The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

We were simultaneously squeezing Havana. State reversed Obama’s absurd conclusion that Cuban baseball was somehow independent of its government, thus in turn allowing Treasury to revoke the license allowing Major League Baseball to traffic in Cuban players. This action didn’t endear us to the owners, but they were sadly mistaken if they didn’t grasp that their participation in professional baseball’s scheme meant they were sleeping with the enemy. Even better, the perennial presidential waivers of key provisions of the Helms-Burton Act were coming to an end. Helms-Burton allowed property owners with assets expropriated by Castro’s government and sold to others, to sue in US courts, either to retrieve the property or to receive compensation from the new owners, but those provisions had never been deployed. Now they would be. Consistent with his public threats of a “full and complete embargo” on Cuba because of the oil shipments between Venezuela and Cuba, Trump also repeatedly asked the Defense Department for concrete options on how to stop such shipments, including interdiction.44 Although military force inside Venezuela was a nonstarter, using force to slice Cuba’s oil lifeline could have been dramatic. The Pentagon did nothing. How bad was Cuba’s influence in Venezuela? Even the New York Times understood the problem, running a major story on March 17 recounting how Cuban “medical assistance” had been used to shore up Maduro’s support among Venezuela’s poor and held back ...