Cuba Joining BRICS Is A Quiet Warning To Trump

In another piece of trademark bullying, U.S. President Donald Trump has placed communist-led Cuba back onto the U.S. list of sponsors of terrorism. It's an absurd, obsolete instrument and outrageously unfair to a people that have already suffered decades of poverty and even hunger from Washington's longstanding blockade.

Of course, Trump can count on the island's dogmatic and economically inept regime to aid him in making Cubans' lives a misery. Today it may not be as extreme as in its early days in the 1960s — after all the revolutionary ruler Fidel Castro made his fellow guerrilla, Che Guevara head of the Cuban central bank. Still, the regime in Havana is still clinging to its chimeric belief that the state can build, and run, the economy without free-market incentives.

Luckily for the Cubans there may be a way to compensate for all this harm, through the invitation of the BRICS national economies challenging the West.

China factor

BRICS now represent half the world's population and 40% of its GDP. As they expand with new members, including three key Asian economies (Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia) and oil powers like Nigeria, the BRICS nations are gaining strategic weight with collaborative projects among members that are outside the G7.

They've formed a New Development Bank, are pushing trade without the U.S. dollar, working to evade the SWIFT banking payments system (Iran and Russia are advanced in this), and can count on China's preponderant economy and innovative savvy as an engine for the entire group.

China, Russia and Brazil may turn into the firewall for Cuba against the Trump administration

Through China, the BRICS are becoming involved in other initiatives like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Belt and Road Initiative, which are of crucial importance to countries facing sanctions, like Russia, Iran and Cuba. The group's leading economies include China, Russia and Brazil, powers that are sympathetic to the Cuban regime, and may turn into the firewall it needs against a Trump administration keen to bring the communist regime to its knees.

You might call the BRICS Cuba's modern-day apparition, like those historic arrivals of the Virgin that gave hope and succor to Catholics over the centuries. After decades of stagnation, so evident in the decrepit state of its colonial heritage, Cuba has the opportunity to enter into joint ventures with leading tech firms from China or India, in areas like medical research, logistics and infrastructures including the vital modernization of the Mariel port, waiting to recover its privileged role as an Atlantic and Caribbean hub.

Cuban Minister of the Interior Lazaro Alberto Alvarez Casas during a BRICS meeting in September in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Maksim Konstantinov/SOPA Images via ZUMA

Circumventing the dollar

The BRICS can also play a key role in diversifying Cuba's economy beyond tourism and farming, and renewing the energy sector and digital communications. They can provide a way out of the U.S. dollar's restrictive dominance, reducing transaction costs through use of the Chinese yuan or Indian rupee.

These are the possibilities of the multipolar world taking shape in spite of the United States' bully-boy tactics. Washington will no doubt pursue its supremacist wars, back Taiwan to the hilt and support Israeli expansionism and mass murder of the Palestinians, all with the backing of European neocolonialists. With Gaza revealing the West's despicable hypocrisy over human rights, Western states have stopped pretending and once more uncovered their seething nationalism and anti-globalizing xenophobia.

But the world has changed and its shape is being redefined by projects like BRICS. People have gathered across the world to denounce the West's bid to harmonize the globe with its hostile policies toward Russia. China gave the German foreign minister her response as she toured around in a clumsy bid to set the general line to toe with Russia. The world living under the West's thumb is crumbling and that can only mean hope for downtrodden nations, like Cuba.