Cuba’s leaders may fear American power, but blackouts, shortages and economic collapse pose a more immediate threat
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An American aircraft carrier strike group has arrived. The US Marine Corps is readying. There’s an increase in reconnaissance missions, an oil embargo is in force, extra sanctions are being applied and the head of the CIA is focusing on regime change. Sounds familiar. But it’s not Venezuela, it’s not Iran, it’s Cuba.
A full-scale invasion is unlikely, but once the waters have calmed in the Strait of Hormuz, President Trump’s ‘eye of Sauron’ will turn towards the Caribbean island. Washington has attempted to change the regime in Havana ever since the revolution of 1959, which overthrew the Batista military dictatorship and replaced it with Fidel Castro’s Communist dictatorship. That goal looks closer now than at any time in the last six decades.
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No US government will accept a Cuba hostile to the USA due to the island’s location. It sits at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico, home to US ports that handle more than 40 per cent of the USA’s waterborne imports and exports. One hundred and forty-five kilometres to the north, across the Florida Straits, is Florida. To the west, across the 210-kilometre-wide Yucatán Channel, is Mexico.
Blockading the gulf would be far more difficult than the Iranian operation in the Strait of Hormuz, but every US government seeks to make it impossible. They also seek to ensure that a hostile foreign government doesn’t hold sway in Havana.
There’s a lot of history here, dating to the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, which warned European powers not to interfere in the Americas. In 1854, the USA tried to buy Cuba from Spain but was rebuffed. It then supported Cuban rebellions before taking control of the island after the Spanish-American War of 1898. Following Cuban independence in 1902, the USA withdrew troops but established control of Guantánamo Bay naval base, dominated the economy and ensured that the Soviets couldn’t get a foothold close to Florida.
That strategy fell apart in 1959, leading to the disastrous CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles in 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year, which took the world to the brink of nuclear war. Plots to kill Castro with exploding or poisoned cigars came and went, sanctions failed to cow the regime, and Cuba continued to export anti-American revolutionary Marxism throughout Latin America. Now, it’s in no position to export anything except refugees fleeing a bankrupt, corrupt, brutal and failed regime.
What may turn out to be the penultimate hammer blow to the government was the capture of the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January. This led to ‘regime behaviour change’ in Caracas. Subsidised Venezuelan oil was all that kept the lights on in Cuba, but since January, the supply has dried up. Basic services have ground to a halt and there are daily power blackouts. Without refrigeration, food will rot as the island heads into the blistering heat of a Cuban summer. People will become angry and desperate.
Enter the USS Nimitz. The carrier was supposed to be decommissioned this year, but that has been pushed back to 2027. On the same day as it arrived in the region, the Department of Justice indicted former Cuban president Raúl Castro for allegedly ordering the shooting down of two civilian planes belonging to a Miami-based Cuban aid group. Four people died, including three Americans. The indictment potentially opens the way for a Maduro-style operation.
Following that, CIA director John Ratcliffe flew into Havana and delivered an ultimatum. Cuba must close the ‘listening posts’ China and Russia have established there, break security ties with the two powers and open the political and economic system. By no coincidence, he took with him one of the covert operators involved in the mission to capture Nicolás Maduro.
Cuba’s leaders say they aren’t intimidated. Like their Iranian counterparts, they have a lot to lose. Just as the IRGC controls major companies in Iran, so the Cuban military has its sticky fingers all over Cuba’s economy. It dominates the Grupo de Administración Empresarial, a business founded by Raúl Castro through which the military chiefs make money out of tourism, construction, shops and so on.
They hope to buy time. The longer the Iran crisis continues, the less focus there will be on them. They’d like to get to the US midterm elections in November, after which power will begin to drain from Trump. That’s true domestically, but on foreign policy he will still have the biggest say. Besides, the most urgent threat to the regime isn’t political or military – it’s economic, and it becomes more acute with each passing day.
However, Trump has hinted that the military option is on the table, saying that, while returning from Iran, an aircraft carrier could “come in, stop about 100 yards offshore, and they’ll say: ‘Thank you very much. We give up.'” Now, where have we heard that before…?
