime’s capacity to wait indefinitely: the collapse of the Venezuelan oil subsidy, which fell from a peak of nearly 100,000 barrels per day to a fraction of that figure by 2016; the generational thinning of legitimacy, exposed by the July 11, 2021 protests, the largest in six decades; and the tightening of U.S. sanctions since 2017, including the 2019 activation of Title III of the Helms-Burton Act.
But none of these pressures make transition automatic. And the flaw in the original diagnosis —the point this essay seeks to highlight— is treating maximum pressure as a disciplined variant of the “negotiated transition” scenario. In practice, the way Washington has combined rising sanctions with the (so far) refusal to activate its military option constitutes a fifth scenario, distinct from the original four: it is not transition, not collapse, not intervention, and not an inertial status quo either, because pressure is indeed intensifying. It is, rather, an ascending pressure with no resolution, whose internal logic deserves analysis in its own right.
My piece in Foreign Affairs Latinoamérica (2026) offers the key to understanding why this ascending pressure is not enough, given that Havana’s regional influence far exceeds its scant financial and human resources, precisely because it rests on structural —not conjunctural— attributes of the Cuban state: unity and verticality of command, the sustainability of its strategy over time, and its capacity to expand spatially through an extensive diplomatic network and agents of influence embedded in the political, academic, and social communities of neighboring countries. Added to this is a victimhood narrative of permanent siege that allows it to present itself to Latin American audiences —sensitive to the historical grievances of imperialism— as a moral touchstone, rather than as the origin of the crisis it manages.
This characterization has a direct implication for this essay’s hypothesis: an actor built precisely to withstand prolonged pressure without changing its conduct will not be broken by the mere quantitative increase of sanctions, however severe, if the instrument of coercion does not alter the leadership’s calculation about its own survival. The ambiguity of maximum pressure —sanctioning without credibly threatening control of power— is exactly the kind of pressure this architecture was designed to absorb: dispersing the cost onto the population, sustaining the verticality of command, and exploiting external ideological sympathy to erode international consensus around the sanctions themselves.
Blanco (2026) has documented this architecture/attitude of ambiguity from the U.S. side early on and in remarkable detail. Five years after the July 2021 protests, and in a context where Washington has reformulated its national security doctrine to treat the Cuban case as an imminent threat, has initiated judicial proceedings against Raúl Castro, and has built an inter-American architecture parallel to the OAS, the author himself describes a conflict already being waged in “fourth-generation” terms: economic, diplomatic, and psychological pressures combined selectively with the possibility —not the certainty— of surgical military options. The relevant question, Blanco argues, is not whether a war between the two countries will break out, but when it will be acknowledged that the escalation of that historic conflict is already underway.
What matters most for this essay’s hypothesis is Blanco’s reading of the Cuban strategy in the face of that ambiguity: Havana does not aim to defeat the United States militarily, something it knows to be impossible, but rather to paralyze or slow down the U.S. decision-making mechanism for as long as the non-kinetic phase of the conflict lasts, betting that political attrition will erode the will to act before its own capacity to resist runs out. The regime measures the success of that strategy by the volume of opinion columns that, in widely read U.S. media, question the advisability of kinetic action and recommend a return to diplomatic containment. It is, in other words, a war of attrition waged against Washington’s political patience, not its military capacity. And it is a conflict the regime can win without firing a single shot, insofar as U.S. indeterminacy —sanctioning and threatening, without either executing or negotiating with verifiable conditionality— grants it indefinite time to adapt.
Blanco also precisely identifies the costs of this prolonged inaction: the erosion of the credibility of U.S. threats in other strategic settings; the consolidation of the Cuban regime as a more entrenched and potentially more aggressive authoritarian oligarchy for having withstood the pressure; and the domestic political impact of raising expectations of change that then fail to materialize, with electoral consequences in Florida and the latent risk of a new mass migration exodus.
The Hypothesis: Why Indeterminacy Pushes the Transition Further Away and Worsens the Cost
The hypothesis of this brief essay can be stated more precisely. The strategy of ambiguous maximum pressure —rising sanctions without a credible kinetic threat or verifiable conditionality— simultaneously produces four mutually reinforcing effects:
First, it pushes the negotiated transition further away because it deprives the pragmatic leadership of the decisive incentive that the panel itself identified as necessary: the perception that only by negotiating a limited, time-bound transitional exit can total loss be avoided. Without that threshold of credible threat, the verticality of command I describe in Foreign Affairs has no reason to fracture; the rational calculation of any “pragmatic” sector of the security apparatus continues to favor loyalty and waiting over negotiating with Washington.
Second, it worsens the humanitarian cost because the regime, true to the institutional resilience I have documented in previous analyses, shifts the weight of adjustment onto the population —blackouts, shortages, inflation— rather than onto its own power centers, which are protected precisely by that verticality. The pressure meant to bend the leadership ends up, in practice, punishing those least able to change the regime’s course. And although the structural and determining cause of the current collapse is fundamentally the Cuban regime’s own doing —which is why targeted sanctions against the GAESA network and against those responsible for state repression are necessary— blocking the entry of oil into the country makes the humanitarian situation unsustainable, because it ends up depriving nearly the entire population (with the exception of the elite and their closest associates and employees) of the minimum conditions for life. At that point, the pressure policy becomes harmful and turns the United States, in practice and in the eyes of the Cuban population itself, into an unintended co-author of the humanitarian crisis. And we are already very close to that point.
