The Outsider Perspective Issue 483 | The Beltway Outsiders

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Good Friday Morning! Especially to the twenty camel owners in Oman who just got caught pumping Botox into their camels’ faces. Vice is calling it a “hump inflation” scandal, and that headline alone is worth your click.

At the 2026 Camel Beauty Show Festival in Al Musanaa, veterinary inspectors discovered twenty contestants had received cosmetic procedures — lip fillers, facial Botox, silicone hump enhancements, and hormone regimens for muscle definition. The Jerusalem Post has the full rundown. Judges caught them during pre-parade inspections when “unusually pronounced facial features” and visible injection sites gave the game away.

I have so many questions. Starting with: who is the camel Botox guy? Because someone in Oman is running a back-alley camel cosmetics practice, and that person has clients. Repeat clients, apparently.

This isn’t the first time this has happened— Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz Camel Festival has dealt with similar scandals. These are serious-money competitions, reportedly $60 million in prizes, and winning raises the breeding value of the animal. There’s a really trashy reality television show waiting to happen here with the Geico Hump Day camel, and… I might watch it. Just saying.

This week, I’m writing about Cuba — the Communist Party just invited capitalist exiles to invest in the island it spent sixty-five years destroying, and I think it’s the clearest verdict on the regime we’re going to get. Links and analysis to follow.

Quick Hits:

The Iran war enters its third week. If you’ve been reading my columns over the last month, none of this should be surprising — but the speed is. We’re on Day 21 of the US-Israel campaign against Iran, and the escalation has moved into energy infrastructure. Israel struck phases 3, 4, 5, and 6 of Iran’s South Pars gas field — the largest in the world — and Iran retaliated by launching missiles at energy facilities across Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Saudi and Emirati defenses intercepted. Qatar wasn’t as lucky. Ras Laffan, the country’s main LNG export terminal, took extensive damage — 17% of the nation’s LNG export capacity knocked offline, roughly $20 billion in lost annual revenue. Brent crude has been trading above $100 a barrel since mid-March, spiking toward $110 after the South Pars strike — up more than 40% from $71 before the war started on February 28. Trump responded by threatening to “massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field” if Iran continues targeting Gulf states. I wrote that this administration was weaponizing oil prices against China heading into the March 31 summit. That thesis is playing out in real time, even with the summit potentially becoming a moving target. But Iran striking its own neighbors’ energy infrastructure is the wildcard that is giving China heartburn these days.
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Where you can find me this week

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The Iran War Is Already on Your Grocery Receipt. Democrats Just Don’t Want to Admit It. – Conservative Institute

Paul Ehrlich Died And The Damage Of His Ideas Are Still Compounding – Conservative Institute

Your Grocery Bill Is a National Security Problem – Conservative Institute

Cuba Just Asked Capitalists to Save Socialism

The Communist Party invited Miami exiles to invest in the island it spent 65 years destroying. The verdict on socialism came from the defendants.

On Friday night in Morón, a small city on Cuba’s northern coast, the lights went out. Again. Another nationwide blackout. People grabbed pots and pans and took to the streets. By Saturday morning, the local Communist Party headquarters was on fire. Video from the scene appeared to capture gunfire. Five people were arrested.

Morón was not an isolated incident. Cuba recorded 130 protests in the first half of March alone, up from 30 in January. Cuban officials admitted in February that the healthcare system had been “pushed to the brink of collapse.” The average state salary is 6,685 Cuban pesos per month. At the informal exchange rate of 510 pesos to the dollar, that works out to about $13. A carton of eggs costs nearly half a month’s pay.

John F. Kennedy understood something about Cuba that his Democrat successors forgot: a hostile regime 90 miles from Florida is not a diplomatic nuisance. It is a permanent threat to American security. The Cuban Missile Crisis proved it. Sixty-four years later, the threat has changed uniforms but not addresses. The United States should finish what Kennedy started.

Free Cuba.

Ninety miles

Alfred Thayer Mahan, the naval strategist who shaped American sea power doctrine, called Cuba the key to the Gulf of Mexico. He analogized it to Gibraltar in the Mediterranean. He was writing in the 1890s. The geography hasn’t changed.

