A rendering is a promise made of light.
It has no plumbing. No payroll. No guests waiting at a desk in a darkened lobby for water pressure to return. It has no kitchen worker calculating whether the eggs will arrive, no electrician counting the hours until a generator gives up, no family in a nearby town asking why the country’s best beach is being prepared for a future that never seems to include them.
It has gold domes, though. It has towers. It has a name.
The new proposition before Cuba is called Trump Island, a proposed luxury development on Cayo Santa María, the long white strip off the northern coast that has been marketed for years as one of the island’s great resort prizes. The Dubai-based Abdulla Ali bin Haidar Group says it has a letter of intent for land, has approached the Trump Organization about branding, and has drafted a project around two gold-domed towers. There is no agreement with the Trump Organization. There is no construction. There is, at present, a picture of what might be. (The National, https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/property/2026/06/17/cuba-turns-to-foreign-capital-to-rescue-collapsing-tourism-industry/) (thenationalnews.com)
That ought to be the first fact kept in view. Cuba is not opening a Trump resort. It is holding up an architectural rendering before a world that has become accustomed to reading the island through ruins, ration books, departure boards, and blackened windows.
But the political fact has arrived. On August 6, El País reported that Carlos Fernández de Cossío, Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, had signaled in an interview with The New York Times that Havana would not reject the idea merely because it involved Donald Trump or his company, provided it proceeded peacefully and within Cuban law. The government that spent six decades turning foreign ownership into a national wound is now publicly declining to close the door on the most symbolically loaded hotel brand in American politics. (El País, https://elpais.com/us/2026-08-06/el-gobierno-cubano-se-muestra-abierto-al-plan-de-un-inversor-arabe-para-desarrollar-la-isla-trump.html) (elpais.com)
This is not just desperation. Desperation is too passive a word. It makes the regime sound like a victim of weather.
This is a regime making its oldest move in a new costume: preserving control by selling the future in pieces. The difference is that it once sold the future as sacrifice. Now it sells the future as a luxury destination, complete with a name designed to flatter the man whose government has tightened pressure on the island.
The proposal is almost indecently perfect as a symbol. A revolution that built much of its legitimacy on refusing the old Caribbean arrangement—foreign money on the coast, Cuban labor behind the scenes, sovereignty treated as décor—now entertains a plan to rename a Cuban cay after an American president. The gold domes are not the irony. The irony is the confidence that a change of signage can be mistaken for a change of system.
Cayo Santa María is not an empty square on a developer’s map. It is part of the Jardines del Rey tourism machine, connected to the mainland by a long causeway and developed around a simple national bargain: foreign visitors would bring hard currency, state companies would hold the commanding stakes, and ordinary Cubans would receive whatever employment and leakage filtered outward from the enclave. The new proposal does not break with that model. It makes its logic more naked. (The National, https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/property/2026/06/17/cuba-turns-to-foreign-capital-to-rescue-collapsing-tourism-industry/) (thenationalnews.com)
A tower can be taller than the old hotel blocks. It cannot make the arrangement less feudal.
That is the regime’s enduring mistake. It mistakes access to capital for a settlement with the country. It mistakes a signed letter of intent for legitimacy. It believes that if enough outside money can be attracted through enough carefully controlled doors, the political structure behind those doors may remain untouched: the military-commercial apparatus, the arbitrary rules, the state’s ownership of permission itself.
There is a serious counterargument, and it deserves more than a sneer. Cuba needs capital. Tourism has cratered from roughly 4.2 million visitors in 2019 to 1.8 million in 2025, according to figures cited by The National. Sanctions and U.S. restrictions have deepened the island’s isolation; investors do not enter a place where rules can change in Washington as quickly as power can fail in Havana. A Gulf developer with land arrangements, drawings, and a willingness to wait is not necessarily a political plotter. He may simply see an undervalued coastline and a future market. Cuba cannot rebuild hotels, airports, marinas, farms, electrical systems, and private businesses on slogans alone. (The National, https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/property/2026/06/17/cuba-turns-to-foreign-capital-to-rescue-collapsing-tourism-industry/) (thenationalnews.com)
All of that is true.
It is also why the regime’s answer cannot be another controlled enclave. Cuba does not need one more sealed resort where imported management and politically protected capital operate beside a population excluded from ownership, independent financing, reliable courts, and the right to organize without permission. The island needs rules that let Cubans invest in Cuba without becoming junior partners in their own country.
The closed window of 2015 to 2017 matters here. That opening was imperfect, temporary, and often romanticized. But it was built around the possibility—however limited—that relations could normalize by becoming ordinary: flights, visitors, small businesses, family ties, commercial habits, institutions learning to deal with one another without a theatrical surrender. That window cannot be recreated now. Too much trust has been burned, too much leverage has been converted into punishment, too much of the Cuban state has been exposed as incapable of reforming before the emergency.
Trump Island is the opposite of ordinary. It is a fantasy of political shortcutting. Havana would offer the vanity object. Washington would ease something. A developer would build something. The regime would call it pragmatism. And the Cuban citizen, whose country has supplied the beach, the labor, the history, and the sacrifice, would again be asked to applaud from outside the gate.
The rendering will remain beautiful because renderings do not have to survive Cuba.
That is their advantage. They do not flicker. They do not queue. They do not emigrate. They do not ask who owns the island beneath them.
Natalia Suyos writes for Cuba Journal on Travel.
