Is Cuba about to collapse?

0:00Support for here and now any time comes from the VCU School of Business. Careers evolve and sometimes growth means continuing your education. VCU graduate programs offer flexible evening and weekend options for working professionals. Learn more at business.vcu.edu slash grad. WVUR podcasts. Boston. Using humanitarian suffering as a tool for political change, I find really not only uncomfortable, but not the United States that I know. Trump's foreign policy is not exactly winning hearts and minds. It's Monday, March 23rd, and this is here and now anytime from NPR and WVR. I'm Chris Bentley.

1:00Today on the show, the economic pull of war. It's not just gas prices. The impact on energy costs, shipping costs, insurance costs. All of these costs are going to be enormous. Also, we'll meet a man who left his job at the Department of Homeland Security and now works as a paralegal on immigration cases. But first, the US is now weeks into a war with Iran that it initially claimed would be a quick operation with no end in sight. And at the same time, the Trump administration is pushing regime change in Cuba. Cuba's communist government has held on to power for nearly 70 years, despite economic warfare and coup attempts from the US. But the country is now suffering its worst humanitarian crisis in decades. On top of its long-standing trade embargo, the US recently imposed a total blockade of oil reaching the island, crippling Cuba's power grid, enforcing cuts to everything from trash collection to hospital service. Jeffrey D. Laurentus was the top diplomat at the American embassy

2:04in Havana from 2015 to 2017. And he tells Indira Lakshmanan, the US is escalating things quickly. We've moved from economic reform and a gradual approach. And then we heard talk about the US wanting the removal of so-called older officials who remain committed to the ideas of the del Castro. And then I'm guessing there might have been some blowback from the Cuban diaspora wanting more than gradual economic reforms. And the Secretary of State said what the Cubans have suggested is not enough. And I think we'll have to see. Cuban leaders say they're preparing for a possible US invasion, but the two sides are reportedly also in talks. Is the Trump administration pressure campaign having the desired results? In terms of the administration, well, representatives of the administration have been going around for a week saying 2026 is the year that the Cuban regime is

3:09going to fall. Transition is going to begin. Clearly, they had the Venezuelan model in mind. And that's why they've begun to talk to Royal Castro's son and grandson and grand nephew and so forth. This seemed to be the model they were looking at it. I call it maybe a bit globally kind of a coercive version of Obama 2.0. And this now seems to have gotten stuck. Well, let me ask because Cuban leaders have offered vague promises of reforming the economy and even the government. Do you believe having lived there and interacted with this regime that real change is possible with the current government? Royal Castro is still alive and is seen as the power behind the throne. Or are they simply talking about reform just in an effort to avoid more drastic US intervention? Well, the Cubans have been talking about economic reform for a very

4:15long time. And they seem to make one step forward and a couple of steps backward. Perhaps here they're playing for time. On the other hand, they have a humanitarian crisis on their hands. It's been it's really the worst. I think we've seen since the beginning of the revolution. I think it's worse than the special period in the early 1990s, which I witnessed personally. Maybe they're more serious now about economic reforms. But I haven't heard any of them talk about significant political changes. All right. If president Trump tries to remove Cuba's president, Miguel Diaz Canal, like he did in Venezuela, what do you imagine the consequences would be? Yeah, it's it's a good question. And if you're talking about some sort of military extraction, I think that to me feels like so far anyway a remote possibility. So I think

5:23we're just going to have to see. There's been reporting that the Trump administration is considering various wealthy Republican donors who have Cuban ancestry for potential leadership roles in Havana. What's your reaction to that? Yeah, I think one of the problems here and one of the reasons the administration began on the let's say economic side of the ledger was because they were looking for more gradualist of reform that would take place slowly step by step because they don't want the country to collapse. There's not some large opposition group as there isn't Venezuela in waiting. So I'm sure they've been talking to folks in South Florida, but I just don't see how all that would unfold. And I also have to say particularly with respect to the oil blockade now, using humanitarian

