A telephone can be an instrument of connection or an instrument of theater. It depends on whether anyone is listening at the other end.
In Havana, the line is technically open. That is the strange detail inside Miguel Díaz-Canel’s latest interview with Folha de S.Paulo. Cuban officials, he said over the weekend, have spoken with officials from the United States. But the channel is stalled. There is no agenda. There is, in other words, a telephone line without a conversation: a receiver lifted carefully from its cradle so that both governments may say, for their own reasons, that the call still exists. (Folha de S.Paulo, https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/colunas/monicabergamo/2026/08/diaz-canel-diz-que-eua-asfixiam-cuba-nega-guinada-capitalista-e-afirma-que-pais-esta-em-pe-e-nao-se-rende.shtml) (www1.folha.uol.com.br)
This is not diplomacy in the old sense. Diplomacy begins when two sides agree that an argument is preferable to silence and that an outcome is preferable to the performance of having tried. Cuba and the United States are instead conducting a more familiar ritual. Washington increases pressure. Havana calls the pressure criminal and insists it cannot negotiate under it. Each side identifies the other as the author of the emergency. The island receives the dial tone.
Díaz-Canel’s formulation is revealing because it sets the terms of the impasse with unusual clarity. He says Cuba wants dialogue without preconditions. He says the United States has no standing to demand concessions. He says the government’s 176 economic measures are not concessions at all, but the delayed product of a decade of internal discussion. The state may permit more investment, invite Cubans abroad to bring money home, widen the space around private enterprise, and loosen parts of foreign trade. But it will not say that these changes answer the pressure outside the room. (Folha de S.Paulo, same URL.) (www1.folha.uol.com.br)
That is the call’s central malfunction.
A government can refuse foreign dictates. It should refuse the fantasy that Cuba’s political future belongs to officials in Washington, Miami, Moscow, Beijing, or anywhere else beyond the island. Sovereignty is not a gift that becomes real only when a superpower approves it. Nor should Americans pretend that economic punishment lands cleanly on a ruling class while bypassing the people waiting for medicine, transport, cash, food, and a functioning home.
The sanctions argument is not invented. The United States has intensified its pressure campaign, and the latest measures have reached state companies and figures connected to the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples. The effect of such measures is not confined to a ministerial office. It travels through banks, suppliers, insurers, shipping decisions, and every foreign company deciding that the Cuban file is too radioactive to touch. (apnews.com)
Washington is right about one thing, however: the Cuban state is not merely an innocent object of pressure. It is an active maker of its own paralysis.
The regime’s answer to every opening has been to preserve the hand that closes it. It has tolerated enterprise without accepting independent power. It has permitted markets without allowing the citizen to become politically consequential inside them. It has treated investment as a resource to be administered, not as a source of rights, expectations, contracts, courts, associations, and limits on official discretion.
That is why Díaz-Canel’s insistence that the reforms are not concessions matters. He means to protect national dignity. But he also reveals the regime’s deepest reflex: even a necessary correction must not be allowed to look like a correction. The state may bend only if it can call the movement continuity.
A country cannot modernize by pretending that every repair was part of the original blueprint.
The 176 measures have been described as the broadest economic shift in decades: more room for private firms, direct importing and exporting, freer hiring, private banking, and investment from Cubans abroad. Those are not decorative changes. They are admissions written into policy. They acknowledge that the old command system cannot produce enough, move enough, finance enough, or retain enough people to sustain the nation it claims to embody. (apnews.com)
But admissions are not yet a settlement.
The real negotiation Cuba requires is not first with Washington. It is with Cubans. With the shopkeeper who can import goods but cannot organize politically. With the professional who can leave but cannot help set the terms of the country she leaves behind. With the family abroad invited to invest capital but not invited to exercise civic influence. With the worker who is told that the state represents him even when the state has ceased to hear him.
This is where the telephone becomes less a diplomatic symbol than a domestic one. The regime wants a line to the United States without conditions. It has spent decades ensuring that Cubans have no equivalent line to the regime.
A real dialogue is dangerous to a one-party state because it cannot be controlled merely by selecting the subjects. It creates witnesses. It produces demands that cannot be translated into slogans. It forces the government to distinguish between the nation and the apparatus that claims permanent custody of it. Díaz-Canel can plausibly complain that Washington’s pressure is destructive. He cannot plausibly claim that Cuba’s crisis began when Washington picked up the phone.
The regime’s defenders will answer that this is an unfair demand during siege conditions. They will say that national unity is not a luxury when a far stronger neighbor threatens strangulation, intervention, and political engineering. There is force in that argument. The United States has repeatedly supplied Havana with reasons to confuse external hostility with internal dissent. A government facing coercion will harden. A population facing deprivation will often cling to whatever institutional structure still distributes the final ration, the final fuel, the final permission.
But that is precisely why the regime’s choices matter more, not less.
Pressure does not require censorship. Sanctions do not require a party monopoly. A hostile White House does not compel Havana to make a licensing office the arbiter of ambition, a police file the price of criticism, or political loyalty the background condition of ordinary advancement. The government has inherited real threats. It has also built a system that converts every threat into an argument for its own permanence.
The opening of 2015 to 2017 briefly offered another kind of call. It was incomplete, reversible, and never close to democratic transformation. Yet it created more travel, more family contact, more commercial possibility, and more unscripted traffic between Cuba and the world. Washington’s regulatory changes then explicitly sought to facilitate travel, telecommunications, small business activity, and certain financial relationships with Cuban nationals. (home.treasury.gov)
That window is closed. It cannot be recreated by romantic memory. Nor can it be reopened by a policy of economic suffocation, which mistakes desperation for transition. But it also cannot be replaced by the Cuban state’s preferred fiction: that reform is safest when it changes the economy while leaving power untouched.
There is no agenda because neither government wants to begin where reality begins.
Washington wants leverage before trust
Natalia Suyos writes for Cuba Journal on Business.
