Cuban exiles and Cuban Americans are protesting in cities all over Miami-Dade, from Doral and Hialeah to Sweetwater and Little Havana, calling for the end of the island’s 62-year communist regime– but the path to that goal is heavily debated.
Amongst protestors, a common solution is military intervention, which means sending troops to the island to put some pressure on the Cuban government.
Mairelys Ortiz, a protestor at the Tamiami Park rallies on Tuesday, feels that military intervention is the way to solve this crisis because “the Cuban people are unarmed and peacefully protesting.”
However, experts like Jorge Duany, director of Florida International University’s Cuban Research Institute, disagrees with Ortiz.
“This threat of military intervention is exactly what the Cuban government wants its citizens to believe, because part of the rhetoric of the Castro government and now [Miguel] Diaz-Canel is that we have to prepare ourselves for that military aggression,” said Duany.
He adds that apart from the military already established on the island, there are average civilians who are trained for any kind of military aggression. Because of this, he predicts that sending troops will provoke a bloody war, probably as long as the one in Afghanistan.
Duany says that the United States can instead enact policies towards Cuba.
“I don’t expect the Biden administration to undo all of Trump’s restrictions and go back to Obama’s policies,” he said, “but I would expect, for instance, that the United States should lift the remittances [transfers of money sent to the island] and perhaps allowing more travel between Miami and Havana or other cities in Cuba.”
He feels like these two measures would be a more modest change, but would have a positive effect by allowing money to get into the pockets of residents on the island.
