3722. The Controversy Over Artificial Intelligence Regulation

By Kamran Nayeri, September 22, 2026

Credit: SciTechDaily.com

1. The controversy over Artificial Intelligence (AI) regulation in the United States is essentially a dispute over how to balance two competing concerns: preventing serious harm from increasingly powerful AI systems while preserving innovation, economic development, and freedom to use the technology (The 2026 AI Index Report | Stanford HAI). Participants come from a wide range of professions and social positions: AI developers, mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, philosophers and ethicists, trade unionists, consumer advocates, and bourgeois politicians.  Overall, about two out of three Americans say there is at least a “moderate” risk that advanced AI could destroy humanity, with majorities across parties, genders, and age groups holding that view (Politico, September 16, 2026).

Thus, several overlapping AI concerns emerge.

A. The "existential risk" debate
Leading AI researchers such as Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Stuart Russell, as well as some industry leaders, are concerned that sufficiently advanced AI could become difficult or impossible for humans to control. This part of the controversy receives the most public attention.

B. The "economic transformation" debate
Economists are asking a somewhat different question: Even if AI never becomes superintelligent, what happens if increasingly capable machines perform large portions of human intellectual labor? A 2026 statement involving hundreds of economists and technology leaders specifically called for research into the economic consequences of transformative AI.

C. The "social and political power" debate
Sociologists, political scientists, lawyers and policymakers are concerned about who controls AI, who owns the computing infrastructure, who benefits economically, and how AI affects democracy and human rights. The UN's independent scientific panel, for example, examines AI across economics, security, human rights, democracy, autonomy, safety and governance—not merely technical safety.

E. The "regulation versus innovation" debate
Governments, technology companies and regulators disagree over how much oversight is appropriate. Some AI executives are now calling for stronger safeguards and coordination, while others argue that excessive regulation could slow innovation and weaken national competitiveness.

There is no doubt that socialists everywhere need to engage with the first three of these concerns to address the current debate in a way that advances a socialist vision and to consider whether and how AI would be part of a socialist future.  There are other less prominently voiced concerns with AI technology relevant to socialists such as:  

·       Safety and catastrophic risks: Supporters argue that sufficiently powerful AI could cause harm that ordinary consumer-protection laws cannot adequately address. These include sophisticated fraud and manipulation; autonomous cyberattacks; assistance with biological or chemical threats; uncontrolled autonomous AI agents; accidents caused by AI systems operating in critical infrastructure; potentially much more serious risks from future, substantially more capable systems (see “superintelligence” below).

·       Consumer protection and misinformation: Generative AI can produce convincing false information, impersonation, deepfakes, and synthetic media at enormous scale. Regulation can require disclosure that content is AI-generated, restrict uses, and establish liability for certain harms. The European Union's AI Act, for example, contains transparency requirements for certain AI-generated content and prohibits particular AI practices.

·       Discrimination and fundamental rights: AI used for hiring, credit, education, policing, immigration, insurance or healthcare can reproduce or amplify discrimination contained in its training data or deployment environment. Regulators therefore argue that some applications deserve requirements for testing, documentation, human oversight, and accountability.

·       Labor and economic disruption: Another controversy concerns employment. AI could substantially increase productivity while simultaneously displacing some occupations or reducing workers' bargaining power. This raises questions that go beyond "AI safety": Should governments regulate particular applications, require employers to disclose AI use, protect workers from automated decisions, or address the consequences primarily through labor and social policy?

2. Marx on automation

AI may represent the final stage of the capitalist technological drive toward automation. Karl Marx, whose vision of communism is a society of abundance with an ethical view summarized as "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" in which the necessary time in the working day is continually reduced to provide ever more leisure time to develop human potentials (Marx, 1875), had analyzed the trend of technical change in the capitalist mode of production, driven by capital accumulation and competition, towards automation (Nayeri, 2018).  AI seems the likely candidate to replace humans in production and service tasks across the economy, sustaining socialist and then communist societies.   

But how would socialists respond to current controversies over AI development by capitalist firms and states? Would AI be acceptable to socialists in developing socialism and communism? Should socialists join the fight for AI reforms by regulating the capitalist firms that develop or use AI, and the capitalist state entities engaged in AI development and deployment at every step?

