Notes

5 W Main: The Tribe. Days after the U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump commented that his former secretary of state Mike Pompeo wouldn’t serve in the new administration. This followed Donald Trump Jr. remarking that he opposed not only Pompeo but all “neocons and warhawks” who favor the U.S. being more combative with its rivals—and its allies’ rivals. Now, however, the president-elect has chosen Florida’s Senator Marco Rubio as his nominee for the next secretary of state—and Marco Rubio is known as something of a hawk.

While it may not yet be clear how much influence either Trump Jr.’s stated views or Rubio’s established tendencies will have in the new administration, there’s one country where those tendencies may hold sway: Cuba. Not least because Trump Sr. shares Rubio’s view of Cuba policy: In his first term, Trump reversed Barack Obama’s steps toward normalizing economic and diplomatic relations with the country.

Rubio comes from the world of conservative Miami politics, where fierce opposition to Cuba’s autocratic government is virtually a way of life. In the Cuban writer Carlos Manuel Álvarez’s 2022 book The Tribe, he offers a view into how Cubans—those who’ve left and those who’ve stayed—think of that government. Very few feel sympathetic toward the regime, Álvarez says, though there’s less unanimity on what to do about it—including on Rubio’s view in favor of strenuous economic sanctions. Still, in Cuba itself, The Tribe follows how people of virtually every political persuasion have recently come together in the San Isidro Movement to oppose the Cuban government’s regime of censorship.

—Gustav Jönsson