The US Is Starving Cuba. Will It Invade Too?

On September 25, CBS News announced that it had obtained “exclusive new information” regarding potential US military action against Cuba. According to an Army Reserve memo reviewed by the network, the Pentagon was looking at the possibility of mobilizing police forces, medical personnel, and other units to support such an operation. Vague on details, the conveniently timed piece appeared suited to coincide with Donald Trump’s speech at the United Nations three days prior, where he asserted that his administration was seeking a “fundamental change in the situation” with the Cuban government, which is “failing like never before” and “will fall.”

The very night of its report, however, CBS published another article effectively walking it back, quoting a defense expert who claimed that the memo in question should be viewed as a routine planning exercise — one with electoral overtones. “It may be aligned with the interest in trying to inspire the South Florida vote to rally around the administration,” said Florida International University’s Brian Fonseca, “and not necessarily fall into the trap of mismanaged expectations.”

Nearly a month later, and with no invasion in sight, the Florida state government waded still further into pre-electoral waters, issuing an arrest warrant against former President Raúl Castro for his purported responsibility in the 1996 downing of two “Brothers to the Rescue” aircraft. Castro was the defense minister at the time. Essentially a copy-paste of a federal indictment unsealed in May, the announcement came some thirty years after the events in question but a mere two weeks before unusually competitive midterm elections, where even some safe GOP seats in Florida, like that of Cuban American hardliner Maria Elvira Salazar, are suddenly at risk.

In this manner, after ten months of excruciating suffering and the will-they-won’t-they threat of invasion, the medieval siege of ten million Cubans becomes yet one more political football in the US election season.

An Avalanche of Coercion

Following the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his wife, Cilia Flores, on the night of January 3, rhetoric was flying high in Trumpworld that Cuba would be next. “I think they’re in a lot of trouble,” said Marco Rubio on the day following the operation. “Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall,” Trump himself commented on Air Force One the same day. “I don’t know if they’re going to hold out.” A week later on Truth Social, he threatened: “I strongly suggest they make a deal BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.” Cuban American congressman Carlos Giménez gloated that “Maduro has fallen, [Cuban President Miguel] Díaz-Canel and [Nicaraguan President Daniel] Ortega are next.” Not to be outdone, Senator Lindsey Graham warned: “You just wait for Cuba.” And so on in an orgy of triumphalist bloviation lasting weeks.

The invasion, however, did not come. What came instead was a total fuel blockade of the island, a flagrant violation of United Nations Charter Article 2(4), Resolution 3314 Article 3(c), and the rules governing freedom of navigation and boarding on the high seas. A whirlwind of executive orders and State Department directives followed, tightening the screws even further. (This on top of Trump having returned Cuba to the list of state sponsors of terrorism on his first day back in office, reversing a removal the Biden administration had waited until its final days to make.) The administration declared a “national emergency” regarding Cuba and expanded sanctions, allowing US authorities to freeze the US-held assets of Cuban officials, government-linked entities, and others.

Foreign companies and banks now face sanctions for doing business with designated parties, and military-linked firms such as the conglomerate Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A. (GAESA) are walled off entirely: even indirect transactions with entities on the Cuba Restricted List are banned. Foreigners working in key sectors like energy, defense, mining, financial services, or security have been threatened with sanctions. Travel rules for US citizens were also tightened, as were visa rules for Cuban officials and anyone tied to the country’s overseas medical and labor programs. Remittances and money transfers were restricted further. And beyond the specific rules, the measures created a climate of legal uncertainty about penalties and compliance costs that scares off commercial activity of every kind, which was very convenient for Washington.

The result of this avalanche of coercion has, predictably, been devastating. Hotels and resorts such as Spain’s Meliá and Iberostar, Canada’s Blue Diamond, Indonesia’s Archipelago International, and Thailand’s Minor announced they were suspending service on the island. Visa and Mastercard ceased operations in June. Faltering demand and fuel shortages led major airlines like Iberia to cancel direct flights. Shippers such as France’s CMA CGM and Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd suspended new bookings. Over forty banks have ceased operating. A crisis, in short, that may have broken many populations on its own; but not the Cubans, inured like few to withstanding hardship.

“Never before has a sequence of measures been set in motion in such a short period of time that so cold-bloodedly carries out a criminal design of extermination — a policy deliberately aimed at creating shortages capable of suffocating a population, threatening its physical well-being, and depriving an entire people of their means of subsistence,” said Ambassador Johana Tablada de la Torre, deputy chief of mission at the Cuban embassy in Mexico, in an interview.

