For most of the spring, the sidewalk outside an ICE facility looked like a job site. There were folding tables, printed signs that all somehow used the same font, matching shirts, legal observer vests, and bottled water by the case. From Portland to Chicago to Los Angeles to Minneapolis and elsewhere, it looked the same at each protest on the same weekends — uniformity across great distances. The press kept calling it organic. Organic movements do not show up with a supply chain.
The tables are gone now.
On Thursday, Marco Rubio’s State Department sanctioned Fidel Ernesto Castro Calis, a grandson of Raul Castro, along with Banco Exterior de Cuba, the regime’s foreign trade bank, and the entities that move the island’s nickel and its fuel: Nicarotec, Cexni, Abapet, and Comercial CUPET. That came a month after sanctions on what the State Department called Cuban regime actors tied to Marxist subversive networks. Both followed a July State Department report describing a Cuba linked rapid response network, run through Havana’s ICAP and the more than 60 organizations of the National Network on Cuba, built to put bodies outside American military bases and ICE facilities within 24 hours. Code Pink is named in that report. So is the Democratic Socialists of America. So is the People’s Forum.
This could be correlation instead of causation. Freezing a correspondent account does not automatically empty a sidewalk in Chicago, and I cannot prove the two are one thing.
What is not in dispute is the plumbing. A regime with 2 or 3 hard currency streams keeps them open through a foreign trade bank, a nickel exporter, a fuel importer, and front companies that reach American banks through third countries. Cut the bank out of dollar clearing and every one of those pipes narrows at once. Cuba spent 60 years exporting revolution because it could not export anything else at a profit. It is being contained now by Marco Rubio and a piece of paper, and containment by paperwork is cheap, reversible, and does not require a single American in uniform.
The second piece of good news came from Tom Homan, who says ICE broke its all time monthly arrest record in June, broke it again in July at roughly 51,000, and held that pace in August. That’s three consecutive months of deportation arrests at record levels in the middle of what was supposed to be an unmanageable political backlash.
Notice who did it.