6:23suffering as a tool for political change, I find really not only uncomfortable, but not the United States that I know. And that's not going to be a strategy to win the hearts and minds of the Cuban people. Well, the current Cuban government has been in power for more than 60 years now. Do you think that it can survive the current crisis? I think we'll have to see. And I would say if you put Venezuela and Cuba and Iran on a sort of scale of degree of difficulty, then as well as the easiest Iran the hardest, I would kind of put Cuba in the middle. So it's going to be much more complicated than the Venezuela operation and plan with. Ambassador Jeffrey De Laurentis was the top U.S. diplomat in Cuba from 2015 to 2017. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Well, speaking of complicated attempts at regime change, American military costs are mounting in

7:32Iran. After the break, Indira asks, just how big a tab are we running up? Support for here and now any time comes from the VCU School of Business. Many professionals work with data now. Fewer feel confident using it to make decisions. VCU's Master of Decision Analytics Weekend program helps professionals use data and AI to guide complex strategies. Develop skills without stepping away from your career. No analytics experience required. The VCU School of Business is open for business, open for opportunity. Learn more at business.vcu.edu slash mda weekend. Support for here and now any time comes from Select Quote. If you're new to life insurance, you're not alone. Thankfully, there's Select Quote. For over 40 years, Select Quote has helped

8:36more than 2 million Americans understand their options and get the coverage they need. Select Quote takes the guesswork out of finding the right life insurance policy. Life insurance is never cheaper than it is today. Get the right life insurance for you, for less and save more than 50% at selectquote.com slash anytime. That's selectquote.com slash anytime. This Earth Day, a one-in-a-kind adventure begins. From WBUR, the creators of Circle Round and Endless Thread, you prefer your fruit hot or not, comes a new interactive story. 100 years into our flooded future, the Midnight Rebellion is coming. April 22nd, wherever you get your podcasts. President Trump said today the U.S. and Iran are having, quote, very strong talks toward ending the war, a claim that Iran rejected. And as the war enters its fourth week, it's already

9:38costing the U.S. tens of billions of dollars. The Pentagon reportedly told Congress and closed session that the first six days of the war cost more than $11 billion. So where is all that money going? And what are the long-term costs of this war to our economy and the national debt? Linda Bilmez is a professor of public finance at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Her forthcoming book is called The Ghost Budget, Paying for America's Wars. Linda, welcome. Thank you. Linda, you predicted in a recent op-ed for the Boston Globe that the price tag for this war could reach $50 billion or more. What is all that money being spent on? Well, the $50 billion has already been eclipsed by the fact that the administration is asking for $200 billion for immediate cost. And that is to pay for the very, very rapid pace of consuming munitions as well as planes, fuels, and a wide range of missiles, bombs, mines, torpedoes,

10:39etc. that we are using in these wars. But also, this is related to the fact that the President had already prior to this war asked for a 50% for a $500 billion increase in the defense budget, which is unprecedented. That's a higher increase than we've seen any time since 1951 percentage-wise, since during the Korean War, right? It is, but during the Korean War, taxes were also raised. Top taxes to 92% by President Truman to pay for that. This time, this was being requested with no mechanism to pay for it apart from more borrowing. Even though we're being told that the war is now costing us about a billion dollars a day, that there are hidden costs that might actually double that to $2 billion a day, and you're saying that there are also hidden costs we're not thinking of, which is equipment replacement down the line. What are some of the other hidden costs we may be missing in this current war?

11:42Well, two major costs that we are missing that are long-term costs are one paying for disability benefits and medical care for those who are currently serving, who will become veterans. We know from previous wars that veterans cost peak a long time after the war. Just to give you an example, the 1991 Gulf War, which was a short six-week war, 37% of those who served currently receive lifetime benefits. There are hundreds of billions of dollars over their lifetime of costs that will be incurred. This war is being financed with borrowing at a time when the national debt is already $39 trillion. Explain to us the long-term consequences of all that debt and borrowing. Well, this is a very interesting question, and it's the subject of my forthcoming book, because starting after 9-11, we changed the way we paid for war. We used to pay for wars through higher taxes and reduced non-war spending. But we have now since 9-11 cut taxes four times

12:49and increased non-war spending. So this war is following this same pattern that we are paying for everything in Iran and paid for all of the pre-war costs through debt. And debt, of course, means that we have to pay interest on the debt. And we still have to figure out a way to pay that debt back. But right now, what we have done is just transferred the cost of these wars to our kids and our grandchildren. Well, let me ask you, George W. Bush, when he was president, said the Iraq war would cost $40 billion. You wrote a book with economist Joseph Stiglitz on how that price tag ballooned. Current estimates of that eight-plus-year war are that it cost us American taxpayers $8 trillion. Why did it end up costing so much more than we were told? Well, I think that historically, those who get into wars typically underestimate both the duration