Tablada de la Torre lays out just some of the results of the blockade: the infant mortality rate in Cuba, once the pride of the nation and the best in the Western Hemisphere, has more than doubled to 9.9 per 1,000. Survival for childhood cancer has tumbled twenty points to 65 percent. Some 96,000 people are on a waitlist for operations, 11,000 of them children.

“The United States is applying the same formula to Cuba that it applied to Gaza, only without the bombs yet,” she says. “And we can’t rule that out. Their theory is that the blockade wasn’t working because it wasn’t airtight. So if they make it airtight and cut off every source of support, the country has to collapse. The opposite is true: it is thanks to our socialist system that we’ve been able to distribute the little we have.” Tablada de la Torre continues:

The idea is to intervene, install a puppet government, and restore the colonial rule that existed before. They’ve succeeded in the first respect . . . in making the Cuban people suffer like never before in their history. The only thing comparable was the reconcentration period under [General] Valeriano Weyler, during Spanish rule, when the people were confined to camps. . . . so they could not support the rebels. That’s the only comparison. But where they have not succeeded is in their main objective. They have failed to bring the Cuban people to their knees, because they have not managed to force them to give up their struggle.

Cubans Endure

Despite the drastic shortages, life goes on in Havana and elsewhere on the island. The bakers bake; the teachers teach; the doctors treat with what they have, while the scientists in the labs move forward as they can. On the streets, the whir of electric vehicles has replaced the grind and groan of the internal combustion engine. As hours of electricity are both precious and unpredictable, people have taken to leaving a small appliance on in order to be woken up if the power comes back on in the middle of the night.

To boost electricity production, the government is banking on two main solutions: First, a China-powered solar revolution that is already producing one gigawatt of the three the country needs to function during peak-demand hours. And second, a developing technology called “thermoconversion” capable of improving the quality of the heavy crude oil found on its north coast by reducing its viscosity and sulfur content. Unsurprisingly, the attempt at energy sovereignty has also become a target of Trumpian sabotage, with the Center for Petroleum Investigation (CEINPET) being included in the July round of sanctions, almost three months after the announcement of the breakthrough.

The Little Invasion That Couldn’t

So where does all of this leave the prospect of an invasion? In short, in a very strange space. In the months since the setting up of the oil blockade, Western media has been on a febrile search for the “perfect traitor” that would hand over the keys to the island and defuse popular resistance. For a time over the summer, on the heels of CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s visit to the island, they even thought they’d found one in the person of Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, Raúl Castro’s grandson and Fidel’s grandnephew.

It was not to be. By October, Marco Rubio was forced to take to X to effectively crowdsource an uprising, calling on “those who seek to create positive change in Cuba” to seize the opportunity “through a discrete [sic] partnership with the CIA.” Not very discreetly, the CIA then took it upon itself to retweet Rubio, translating the text into Spanish, only for the US Southern Command to then retweet the CIA. To cap off the delirium, Donald Trump insisted at a campaign stop on October 23 that “we’ll take care of Cuba on our way back from Iran,” conjuring up the unlikely image of a warship stopping fifty yards off the coast only for the island’s public to spontaneously raise up its hands in surrender. Meanwhile, polls consistently show the US public opposing an invasion by overwhelming margins.

As for the “taking care of Cuba” on the way back from Iran, there are two schools of thought. The first is that the Trumpian debacle in West Asia makes an invasion of Cuba less likely, as it stands to suck up attention, resources, soldiers, and carriers for months or even years to come. The “pink tide” of progressive governments in Latin America, according to this thesis, was at least partially due to the Bush administration’s being distracted by the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. But many in the region hold another view, darker and more fatalistic perhaps, but rooted in history and a long-standing study of US character: that a disaster in Iran could actually make such an attack more likely, as the empire will need a smaller enemy to brutalize in order to staunch its wounded pride. The war in Iran is hardly preventing the Trump administration from intervening in country after country in the region as we speak, these people would argue. Although an extended occupation, which is what Cuba would most likely require, is another matter entirely.

Despite Trump’s fantasies and the obvious asymmetries involved, a hypothetical invasion would be anything but a walk in the park. “The United States surpasses us in firepower and military technology, but if they lose their minds and make the reckless decision to attack us, the cannons will roar in Cuba, and many of our people will die — but so will many of theirs,” warns Tablada de la Torre.

This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.