Shirk is chair of the department of political science and international relations at the University of San Diego. He lives in University Heights. Recent anti-government protests in Cuba pose a new test for the Biden administration. Responding to Cubans’ calls for “homeland and liberty” (patria y libertad) is not, however, a new dilemma in U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, deciding what to do about Cuba is an age-old question that illustrates the core dilemma in U.S. foreign policy: whether to promote our democratic values abroad, or pursue our narrow national self-interest. A U.S. intervention to help liberate Cuba from Spanish control in 1898 was our first military initiative to promote democracy abroad. Yet it was also a naked power grab that imposed U.S. controls on the newly “independent” Cuba, and allowed the United States to lay claim to strategically important territories, including Puerto Rico, Guam and (until 1948) the Philippines.