The existential threat of AI

Now, let’s focus on the existential threat AI can pose to humanity. I'll summarize the concerns of the above-named AI computer scientists: Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Stuart Russell.

For half a century, Geoffrey Hinton nurtured the technology at the heart of chatbots like ChatGPT. Now he worries that AI will cause serious harm. Hinton quit his job at Google, where he worked for more than a decade and became one of AI's most respected voices, so he can speak freely about the risks of A.I. In an interview with The New York Times (May 1, 2023), he said that generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation. Generative AI (GAI) is the type of AI that can create new content based on input data. Hinto says that GAI could soon threaten jobs. Down the line, it could even risk humanity. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” he argued.

Yoshua Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist and a pioneer of artificial neural networks and deep learning. Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that has significantly advanced AI by enabling computers to learn and understand like the human brain. It helps computers discover patterns in data independently, leading to breakthroughs in image recognition, speech understanding, and natural language processing.

“What worries me the most is the fact that we are collectively racing ahead towards A.I. models achieving human-level or greater competence on most cognitive tasks without knowing how to align and control them reliably. As A.I. capabilities and agency increase, behaviors like cheating, manipulating, and lying, for which we see early signs today, will increasingly pose significant threats and could lead to catastrophic risks. I and several other renowned A.I. researchers even believe that it is plausible that, if nothing significant is done, the current trajectory could lead to the creation of superintelligent A.I. agents that compete with humans in ways that could compromise our future.” (Observer, September 18, 2025)

Stuart Russell is a British computer scientist well-known for his contributions to artificial intelligence. Russell is the co-author with Peter Norvig of the authoritative textbook of the field of AI: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, used in more than 1,500 universities in 135 countries. Writing in The Guardian, Russell cites the resignation of the AI safety researcher Jacob Coxon from Anthropic.  In his resignation letter, Coxon expresses alarm over the prioritization of superintelligence development at companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, stating that they are "gambling with our lives". He emphasizes the lack of a safety framework and exit plans in the race to create advanced AI systems, urging immediate action to address these existential risks. The letter has sparked widespread discussion about the ethical implications of AI development and researchers' responsibilities in the field.

Russell comments as follows:

“Recursive self-improvement leading to superintelligent AI raises the risk of the irreversible loss of human control. The acceptable risk level for loss of control is perhaps one in 100m per year, not the one in 10 or one in five that the AI CEOs currently estimate.

“And remember “the complete absence of credible plans for controlling superintelligent AI systems”. At some point, progress along this technology path will halt, not because further progress is impossible, but because further progress is untenable when the technology is intrinsically unsafe. Humanity has a right to protect itself.

There is huge resistance to this conclusion. We have already sunk trillions of dollars into the current technology path and plan to sink trillions more. But the sunk cost fallacy is just that: if we double down on a mistake, it’s still a mistake.” (Russell, September 15, 2026)

There is no doubt that working people, including socialists, must join the growing demand for full and immediate regulation of AI technology currently being shaped by private corporations that have poured billions of dollars into it. Their interest is to plow ahead in the bid to become the first to possess AI superintelligent systems that can control the world. Of course, they are blinded by the fact that superintelligent AI systems may decide to dominate and control, and even annihilate, humanity.

Thus, the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization has now created a NEW EXISTENTIAL THREAT: AI technology.

The dialectics of negation of the negation in Marx’s theory, that is, the radicalization of the working class and subsequent emergence of its self-organization and self-activity to transcend world capitalism, has not yet materialized despite overripe material conditions for socialism.  Meanwhile, the anthropocentric capitalist civilization has created the social and planetary crisis that threatens much of life on Earth, including our own species. Artificial intelligence is the most recent existential threat it has brought to life.

To stop and resolve these existential crises, working people worldwide need to transcend anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization and move toward an ecocentric socialist future. 