Third, it renews the regime’s confidence in its own capacity for survival. The attrition strategy Blanco describes —buying time, fragmenting U.S. consensus, waiting out the political wear of each electoral cycle in Washington— is directly rewarded by a policy that threatens without executing. Each cycle of announced sanctions unaccompanied by a verifiable kinetic threat reinforces, rather than weakens, Havana’s bet that it can survive this administration as it survived previous ones.
Fourth, it compromises Washington’s broader hemispheric strategy. If Cuba once again demonstrates that it can withstand sustained pressure without changing its conduct, that outcome is not confined to the bilateral sphere: it emboldens the United States’ global adversaries —Russia, China, and Iran— who view the Cuban case as a test of U.S. willingness to back up its threats in its own hemisphere. The logic of Cuban influence in the region —low cost, high yield, ideological reach— ultimately depends on the regime remaining standing as a reference point and as a node in that transnational authoritarian network.
Based on this background, it is possible to identify several potential scenarios for the evolution of the situation on the island, which are outlined below.
V. Prospective Scenarios Toward 2027
A. Prolongation of Ambiguity (the most likely scenario)
Washington maintains its current pace: new sanctions, strengthening of the legal and military architecture, without a decision to carry out kinetic action or to sustain a verifiably conditioned negotiation. The regime absorbs the cost by shifting it onto the population, deepens its alignment with Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran, and reaches the end of the current U.S. political cycle strengthened in its narrative of resistance. This is the scenario that best serves the attrition strategy Blanco attributes to Havana.
B. Late and Costlier Escalation
The military and legal architecture —reinforced bases, reformulated doctrine, judicial proceedings against Raúl Castro— is eventually activated, but only after political attrition has narrowed Washington’s room for maneuver and hardened the regime’s internal position. In this scenario, the warning that has been made about Venezuela becomes fully applicable to Cuba: decapitating the regime without dismantling the institutional apparatus that sustains the conduct described above leaves the underlying risks intact, even if the visible face of power changes.
C. Negotiated Window (possible, but increasingly narrow)
Only if Washington resolves its own ambiguity —sequencing sanctions relief to verifiable commitments, as the 1996 LIBERTAD Act requires, while simultaneously sustaining a credible threat of severe consequences for those who block the transition— would the conditions Chrobot identified in the Polish case be recreated: the opening of channels between the island and its diaspora, recognition of dissidents and human rights defenders as key actors, and a limited, time-bound transitional offer to the most pragmatic sector of the security apparatus. The longer scenario A persists, the narrower this window becomes.
D. Collapse (with intensification of the humanitarian crisis)
This collapse —resulting from the continuation of sanctions, the worsening of the population’s living conditions, the entrenchment of the elite in power, spontaneous protest that fails to translate into organizational capacity and real power to bring down the regime, rising social violence and related phenomena (criminal gangs, drug use, murders, etc.), and widespread repression— would become (is on the verge of becoming) a vicious circle with no exit in the short or medium term.
VI. Conclusions
The choice facing those responsible for U.S. hemispheric policy is not, as it is usually framed, between stability and risk. It is a choice between: a) a narrowing window in which a managed and verifiable transition turns an adversarial relationship into a partnership, and b) a widening gap between what a containment strategy can still contain and what a regime with regional coercive and influence capacity is still able to do. Sustaining ambiguity and indeterminacy is not a neutral position between these two paths: it is the option that has so far systematically favored the Cuban regime, because it allows the regime to win the only war it can win —the war of attrition against the political will of others— without risking the one it knows it has already lost.
For the United States, the cost of this path is strategic: it means less security and defense for its immediate periphery. For Latin America, the cost is perhaps broader: its democratic institutions —already strained by disinformation, populism, and organized crime— will continue to be threatened by the interference of an unreformed Cuba, which continues to function as an active node in a transnational authoritarian network. For Cuban society, the cost is unpayable: it amounts to an inhuman, existential erosion of its dwindling capacities and hopes.
Thus, the longer ambiguity and indeterminacy persist in Washington —endorsed from Miami by uncritical silence and subordination to them— the closer Cuba comes to a degraded spiral: one in which Cuban leaders cling to power even as their wealth and stability come under siege, while popular protest, persistent but fragmented, does not stop but is not enough to bring about systemic change.
References
Blanco, J. A. (2026, July 13). EEUU-Cuba: la hora de la decisión. Diario de Cuba.
Chaguaceda, A. (2026). Las fuentes de la conducta cubana. Foreign Affairs Latinoamérica, 26(2), 76-82.
Chrobot, A. (2026). Cuba’s Threshold: Democratic Transition or Compounding Risk. Implications for the United States and Latin America.
GAPAC (2026). Dismantling Eternity: A Roadmap for the Democratic Transition in Cuba.
- Armando Chaguaceda Noriega (La Habana, 1975).
- Politólogo e historiador. Especializado en procesos de democratización en Latinoamérica y Rusia. Reside en México.