What has changed is the tenant list. The Soviets are gone. But China now operates suspected intelligence facilities on the island, including the signals intelligence complex at Bejucal, just outside Havana. CSIS satellite imagery from 2025 shows the site is being upgraded with a new antenna array. The upgrade would give Beijing the ability to monitor Cape Canaveral launches, Southern Command headquarters in Miami, and submarine bases along the Gulf Coast.

In June 2024, Russia sent the nuclear-powered submarine Kazan into Havana harbor for a five-day port call. The Kazan carries Zircon hypersonic missiles. On the way in, the Russian fleet conducted live-fire drills in the Atlantic. Ninety miles from Key West.

Cuba is our Taiwan geographically, except the strategic math cuts the other way. China cannot project enough force across the Pacific to take Taiwan. The United States can project more than enough force across the Florida Straits to change the equation in Havana. We have the power. We have the proximity. And we now have the opportunity.

Kennedy was right. Obama was wrong.

Kennedy drew the line in October 1962, and every president for the next five decades respected it in some form. The embargo was blunt, imperfect, and often criticized. But it reflected a core principle: a communist military outpost on America’s doorstep serves the interests of America’s enemies, and the United States has no obligation to finance it.

Barack Obama abandoned that principle in December 2014. His theory was that engagement would do what isolation hadn’t: open the regime from the inside. Reopen the embassy. Loosen travel restrictions. Let American tourists spend dollars in Havana. The invisible hand would do the rest.

It didn’t. Tourism revenue flowed to the Cuban military, which controls most of the island’s hospitality sector. Repression continued. China expanded its intelligence footprint. The regime pocketed every concession and delivered nothing in return. Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat, warned Obama at the time that he had “rewarded a totalitarian regime.” Marco Rubio called on Havana to shut down the Chinese listening post at Bejucal. Neither got anywhere.

Obama’s mistake wasn’t naiveté. It was a theory of change that has never worked with authoritarian governments: the belief that economic access will produce political reform on its own. It doesn’t. The regime decides where the money goes. In Cuba, it went to the generals.

Obama’s failure on Cuba mirrors that of Iran. A mental model that was utterly wrong on every point.

The blockade objection

The far-left argues that the United States is the source of all Cuba’s ills, not socialist tyranny. They point to the sanctions and the embargo. The oil blockade cut off Venezuelan crude. The grid collapsed. People are going hungry. Washington did this, they say.

Assume the argument is true for a moment. The blockade is real. It is harsh. When the United States cut off Venezuelan oil after capturing Nicolás Maduro in January and slapped tariffs on any country selling oil to Cuba, it targeted a regime that depended on roughly 70,000 barrels of Venezuelan crude per day. That was over two-thirds of Cuba’s supply. The blackouts that followed, sometimes lasting 20 hours or more, are a direct result of that pressure. Real people are suffering because of American policy choices.

But the argument falls apart once you widen the lens. The American embargo has existed in some form since 1962. Cuba’s economy has been in freefall since 2019, well before the current oil blockade. GDP has dropped 23% since 2019, with the Economist Intelligence Unit projecting another 7.2% decline this year. More than one million Cubans have fled the island since 2021, the largest exodus since Castro took power. The sugar harvest, once Cuba’s economic backbone, fell below 200,000 metric tons for the first time in over 200 years. The blockade didn’t cause any of that. The system did.

For decades, the regime pointed to its healthcare system as socialism’s crown jewel. Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary Sicko gave that myth its most famous platform. Moore brought 9/11 rescue workers to a Havana hospital and marveled at the care. Cuba’s health minister praised the film. The government aired it on national television. What Moore skipped was that the hospital floor he visited was a health-tourism ward, a foreign-currency operation built for cameras. Regular Cubans use a different system. That system, as of 2025, has lost more than 12,000 doctors and 7,000 nurses in a single year. 70% of basic medicines are unavailable in Cuban pharmacies. And by the regime’s own health minister’s admission, it is collapsing. Moore was a useful idiot for a Potemkin hospital. The real patients were always in a different building.