3721. Cuba’s Market Reforms: Reflections on Wilder Pérez Varona’s Contribution

By Kamran Nayeri, September 20, 2026

Wilder Pérez Varona

Wilder Pérez Varona’s intervention in the discussion of market reforms introduced by the leadership of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) and quickly adopted by the National Assembly of People’s Power in June is a welcome and thoughtful contribution. I will focus my remarks on the interview Ariel Dacal Diaz conducted with him, published in La Joven Cuba in July, translated into English, and posted on the Links website on July 30. I published my initial assessment of the proposed market reforms in Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism (Nayeri, 2026) on July 11. I urge readers to consult it before proceeding, as I will not repeat my earlier argument here and will build on it.

Currently, Pérez is a postdoctoral fellow in sociology at the Institute of Economy and Society in Contemporary Argentina. Before moving to Argentina, he was the managing director of the Institute of Philosophy in Havana, a socialist think tank that serves as the Communist Party of Cuba's cadre school. Thus, he writes from the standpoint of someone intimately familiar with Cuba's problems and its economic and political system and keenly interested in seeing its long-term crisis resolved in favor of socialism.

Pérez’s overall view of the market reforms under discussion comes at the conclusion of the interview:

“The future of Cuban socialism will not depend solely on how much the economy grows. It will depend on whether those who produce wealth also have a say in decisions about how it is used. If reforms merely modernize mechanisms of accumulation but leave existing power relations intact or even reinforce them, they will have changed the economy without transforming what, from a socialist perspective, really matters: who governs the collective wealth and on whose behalf.”

“The most significant change is not more market, but the redefined relationship between ownership and power. A company can still call itself socialist while workers and citizens no longer have a real say in its affairs, thereby rendering social ownership a legal fiction.” (Pérez, 2026)

He offers an example:

“GAESA [a Cuban conglomerate owned by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces] is the clearest example. Beyond recent news regarding the release of assets, under these reforms it could retain its management forms and convert companies it already runs into shareholdings. On paper, ownership will remain with the people; in practice, it will be the same people making decisions as before the reform”.(ibid.)

Pérez also writes:

“This [the reforms] also alters the socialist project’s logic. For decades, despite many contradictions, equality was the model’s starting point. As [Cuban president Miguel] Díaz-Canel stated, this sequence is apparently being reversed: first accumulate, then redistribute. Growth is no longer subordinate to social justice; social justice now depends on growth.’

“This represents a shift in economic philosophy. The market can be a useful tool for developing a socialist economy, but it cannot substitute for politics. If new opportunities for accumulation are not accompanied by transparency, democratic regulation and social control, we risk replacing an inefficient bureaucracy with a new economic elite closely linked to state power.” (ibid.)

Marx’s socialism vs. Cuban socialism  

For decades, the discussion among supporters of the Cuban revolution has been murky on what socialism is and how to transition to it. In my assessment of the market reforms, I have contrasted Marx’s view of socialism with what has become accepted as Cuban “socialism” (Nayeri, 2026).  Marx’s concept of socialism is a society free from alienation from nature and social alienation, achieved through a socialist revolution led by the proletariat as a self-organized, self-mobilized class. On the other hand, Cuba's socialism has always been about building an egalitarian society. As Pérez stressed: “For decades, despite many contradictions, equality was the model’s starting point.”

This notion of “socialism” has made Cuba a welfare state created by the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC). I have contrasted Costa Rica, which in 1948 created the first capitalist welfare state in Latin America, with Cuba and Nicaragua, both of which had revolutions in 1959 and 1979, respectively; I have found that taking life expectancy, infant mortality, index of social security, democratic rights and democracy, and the desire to remain in the country of their birth as opposed to migrating to the United Staes, Costa Ricans fare better than Cubans and Nicaraguans (Nayeri, 2025).

What distinguished Cuba in the first three decades after the 1959 revolution was its policies to achieve greater equality in income and access to basic necessities, as well as education, health care, and housing, among Cubans, especially for women and Afro-Cubans. In the mid-1980s, people experiencing poverty—defined as those who could not meet their basic needs with what they earned—made up no more than 6%. In contrast, across Latin America during those years, the poverty rate averaged more than 40%, and in some countries, it exceeded 70%. (Espina, 2025). Thus, we can think of Cuba as a welfare state, a state that created the institutions and conditions for more equality.