13:51and the cost. And the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were extremely expensive, both in terms of operations, the personnel on the ground, the amount of weaponry and reset, and the very, very significant costs of caring for the veterans for those wars. If we think just about veterans' cost, if you look at the financial statements of the United States, we currently owe just in disability benefits to veterans of previous wars, more than $7 trillion. And these are costs that are never considered at the outset. Last question, Linda. We're already seeing gas prices going up dramatically with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. In the short term, what are the other ways in which this war could impact the global economy? There are huge economic costs that will dwarf the budgetary costs, but it's too early to put a price tag on them. But the impact on energy costs, shipping costs, insurance costs, for example, the United States has just

14:54opened a 20 billion re-insurance facility. All of these costs are going to be enormous. Linda Bilmes is a professor of public finance at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Her upcoming book is called The Ghost Budget, Paying for America's Wars. Linda, thank you so much. Thank you very much, Indira. We've got one more story for you on today's show. Coming up, a man who once deported immigrants for a living now helps them fight their cases. Peter O'Dowd has that story in just a minute. This message comes from Intuit TurboTax. With TurboTax expert full service, match with a dedicated expert who will do your taxes for you from start to finish getting you every dollar you deserve. It's that easy. Visit TurboTax.com to match with an expert

15:59today. Support for this podcast and the following message come from strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Are you stuck in a job you've outgrown or never wanted in the first place? Are your reasons for staying really just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from strawberry.me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner and get 50 percent off your first coaching session at strawberry.me slash NPR. For more than two decades, Eric Odinius works on immigration enforcement at the Department of Homeland Security. He started out as a van driver taking detainees to their deportation flights. Later, he worked as a security guard in an immigration court and a deportation officer interviewing detainees in prisons and jails. Now he's working with many of the same kinds of cases, but from the other side, he's a paralegal assisting immigration attorneys whose clients are caught up in deportation proceedings.

17:01Eric Odinius is with me now. He's from a suburb of Minneapolis. Eric, good to speak with you. My pleasure. I want to walk people through the trajectory of your career and immigration enforcement. How did you start out working for the federal government and what kind of work were you doing? Well, it was basically the immigration equivalent of a US martial. I was taking a lot of flights, but I was also taking them to immigration court, or if they had to see a doctor or some kind of specialist or, you know, transfer to another district because their proceedings were out of state, anything like that. Whatever it was, I was basically the person who made it happen. How did you feel philosophically about the job? Did you feel that immigration agents like you were doing important work, keeping the border secure, or, you know, was it just a job? No, it was very important. You're a sworn officer. When you're on the job, politics is out. You're not political, anything. The Congress sets the law. You are applying the facts to a given

18:06situation, and you are predicting an outcome, and you take that recommendation up to your chain of command, or to the attorneys at the Office of Chief Counsel, and they ultimately make the final decision. You're just the guy who's gathering the facts and making the recommendation. It really is kind of like Dragnet, you know, or Jack Webb says just the facts. That's basically what it is. You've got this really fascinating 360 degree view of a complicated issue because you spent so many years helping in one way or another, deport people. Now you're kind of trying to help them stay as a paralegal. What made you decide to make this pretty profound switch? One phrase of wisdom that I heard when I went the first time I went to the A-circuit and Court of Appeals is that it's all about jurisdiction. Either you've got it or you don't. If the person in front of me turns out to be a U.S. citizen, the immigration rules don't apply to him, and we

19:07shouldn't be involved with him at all. And until I'm satisfied that my jurisdiction does or does not exist, I have to continue to research the issue until I'm satisfied that yes, we can proceed or know we shouldn't. And that was kind of the rule I tried to live by. Should we even be involved in a particular case? Is there good reason to do something one way rather than the other? And that's what really kind of peaked my interest and trying to figure out the conflict of laws. What takes precedence? It's really, it's quite fascinating. I want to get your thoughts on the tactics that ICE and Border Patrol agents have been using during the first year of President Trump's second term. We've all seen what happened in your home state of Minnesota earlier this year. You live in a suburb of Minneapolis. Two U.S. citizens killed violence against protesters, detaining children. Did all that hit close to home to you? It does. It does. And gee, of all the people I wish I could have consulted with, I wish someone

