Democrats have taken a slightly longer view, arguing that Obama’s trip to Cuba and normalization of diplomatic relations is a step in the right direction. Rep. Janice Hahn (D-Calif.) said she hoped the renewed relationship would eventually “translate to a better economy, better lives, better jobs and hopefully less oppression.”

But what would we say about this visit if we shifted perspective from Washington to Havana? (This question is the type of standpoint shift I argue international relations scholarship would benefit from doing more often.) In short, we’d have to acknowledge that Obama’s visit actually signals the triumph of Cuban defense policy. More specifically, it signals the triumph of a policy that Fidel Castro’s government developed and began implementing toward the end of the Cold War, which I call “revolutionary deterrence.”

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On the domestic front, a government that implements revolutionary deterrence combines unconventional warfare tactics for defense with domestic policies that give constituents a stake in the government’s continued success. Internationally, it launches diplomatic campaigns targeting adversaries’ allies, as well as transnational social movement activism to undermine adversaries’ domestic political support.

When the Soviet Union launched glasnost in the 1980s and scaled back support of Cuba, the Reagan administration was ramping up hostility toward Latin American revolutions. The Soviets didn’t respond to the U.S. invasion of Grenada or to U.S. support of rebels against the leftist Nicaraguan government because Moscow was unwilling to jeopardize bilateral relations with the United States. This lack of a Soviet response left the Cubans to face any escalated confrontation with the United States by themselves. To meet this potential challenge, the Cuban government redesigned its defense doctrine as part of the broader “rectification” process.

As I was beginning the research for my forthcoming book, “Sandinista Nicaragua’s Resistance to U.S. Coercion,” my then-adviser, Mark Q. Sawyer, was just finishing his own monograph, “Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba.” It became clear to us over several conversations at the time that the revolutionary deterrence policy the Nicaraguans implemented to defeat the Reagan Doctrine was almost exactly the same policy the Cubans were adopting during rectification.

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The U.S. policy toward Cuba since the early 1960s, known as “rollback,” was designed to use coercion to overthrow the revolution. This policy predated the Cuban Revolution, originating with the Truman administration, and especially that of Eisenhower, but it was revived in its more virulent form in the 1980s as the Reagan Doctrine. In general, rollback involved using economic sanctions and embargoes, diplomatic isolation and low-intensity conflict strategies against leftist governments. The latter included organization and support of proxy armies and covert operations such as assassinations and terrorist bombings.

To defeat renewed U.S. hostility in the 1980s and to deter further escalation, Cuba’s revolutionary deterrence strategy has had four components:

But Cuba’s victory is a double-edged sword. Rapprochement does not mean that the U.S. strategic objective toward the island has necessarily changed or that U.S. policy is no longer about creating regime change. On the contrary, when Obama stated, “I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas,” he was really admitting the defeat of rollback, a policy that his administration never favored. After all, rollback is a quintessentially Republican policy rooted in the domestic politics of securing the Cuban American vote to win Florida and the presidency.

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Replacing rollback, President Obama has adopted a policy that creates economic openings for U.S. businesses and better political relations with the island and that tries to undermine the Cuban government. The Obama administration is now openly shifting to a “democracy promotion” approach to regime change, which is geared toward opening up the Cuban economy, splitting Cuban society by co-opting and luring certain sectors closer to U.S. interests, and undermining the regime’s internal support, all while pushing for “political reforms” (such as implementation of liberal capitalist representative democracy).

This approach is something that the United States has become adept at using in Latin America and to which the Cuban regime may be quite vulnerable. But for this new tactic to work, the United States needs to create “good” diplomatic relations with Cuba. That means ending the U.S. embargo. This would facilitate the U.S. government’s ability to fund opposition groups it supports, gain economic leverage over the Cuban government and create incentives for political reforms. It remains to be seen how the Cuban government, which despite Obama’s visit is still fighting the remnants of the U.S. Cold War rollback policy, will respond to shifts in U.S. tactics.