What is obvious is that Cuba is bankrupt, but as Mary Anastasia O’Grady cautions readers of the Journal, don’t blame the U.S. embargo or even President Trump’s oil “quarantine,” which blocks petroleum largess to the island from Venezuela and Mexico. As Ms. O’Grady alerts, “the world’s most infamous grifter is simply out of money again and is looking for a new mark.”

• Garbage is piling high in the streets.
• The power grid has come apart.
• Food and potable water are in short supply.
• Mosquito-borne diseases are running rampant.
• Protestors are taking to the streets and are likely to become more restive as summer swelters on.

The Scuttlebutt

Cuba is facing the worst economic crisis since the military dictatorship took over in 1959.  Could President Trump really be seeking a partnership in Havana like the one he struck with new Venezuelan dictator Delcy Rodríguez? Job one would be stabilizing the economy while the regime remains in power.

As Ms. O’Grady explains, “Cuba opened itself to foreign capital in the 1990s after its sugar daddy, the Soviet Union, broke up. Spanish, British, and Canadian investors, among others, thought they were getting in on the ground floor. But there was no transition to democracy. Once Venezuelan oil subsidies—which began in the 2000s—helped the regime recover, it went hammer and tongs after the foreigners it had lured to the island.”

Living the Bad Dream

Ms. O’Grady recounts Briton Stephen Purvis’s nightmare. As a married father of four, living in London, in 1999, Mr. Purvis connected with a British company that needed an architect in Cuba.

After multiple trips to the Caribbean throughout the year, Mr. Puevis moved his family to Havana in 2000 and began developing resorts, golf courses, and infrastructure projects.

As a senior executive at Coral Capital in Havana, Purvis believed his company was in good standing with the regime. He explains in his 2017 memoir, “Close But No Cigar,” how one day state security arrested his boss and shut down the company’s office. “No one knew why.”

Diplomats advised Mr. Purvis to get out of the country. Having done nothing wrong, he stayed. Months later, state security arrested him.

Purvis spent more than a year behind bars, including “eight months inside the notorious Villa Marista prison where he was held with three other men in a filthy, vermin-infested cell the area of a king-size mattress,” Ms. O’Grady reports. Purvis was allowed 15 mins of sunshine a day. Not surprisingly, suicide attempts were common within the cell block.

The Regime’s Motives

Mr. Purvis spent considerable time considering the regime’s motives. Perhaps his trip to the United Arab Emirates with the powerful son-in-law of Raúl Castro, Luis Rodríguez López-Calleja? Contracts were signed with Dubai Ports World to modernize the Port of Mariel.

Cuba was to put up $350 million. Six months later, López-Calleja changed his mind. “We don’t like to see the word ‘binding’ in contracts, and we have to cancel the project for reasons of sovereignty,” he said, according to Mr. Purvis, who was told to break the news to the Emiratis.

An Extra Half Billion?

(Purvis) obeyed and burned the project files in a bonfire on the beach. Three months later, Cuba announced the project would go ahead, with a Brazilian construction group and an $850 million loan from Brazil.

At the time of his arrest, Mr. Purvis and Coral Capital were, in his words, “fighting a losing battle against the officially sanctioned theft of non-fixed assets… and the siphoning off of cash to other state enterprises.”

The Old Guard Rebounds

Purvis now realizes the comeback happened right under his nose. “Every single high-ranking politician or business leader has been replaced or has vanished in the past few years. Some have been the subject of public purges and denouncements . . . but most have simply been edited out. All have been replaced by military figures.”

A Stalinist Housecleaning

Eventually, Purvis connects the dots. “Having allowed foreign capitalism in to rescue the collapsed economy, they now want to behead it before it becomes too powerful.” It’s a “Stalinist” housecleaning. “All I can do is think back and curse myself for not taking the warning signs seriously.”

Last week, reports Ms. O’Grady, Cuban Deputy Prime Minister Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, a great-nephew of Mr. Castro, announced Cuba is opening to investment from exiles. To put it another way, those who were forced to flee and whose property was stolen are invited to buy it back from the thieves.

It’s the latest Cuban con job.