20:10would have asked me for my opinion back then, the government. What would you have said? There's a culture to every agency, right? And what most people don't understand is the Border Patrol is different from the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is also different from Customs and Border Protection. They look like they have the same mission, but they really don't. And because the Border Patrol's job, for instance, is to deal with the border itself, the Customs and Border Protection deals with the ports, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement deals with the Interior Enforcement, which is to say people who are already here for whatever reason and status or out of status, and then respond to that appropriately. And it really is three different cultures and three different approaches that you take. And to put a Border Patrol person to do an Interior job, it's different in different places. And you have to recognize that

21:12what you might be doing on the border is different from how you would deal with things in the Interior or how you deal with things at the port. And you have to recognize that. You mentioned the culture. Is that the culture that you recognized in your time during work with the federal government? It isn't. And I've said so. Because the thing is, is that now that things have kind of calmed down here to a degree, it's my office that's kind of left holding the bag, so to speak. I don't think my local office was involved in all the wild and woolly stuff that was going on out there. But now they're going to have to pick up things with the Consulate Corps and our other stakeholders and things like that. The District Court judges that have had to hear a thousand percent increase in habeas, corpus hearings and things like that. It's going to take a while to get things back on a normal footing and relationship with the other stakeholders.

22:16Because of the government shutdown, I'm sure you've seen this news. ICE agents are getting sent to airports around the country to do the work of TSA agents who are calling out sick or quitting. Do you think ICE is prepared for a job like that? Well, they better give them some training and authority. I don't know what they're going to have to do. I mean, if they're just going to have them, you know, basically post-sentinel, that's one thing. If they're going to have them actively engaged with US citizens and stuff like that, I should hope somebody is making sure that the authorities are all in order so that there's not a whole jurisdictional issue. The first time, there's some kind of conflict between the agent and the person going through the airport. I hope that's done because it will create, it will create a mess in the courts again. You've seen this from both sides now. Yes. Where is all of this headed if the current approach continues?

23:19I guess the only way I can describe it is Mr. Toad's wild ride. I have no idea what we're going for this. What I have said consistently is a lot of the problem that we have today and that we're seeing is because immigration law, like the tariffs issue, is specifically ascribed to Congress in the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, and because it is specifically given to Congress and the executive branch only kind of gets to nibble at the edges, so to speak, it really is up to Congress to decide what they want to do. Well, the problem is, of course, that Congress now is so divided on such a knife edge of the party, so to speak, that they're simply not able to, as far as I can tell, effectively decide what they want to do. If there is going to be any real change or whatever, it really has to come from Congress. It can't come from anywhere else. If Congress won't elects not to do anything about it, well, we're going to continue to see issues

24:19like this, because presidents of every administration, and I was in five different presidential administration, they want to see like they're doing something, or they made a campaign promise, they think something's important, and they do it, but again, immigration is different. It's not like any other field of law. It is controlled by Congress, and if the boundaries are pushed, then the courts have to referee it, and, you know, as I've seen many times that that becomes the right role, and that's pretty quick. Well, this is an issue that Congress for many, many years has been unable to figure out. Eric Odinius, a former immigration agent, now a paralegal working for immigration attorneys. Thank you so much for your time. Well, thank you. I really appreciate Peter. That's it for the show today. Here and now any time comes from NPR and WBUR. Today's stories were produced by Lin-Managhan, Sam Rapleson, Ashley Locke, and Jinea Walker. Our editors were

25:22Todd Munt, Mikhail Rodriguez, and Michael Skato. Technical direction from Matt Reed and James Trout. Our theme music is by Mike Misketto, Max Lieben, and me, Chris Bentley. Our digital producers are Allison Hagen and Grace Griffin, and here and now's executive producer is Alan Price. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with you tomorrow. This message comes from Prolon. Feeling heavy and depleted. Prolon's five-day, fasting mimicking diet aims to make it easy to reset your body, habits, and energy. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute, the goal of Prolon's nutrition program is to rejuvenate you from within by working at the cellular level to support fat loss, glowing skin, and sharper focus. Get 15% off plus a bonus gift when you subscribe at