However, the PCC and the Cuban state were able to do this largely because of subsidies from the Soviet Union, which totaled $60 billion over those three decades. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the number of poor people had more than doubled, reaching about 15% in 1994 (ibid.). Espina (2026) estimates poverty to be about 45% of the population now. She cautions readers that she cannot provide a more accurate estimate because the Cuban government does not provide the necessary statistics and does not allow surveys to determine an accurate rate.[1]

The roots of Cuba’s economic crisis

The Cuban leadership has consistently claimed that the ongoing economic crisis in Cuba is due to the U.S. blockade that officially began on February 7, 1962. Pérez and I have pointed out that imperialist hostility and the blockade, while harming the Cuban economy, are not the root cause of the ongoing crisis.  Pérez notes “inefficient bureaucracy” in Cuba and writes: “There is consensus that the bureaucratic statist model has run its course. Cuba needs more dynamic companies, greater managerial autonomy and new scope for economic initiative.” (Pérez, 2006). Even the PCC leadership acknowledges this, arguing that socialism is impossible without generating wealth that can be broadly distributed among the people.

However, the PCC points to China and Vietnam as models for achieving these dynamics through the market. As Prime Minister Marrero told legislators, the measures formally recognize the market as “an instrument for the efficient allocation of resources” (Atkins, 2026).

 

Pérez adds a significant issue: “There is consensus that the bureaucratic statist model has run its course. Cuba needs more dynamic companies, greater managerial autonomy, and new scope for economic initiative. But autonomy for whom and under what controls?” (Pérez, 2026)

Further on, he put his finger on the crucial problem of the democratization of the Cuban economic and political system: “The crucial question is whether Cuba will have sufficiently democratic institutions to prevent economic power from ultimately capturing political power. The reforms redistribute much more than just income; they redistribute power. This new distribution of power, rather than the economic measures themselves, will ultimately define Cuba’s future.” (ibid.) Distribution of power to whom?

He further adds: “That is why the debate should not be reduced to a choice between the state and market. The fundamental question is whether these reforms will further socialize economic power or pave the way for a new structure of privileges.” (ibid.)

The absolute need for socialist democracy

As I have already argued (Nayeri, 2026; August 11, 2024; October 16, 2024), the Cuban revolution, like other revolutions after the October 1917 socialist revolution in Russia, has been a national democratic revolution against imperialism and for economic development led by parties that essentially followed the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, that is, the Stalinist one-party state that combined economic development and industrialization with a measure of welfare state policies. Stalinist parties led all these revolutions, except in Cuba, where the July 26^th Movement led it. However, in Cuba too, Fidel Castro who became a socialist in his university years, mistook the pro-Moscow Popular Socialist Party (PSP) as the representation of Marxist-Leninism and the Soviet Union as socialist. He maintained this belief throughout his life (Nayeri, April 19, 2024).  That is why, in the Great Debate of 1963-65, Che Guevara, who was a sharp critic of the Soviet Union, was eventually sidelined, and in 1965, with the founding of the Communist Party of Cuba, left for Africa and later Bolivia to help the revolutionary struggle and was eventually captured and executed.  

Thus, Cuban socialism has never been rooted in self-organized, self-mobilized working people.

Even Guevara’s vision of the transition to socialism, which stressed the need to do away with the law of value, had two key weaknesses. First, his Budgetary Finance System (BSF) began with political decisions of Cuba’s leadership that shaped the overall economic plan of JUCEPLAN (the planning board). The ministries then shared this plan with enterprises and production units. The ministries summarized their considerations and communicated them to JUCEPLAN, which adjusted the economy-wide plan accordingly. The ministries then developed plans for specific enterprises and supervised their implementation. JUCEPLAN oversaw the economy’s central controls, assisted by the Treasury Ministry in financial control and the Labor Ministry in planning labor allocation. In other words, the state bureaucracy managed key decisions about what to produce, how to produce it, and how to distribute the products. Guevara’s plan left no room for self-organized, self-mobilized workers.

