From Havana to Mar-a-Lago: The Strongman Playbook Doesn’t Change

I got a note last week that stopped me cold.

Credit: Edel Rodriguez

It came from a colleague who was born in Cuba, came to the U.S. at 16, and built a life here.

He wasn’t writing about policy or partisanship. He was writing about something deeper. Something more dangerous.

He wrote about the kind of blind loyalty that corrodes reason. The kind that once had him chanting slogans for Fidel Castro, and now echoes in MAGA rallies across America.

It triggered a memory and a wave of recognition.

Nine years ago, I visited Cuba. Castro was gone by then, but his presence lingered everywhere. His face covered murals. His slogans clung to crumbling walls.

His image hovered in schoolyards, government offices, living rooms. The man was dead. The myth lived on, breathing through every institution.

For those who weren’t born yet or choose to forget, Fidel Castro ruled Cuba for nearly five decades, seizing power in a 1959 revolution and transforming the island into a one-party communist state.

He crushed dissent, censored the press, and built a cult of personality that outlasted him.

And that’s what hit me hardest. The same Republican Party that once built its identity opposing tyrants like Castro now aligns itself behind a man who mirrors their methods.

Donald Trump isn’t a communist. He’s something far more familiar to American culture. More branded. More televised. More social-media savvy. But the thirst for control, the appetite for adoration, the demand for total loyalty—it’s unmistakably there.

The costumes differ. Green fatigues replaced by red baseball caps. Guerrilla radio swapped for Truth Social tirades. Revolutionary slogans traded for merchandise drops and loyalty pledges. But the mechanics? Strikingly similar.

This isn’t about ideology. It’s about method.

Trump doesn’t sell policy. He sells belief. He doesn’t ask for agreement. He demands allegiance. The phrases once whispered under Fidel—“He knows what he’s doing,” “He’ll fix it,” “He’s our guy”—now reverberate through MAGA circles.

As my colleague put it,“These are the same phrases that we used to say in Cuba about Castro and that Venezuelans used to say about Chavez.” 

The words don’t matter. The obedience does. Trust the man, not the process. Trust him over evidence. Trust him even when reality screams otherwise.

You saw it this week in real time. Howard Lutnick, Trump’s Commerce Secretary, told CNN: “Let Donald Trump run the global economy. He knows what he’s doing. He’s been talking about it for 35 years.” Then came the clincher: “You got to trust Donald Trump in the White House.”

That comment dropped just hours before the markets plunged—not necessarily because of what he said, but in perfect sync with its absurdity. It wasn’t a prediction. It was a snapshot. A moment where blind faith was demanded, even as conditions deteriorated. A reminder that in this movement, loyalty outranks competence.

Every strongman needs enemies. Fidel had imperialists. Chavez had capitalists. Trump has the deep state, the fake news, the globalists, the migrants. The targets shift. The formula doesn’t. Keep the crowd angry. Keep them afraid. Offer them scapegoats and salvation in the same breath.

Castro delivered five-hour speeches to mesmerize the masses. Trump stages rallies with identical purpose, not to inform, but to inflame. To punish dissent. To bathe in adoration. To remind everyone who owns the movement.

And when institutions obstruct, weaken them. Replace career professionals with loyalists. Purge the civil service. Pressure judges. Use pardons as currency. Strip oversight agencies to their foundations. Attack the press until truth sounds partisan.

In Cuba, it took a revolution to crush checks and balances. In America, it’s happening one headline, one appointment, one tweet at a time.

“They might like ‘their man’ now,” my colleague warned, “but if the institutions that are supposed to check his power are destroyed, they might not like either what he becomes… or the ones that come next.”

This isn’t governance. It’s performance art. Cruelty packaged as strength. Kristi Noem films herself strutting through a Salvadoran prison like it’s a tourist attraction. DHS releases deportation videos with mood music and cinematic editing. Trump halts food deliveries to food banks and calls it leadership.

These aren’t policies. They’re rituals. Signals. Dominance disguised as duty.

Fidel used executions to enforce fear. Trump uses humiliation. Public, unrelenting, calculated. The point isn’t persuasion. It’s control.

And the irony cuts deep.

The Republican Party that once wrapped itself in anti-Castro righteousness now follows a man who praises dictators, threatens to jail opponents, and speaks openly about suspending constitutional order. And the applause grows louder.

Even among some Cuban and Venezuelan exiles—people who fled authoritarian regimes—there’s an embrace of Trump’s strongman style. Not all. But enough to make the parallel unmistakable.

“I don’t want to live in an echo chamber,” my colleague wrote, “but when I try to read their arguments, there is no depth, just angry attacks and name-calling.”

They believe this time is different. That because the strongman targets someone else, they’re safe. That power, when it serves your side, isn’t dangerous. But history tells another story. It always does.

This is how democracies die. Not with a coup, but with a cheer. With a shrug. With flags waving and voices chanting and people insisting it can’t happen here, even as they actively enable it.

If you want to know how it ends, ask someone who’s lived through it before.

They’re already sounding the alarm.