POLITICS: The US should intervene in Cuba

Suppose a husband kept his wife in the basement, manacled to the wall, and beat her on a regular basis. The neighbors could hear the poor woman’s groans but did nothing and were even kind to the man when they saw him. “Mind your own business,” they told each other.

That’s how I recently explained the plight of the Cuban people to a friend.

For 67 years, a communist regime has used terror to cling to power — incarcerating them, torturing them or executing them when they dared protest or ask for a change in government.

And most of the rest of the world has stood silently by.

They trade with Cuba’s tyrants even though they know that only the regime’s overfed elite, and not the people, consume imported goods. They vote with the regime at the UN. They welcome its butchers on state visits.

Some countries support Cuba’s communists out of ideological affinity. China, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela under Nicolas Maduro obviously fall under this model.

Cuba remains Mecca for the world’s Marxists, who ignore such signs of hopelessness as the crumbling architecture and the advanced age of the people truly in power and hoof it off to Havana for mojitos and indoctrination under fraying posters of Che Guevara.

Far too many other global players, however, do nothing because they enjoy having a rogue regime only 90 miles off the US coast thumb its nose at Uncle Sam — the suffering of the Cuban people be damned.

Even Pope Leo XIV, for reasons known only to himself and his Boss, just gave the Cuban regime an assist, posting on social media last month, “I have received the greatly troubling news regarding an increase in tensions between Cuba and the United States of America,” as if news still arrived in the Vatican in scrolls carried in by monks from distant lands.

Leo called for a “dialogue, in order to avoid violence and every action that could increase the suffering of the dear Cuban people.”

I have a simple message for the head of my Church. Holy Father, take it from someone not just born on the island but whose roots go back to the Spanish conquest in 1511. There is only one way to relieve the suffering of Cuba’s exhausted people: what President Trump has begun to do.

The US stood apart from the rest of the world as the only nation that cared what happened in Cuba, refusing most commerce with the communist tyrants and, until Obama’s capitulation, refusing to recognize them. But no president until Trump has had the gumption to do what he is accomplishing. (How many times have we said that now?)

That is to apply maximum pressure on the miserable clique that has all the guns and all the prisons, that eats lobster while the people starve, until they run out resources with which to terrorize their own people.

Then, once this contemptible bunch has run out of options, and with no one to save their bacon this time, make them the same offer the Trump administration made to Maduro.

That offer, one Maduro was dumb not to take, was leave the country, go to Sochi, Dubai, Minsk, or wherever. Just leave — or else.

That time has come now to offer the same sweet deal to Cuba’s puppet president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, to the real power behind the throne, 94-year-old Raul Castro, and to the rest of his despicable Castro clan.

Maduro’s arrest on Jan. 3 not only started the new year on a happy footing, it changed the world. Before his capture, Venezuela — the country with the world’s biggest proven oil reserves — was sending Cuba about 30,000 barrels of oil per day. That was off the historic peak of some 100,000 barrels earlier this century, but it covered about half of Cuba’s need.

Since Maduro’s departure, Cuba has gotten zip. Now it experiences daily power outages that last hours, and the people are so desperate they are taking to the streets even though they know what fate likely awaits them. Not even the lobster-munching Castro clan can get things now.

And Maduro’s arrest also holds a sword of Damocles over the ruling clique’s head. And it looks like the ground is being laid for exactly this outcome.

The New York Post reported that the Justice Department has launched an inquiry into these leaders. This would allow the administration to give them the Maduro treatment if they don’t take the offer: a one-way helicopter flight to a correctional facility just 90 miles north. So no wonder that Diaz Canel confirmed on Friday that Cuba is negotiating with the US.

In other words, it looks like America has finally decided to rid the world of that husband who beats his wife in the basement.

Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation and co-author of “NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It.”