Second, when Mandel, who was in Havana at Guevara's invitation, tried to convince him of the need for socialist democracy, he was unmoved. His idea of Cuban workers' participation in decision-making appears in Socialism and Man in Cuba (1965) as a dialogue between Fidel Castro, the revolution's undisputed leader, and the masses at public rallies.  Over the decades, the PCC leadership occasionally organized Cuban workers in workplaces or neighborhoods to discuss major policy proposals.  At these meetings, participants recorded proposed changes and submitted them to the PCC leadership for consideration, sometimes including them in the final policy resolution. During the massive downsizing of the sugar industry, when world sugar prices collapsed, sugar workers were involved in discussions of how to carry it out.

However, such “consultations” with the Cuban working people are substitutes for socialist democracy, which has been lacking in Cuba. To put it another way, the PCC, not the self-organization and self-activity of the Cuban working people, has been driving policy decisions about the economy and society in Cuba.

Economic activity can be organized in three ways: by the market, by the state (bureaucracy), and by the working people themselves. The capitalist mode of production is the most relevant way to organize economic activity by the market, as Karl Marx best analyzed. In all so-called “socialist countries,” the state has organized production and, to a lesser degree, the state-managed market. Market Socialism is most identified with Yugoslavia under Tito, an extreme form of it. History has shown that in all such cases, this form of production leads to a market economy, that is capitalism. The working people's self-organization for production is exemplified by family farming and cooperatives, and, for brief periods, by workers’ management of nationalized industry.

A note is in order here about the characterization of these “socialist countries” as workers’ states. This mistake stems from Trotsky’s analysis of the degeneration of the socialist revolution in Russia in The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (1936) as I have discussed in detail (Nayeri, 2006). He correctly argued that the Stalinist counterrevolution represented the destruction of the 1917 socialist revolution and its leadership in the Bolshevik Party (renamed the Communist Party in 1919), its program and tradition, and the driving of the proletariat in the young Soviet Republic out of politics. Yet he still insisted that nationalized property, a monopoly on foreign trade, and central planning constituted a workers’ state, albeit a degenerated one. He hoped a political revolution by the working class would remove bureaucracy and revive the socialist revolution.  However, in Marx’s theory of the state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the self-organized and self-mobilized working class is the absolute requirement for a workers’ state to exist, not administrative and legal categories like nationalized property, monopoly of foreign trade, and central planning. Trotsky predicted that the Soviet Union would revive as a healthy workers’ state through a political revolution; if that did not happen, it would return to capitalism. However, he anticipated resistance to such a counterrevolution, going from a workers’ state, albeit a degenerated one, to capitalism, by the working people. History showed that these “socialist countries” did return to capitalism, and the bureaucracy reemerged as capitalist. However, the working people did not oppose this, and in some cases, they celebrated it.  

As in the Soviet Union, which Trotsky analyzed with mastery (Trotsky, 1936, Chapter IV), Cuban workers, sidelined by the state bureaucracy, have no political incentive to innovate and improve the production of goods and services. As a result, labor productivity in Cuba has lagged.

Concluding remarks

In my essay on the systemic crisis of economy and society in Cuba (Nayeri, August 11, 2024), I followed Hope Bastian’s use of Pierre Bourdieu's Form of Capital (1986) to trace the ideological shifts in Cuban society over the decades. A post-Marxist, Bourdieu views capital as the power of an individual or social group to mobilize economic resources for their own ends. He discusses three forms of capital: economic capital that can be readily converted to money and is constituted in property rights; cultural capital, such as academic or artistic attainments that can be monetized; and social capital, or a network of powerful connections that can make access to consumer goods easier and can be turned into economic capital.

The proposed market reforms indicate that the PCC leadership is opening the way for a capitalist class in the Marxist sense in Cuba. This is what Pérez is concerned about. The PCC leadership is half-hearted about it, as it was with earlier, less drastic market reforms.

Bastian has discussed three forms of capital since the 1959 revolution. The first is revolutionary cultural capital, which arose from revolutionary power and became a source of socioeconomic changes in the 1960s. In the 1970s, material incentives were added to the moral incentive of becoming a Fidelista and joining the Communist Party founded in 1965. Bastian does not deny Cubans joined the Communist Party because they wanted to contribute to improving Cuban society. In her interviews, she found evidence of material and moral incentives for joining the revolutionary movement. She also offers examples of individuals who, despite many years of selfless revolutionary service, refused to use their prestige to find much-needed resources in the 1990s. However, over time, fewer such individuals emerged.