On March 16, the Cuban government announced it would allow Cuban exiles to invest in and own businesses on the island. Foreign trade minister Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga said Cuba was open to “not only small investments, but also large investments, particularly in infrastructure.” Stop and appreciate the delicious irony for a moment. The Communist Party is asking Miami capitalists to come save the economy that 65 years of central planning destroyed.

When a socialist government invites the exiles it spent decades denouncing to come build what it couldn’t, the argument is settled. The laboratory is closed. The results are in.

The Monroe Doctrine isn’t dead

The Monroe Doctrine has been called a relic, an artifact of imperial overreach that doesn’t belong in the 21st century. But the principle underneath it is as straightforward as it was in 1823: the Western Hemisphere is not a forward operating base for hostile foreign powers.

Kennedy enforced that principle during the missile crisis. Reagan enforced it in Grenada. And in 2025 and 2026, the Trump administration has enforced it with a speed that has shocked the world. Maduro was captured in January. Thirty-two Cuban elite soldiers were killed in the operation, members of the Black Wasps unit that served as Maduro’s praetorian guard. Venezuelan oil to Havana was cut off. Cuba’s grid collapsed. On March 13, Díaz-Canel confirmed his government was in talks with the United States and agreed to release 51 prisoners.

The dominoes are falling. Not because of invasion, but because of economic pressure applied with patience. The same playbook that squeezed Iran. The same playbook that cornered Maduro. Now bearing down on the oldest communist government in the Western Hemisphere.

But the strategic case is only half the argument. The moral case is stronger. 92% of Cubans disapprove of their government. 78% want to leave. The average worker earns $13 a month. The regime fires on protesters. This is not a policy dispute between two governments. This is a captive population.

In Miami, the Cuban exile community is watching with the intensity of people who have waited their entire lives for this moment. They saw Iran’s military might reduced to scrap. They watched Maduro dragged out of Venezuela in handcuffs. Now they want their turn.

Marcell Felipe, who chairs the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, told the CBC that this is “our Berlin Wall moment.” He said the community is already making plans to rebuild. Congressman Carlos Giménez wrote in February that Cuba is “approaching its Berlin Wall moment” and urged the United States to “finish the job.”

The Cuban exile community in South Florida is one of the most successful immigrant groups in American history. They built businesses. They raised families. They kept the culture alive for three generations. And they never stopped believing they would go back. Their parents told them. Their grandparents told them. Now the phone is ringing, and Havana is on the other end begging for money.

Finish what he started

Cuba is the Cold War’s unfinished business. The Soviet Union fell in 1991. The Eastern Bloc freed itself. The Berlin Wall came down. Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states: they all made it out. But the regime in Havana survived, propped up first by Moscow’s money and then by Caracas’s oil, kept alive by the polite fictions of Western intellectuals who toured its showcase hospitals and ignored its prisons.

Both props are gone now. Moscow can barely supply its own war effort. Maduro is sitting in a New York jail cell. The regime has no one left to call. So it picked up the phone and called the exiles. Come back. Bring your money. Build what we couldn’t.

That is either the most cynical move in Cuban history or the most desperate. It doesn’t matter which. The result is the same. The Communist Party just told the world that 65 years of socialism produced an island that can’t keep the lights on, can’t feed its people, can’t keep its doctors from leaving, and can’t build its own roads. The verdict came from the defendants.

In October 1962, a young president looked at photos of Soviet missiles 90 miles from American soil and said: not here. He was right about the geography. He was right about the threat. He was right about the principle. The regime he tried to dislodge has spent the last six decades proving him right about everything else, too.

The lights are out in Morón. The Communist Party headquarters is a burned-out shell. The people are chanting “Liberty!” in the streets. And in Miami, families who haven’t been home since their grandparents fled are making plans to go back.

Cuba is asking to be freed. The answer should be yes.

Quick Hits:

Where you can find me this week

Cuba Just Asked Capitalists to Save Socialism

Ninety miles

Kennedy was right. Obama was wrong.

The blockade objection

The Monroe Doctrine isn’t dead

Finish what he started

Links of the week

X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week

Satire of the week

Thanks for reading!