During the depression years of the 1990s (Special Period), a new social configuration emerged, which provided access to power, consumption, and resources. The importance of revolutionary cultural capital decreased, while economic capital and social capital (access to a network of well-connected individuals) increased.

Economic capital now appears to be gaining power in Cuba, as reflected in the PCC market reforms. A new class of capitalists has been forming in Cuba, as reflected in Díaz-Canel meeting with representatives of the Cuban “private sector” reported in Granma. (Martinez, 2026).

However, the PCC leadership, backed into a corner by a severe economic crisis at home and aggressive U.S. imperialist policy to put in place a government subservient to Washington, is opting for a course toward capitalism while keeping the PCC in power, that is, the Vietnam model (The China model is not appropriate as Cuba simply has no resources to create a world economic power within fifty years).

The problem is that the U.S. rulers have their eye on taking over the Cuban economy as they had before the 1959 revolution. (Schlenker and Augustin, 2026)

If the PCC moves ahead with its market reforms, which will heavily and quickly affect the working people of Cuba who are already largely in poverty, it will lose much of the support it currently has, which bars imperialist military intervention. If it does not, the economic crisis will deepen.

While Pérez and I both wish for working-class power intervening in this situation, there is no such possibility in sight. For many decades, the Cuban working class were denied independent political action and urged to follow the leadership of the PCC.

There is also no sign of a revolutionary breakout anywhere in Latin America and the rest of the world.

As I have argued, the socialist revolution that Marx and Engels predicted to break out in their lifetime in Western Europe never materialized because of the rise of labor aristocracy and bureaucracy that became supporters of the Western imperialist regimes.  This formed the basis of the reformist Socialist Democracy of Second International.

The Russian socialist revolution of 1917 degenerated not only because of Russia's economic backwardness but also because socialist revolution in the West never happened.

As a result, the world revolution turned to the periphery of capitalism, where national democratic revolutions broke out against colonialism and imperialism. In some cases, like China, Vietnam, Korea, and Yugoslavia, Stalinist parties led these revolutions and declared their one-party rule socialist because it helped win the support of the working people. I have already discussed Cuba.  It must be abundantly clear that one-party states running the economy and society are not stable social formations, as they have all returned to open capitalist social formations in which the Communist Party still rules.

Cuba's future cannot be different unless Cuban workers undergo mass radicalization to take the state power in their own hand and the world revolution comes to their aid.

References:

Atkins, C. J. “Cuba Embarks on Emergency Reforms.”  Communist Party U.S.A. June 23, 2026.

Bastian, Hope. Hope Bastian. Everyday Adjustments in Havana: Economic Reforms, Mobility, and Emerging Inequalities. 2018.

Guevara, Ernesto Che. “Socialism and Man in Cuba.” 1965.

Castro Ruz, Fidel and Ignacio Ramonet. My Life: A Spoken Autobiography. 2006.

Espina, Mayra. “Look at Cuba: Growing Inequalities.” ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America. Apr 22, 2025.

__________. “Poverty In Cuba Today.” CEDA. May 1, 2026.

Martínez Hernández, Leticia. “Díaz-Canel se reunió con representantes del sector privado cubano.” Granma. August 25, 2026.

Nayeri, Kamran. “Critical Theories of the Class Nature of the Soviet Union: A Marxian Survey.” III Conferencia Internacional La Obra de Carlos Marx y Los desafíos del Siglo XXI (The Third Conference on the Work of Karl Marx and the Challenges of the 21st Century) in Havana, Cuba, in May 2006.

_____________.  “The Political Thoughts of Fidel Castro.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. April 19, 2024.

_____________. “Economic and Political Thoughts of Ernesto Che Guevara.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. April 30, 2024.

_____________. “Systemic Crisis of the Cuban Economy and Society.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. August 11, 2024.

_____________. “The Cuban Revolution and Other Socialist Revolutions of the Twentieth Century: A Reassessment.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. October 16, 2024.

_____________. “A Historical Comparative Analysis of Costa Rica's Development.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. October 22, 2025.

_____________. “Cuba Adopts Wide-Ranging Free-Market Reforms: An Assessment.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. July 11, 2026.

Savioli, Arminio. “The Nature of Cuban Socialism,” L’Unita, February 1, 1961.

Schlenker, Lee and Ed Augustin. “Trump and Rubio Allies Are Vying for Control of Cuba’s assets If Regime Falls.” The Guardian. September 17, 2026.

Toussaint, Eric. “Ernest Mandel, Revolutionary Cuba and Che Guevara.” CounterPunch, January 12, 2024.

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[1] She also adds: “Poverty exists in degrees; within that 45% figure, there are moderate, intermediate, and extreme situations the latter falling below the threshold of mere survival, a point at which existence becomes extremely fragile and subhuman.”

3720. Trump and Rubio Allies Are Vying for Control of Cuba’s assets If Regime Falls

By Lee Schlenker and Ed Augustin, The Guardian, September 17, 2026

Marco Rubio and Donald Trump at a cabinet meeting at Camp David in Maryland, on 31 July 2026. 

Photo: Aaron Schwartz/AFP/Getty Images

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Spanish hotel chains. A Canadian mining firm. European shipping giants. Visa and Mastercard. Scores of foreign companies have been driven out of Cuba this summer over fear of being hit with potent, new secondary sanctions. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, told Axios last month there are “no escape valves” from his unprecedented pressure campaign against the island.

But not everybody is losing out. A growing cast of Washington and Florida insiders – from billionaire Trump allies and Rubio-linked lobbyists to Cuban exiles – are jockeying for control of the communist-ruled island-nation’s key assets, charging top dollar to help clients navigate the ever-expanding web of sanctions, and positioning themselves for lucrative business opportunities in the case of regime collapse.

Since an executive order signed by Donald Trump on 1 May drove Canada’s Sherritt International from its nickel and cobalt mining joint venture with the Cuban state, two rival US bids to buy out its stake have been presented to US authorities.

Ray Washburne, the vice-chair of Trump’s 2016 Victory Committee who organized last week’s Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas, is clashing with Albert Huddleston, another Texas oil tycoon with close ties to the White House. Both are hoping to swoop in, despite nine-figure claims on Sherritt’s Cuba holdings by Citigroup and Office Depot – Fortune 500 corporations. Washburne did not respond to the Guardian and the consortium group including Huddleston declined to comment.

 similar approach is being pursued by Australia’s Antilles Gold Ltd, which after being blacklisted over its Cuba operations in June received the green light from the Trump administration to negotiate the transfer of its stake in a Cuban copper-gold mine to the New York-based, multibillion-dollar investment fund, Global Emerging Markets.

“If I had done during the Biden administration what Trump’s friends have done now, I’d have been put in jail,” said a person with several decades of experience in Cuba policy who requested anonymity.

Sources tell the Guardian that several Trump Organization executives who had previously traveled to the island to explore real estate deals and who even registered the Trump trademark there in 2008 have in recent months returned to Cuba under the aegis of Dominari Holdings for meetings. The executives are said to have met with Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, the grandson of former Cuban president Raúl Castro, dubbed “the Crab”, to explore opportunities amid the departure of Spanish hotel giants Meliá and Iberostar, which had been operating on the island since the 1990s.

Neither Antilles nor Dominari returned calls for comment.

But American investors aren’t the only ones sensing opportunity in Rubio’s effort to coerce the sanctions-battered country of his parents’ birth into becoming economically dependent on the US.

Cubans have been living under an effective fuel blockade since January 2026: the Trump administration cut oil shipments to the island from the island’s main ally after abducting Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president; it then nixed oil deliveries from Mexico by threatening tariffs on any country sending petroleum to the island.

Treasury department-authorised oil exports from Florida and Texas to the island’s private sector, however – all but non-existent last year – have shot up to over $160m so far this year.

Meanwhile, Florida shipping lines such as Crowley, a donor to Cuban-American Republican lawmakers from Florida, Mario Díaz-Balart and María Elvira-Salazar, seem to be beneficiaries of fresh sanctions that have hit foreign shippers and forced Cuba-bound commerce to reroute through Florida, according to informed sources who spoke with the Guardian. Crowley declined to comment.

And as UN human rights experts warn that Washington’s latest measures “knowingly deprive a population of the means to survive”, Franklin Graham, the Trump-allied CEO of evangelical aid organization Samaritan’s Purse recently secured a $40m federal contract to distribute humanitarian aid in Cuba – despite lacking the capacity to effectively implement such a contract on the island, according to sources familiar with the matter. A spokesperson for Samaritan’s Purse said: “Details about aid for Cuba are still being developed and are not yet finalized.”

Ironically, some of those who have called most vociferously for harsher sanctions are also cashing in.

In July, Madrid-based Vima World SL, a leading player in the island’s food industry which partners with GAESA, the Cuban military conglomerate that controls large swathes of the island’s economy and has become the main target of the US squeeze, hired top Washington lobbying firm Continental Strategy – led by Cuban-American allies of Rubio who oversaw the maximum pressure Cuba policy as officials in the first Trump administration – for matters related to trade, foreign relations and the food industry.

Continental’s executives include Carlos Trujillo, Trump’s former ambassador to the Organization of American States John Barsa, Trump’s former acting USAID administrator and Alberto Martinez, Rubio’s former chief of staff. The firm, which terminated its contract with Vima this month after netting nearly $40,000 according to corporate disclosures, has been known for providing lobbying and government relations services to clients staunchly opposed to the one-party state, including MasTec, the telecom company owned by Rubio’s friend Jorge Mas Santos; American Sugar Refineries, owned by Trump-ballroom donor and Rubio patron Pepe Fanjul; and General Cigar Co, which is fighting Cuba’s state-owned tobacco enterprise in US court for the rights to the Cohiba cigar trademark.

“It’s been interesting to watch how quickly some hardline ideologues become pragmatists once there’s money on the table,” one person familiar with the contract told the Guardian, noting that Continental has taken on other Spanish firms with Cuban business interests “trying to get on the right side of sanctions, like banks and hotel chains”.

Other organizations that for years have won seven-figure grants from US federal agencies are capitalizing on the Trump administration’s push to force sweeping political and economic change on the island.

Lobbying disclosure forms filed in July by a newly formed group made up of former employees at the US taxpayer-funded Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba (FHRC), alongside longtime Republican lobbyist Otto Reich and the husband of top Rubio state department aide Viviana Bovo, indicate it is “advising [the] State Department on [an] economic development plan for a future free and democratic Cuba, including energy-sector development and compensation for owners of property/business expropriated by the Cuban government”.

Reich and Tony Costa, the Foundation for Human Rights chairman, are involved in efforts to mobilize billions of dollars in private investment from wealthy Cuban exiles for a post-communist Cuba through the newly created Cuban-American National Chamber of Commerce (CANCC).

To get their priorities heard by lawmakers and officials in Washington, FHRC and another attendee of the CANCC gatherings, Armando Labrador, a Miami-based plastic surgeon who regularly meets with state department officials and wants to become Cuba’s next leader, have paid DC lobbying firm The Cormac Group a combined $100,000 since December.

For another US taxpayer-funded non-profit that had been the subject of an internal Biden administration inquiry that was quickly shut down by powerful House appropriators, the administration’s unprecedented economic siege could not have come at a better time.

Just before the July release of a heavily criticized state department report referring to Cuba as a nearby terror hub plotting to conquer the US, Digital News Association Inc received a fresh $250,000 contract from the US government’s office of Cuba broadcasting for “investigative journalism, research and media production”, after which its main site launched an online interview series repeating Trump administration claims of Cuba’s purported threat to US national security.

Vima, Continental, Cormac and Digital News did not return calls for comment.

“The cause is regime change,” said Erik Cartelle, a consultant working to connect prominent exiles with Rubio’s state department. “I have clients that want to do a lot of business in Cuba, and the administration is banking on Cuban-Americans going to Cuba and investing, but if there’s a deal that’s going to be had with the regime, it needs to take into account the diaspora’s wishes. You’ve got to listen to this community.