Trump Preps Another War, This Time in Cuba
Several signs suggest the president was serious when he warned that the island nation was “next.”
The Trump administration appears to be calling the same play against Cuba as it called against Venezuela to provide the platform for a military operation.
That platform floats to Cuba in the form of the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, which entered the southern Caribbean Sea where it will remain “as part of the Trump administration’s campaign to pressure the Cuban government,” according to U.S. Southern Command. On and around the Nimitz are F/A-18E Super Hornets, EA-18G Growlers, a destroyer, and more. The move is reminiscent of the White House’s buildup of military assets before the night raid in January that led to the capture of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro.
The White House is also laying the political groundwork for an attack. U.S. intelligence leaked to Axios expressed “concern” over the “growing threat” of Cuba having acquired more than 300 military drones. The intel says that Cuba has been getting drones from Russia and Iran since 2023 and has made plans to use them “to attack the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, U.S. military vessels and possibly Key West.”
Meanwhile, the Justice Department, effectively an appendage of the White House, indicted Raúl Castro, the elderly former president of Cuba, over an incident 30 years ago in which civilian aircraft were shot down off the island nation’s coast. The indictment came the same day the Nimitz arrived off the coast and less than a week after CIA Director John Ratcliffe warned Cuban officials to “take a lesson” from the operation that removed Maduro.
Three hundred drones is less than Ukraine or Russia fire at each other in a day—hardly a serious threat to the world’s preeminent military power. Moreover, Cuba isn’t planning an act of drone aggression against the United States; it’s preparing a retaliation in case the U.S. attacks. “Cuba does not pose a threat, nor does it have any aggressive plans or intentions against any country. It has none against the U.S., nor has it ever had any,” Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel posted. But it “does have the absolute and legitimate right to defend itself against a military offensive.”
That Cuba acquired the drones for defensive purposes is conceded by U.S. officials, mentioned in the Axios report, who “don’t believe Cuba is an imminent threat, or actively planning to attack American interests.” The intel says drone warfare is being discussed “in case hostilities erupt,” as Axios phrased it.
The case against Raúl Castro, the younger brother of the deceased Fidel, is as weak as the argument that Cuba intends to commit national suicide by randomly striking America. He served as president from the time of Fidel Castro’s death in 2008 until 2021, yet has been charged by the U.S. for murder and conspiracy to kill American citizens in 1996. Raúl Castro was defense minister at the time, but it was then-president Fidel Castro who bears ultimate responsibility for downing the planes.
Since there is little chance of Cuba handing Castro over to the Americans, the only realistic way of enforcing the indictment may be a Venezuela-style military operation. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche promised that Castro would make an appearance in the U.S. “by his own will or another way.”
Making the case against Castro is possible only by severing the shootdown from the well-documented history that led to it. The planes were operated by Cuban-American pilots who called themselves “Brothers to the Rescue.” Despite their name, they did more than flying search missions for Cuban rafters. They repeatedly violated Cuban airspace, dropping hundreds of thousands of leaflets with messages like “Change Things Now,” as Willian LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh explain in their book Back Channel to Cuba.
Many years earlier, Brothers to the Rescue founder, José Basulto, had shelled a hotel where he believed Fidel Castro was dining, using a cannon from his boat.
Cuba sent diplomatic protest after diplomatic protest to the U.S. over the repeated violation of its sovereignty and threat to its national security, complete with video radar and flight plans.
A month before the planes were shot down, Fidel Castro was reportedly promised that President Bill Clinton had ordered the Brothers to the Rescue to stop their flights in return for Cuban prisoners being released. Two weeks later, LeoGrande and Kornbluh report, the Brothers violated Cuban airspace yet again.
It was Fidel Castro, not Raúl, who would eventually give the order to take all necessary steps to prevent the Brothers to the Rescue from violating Cuban airspace again. On February 24, they did, and two Cuban jets fired the heat-seeking missiles that shot them down.
The Clinton administration was fully aware of what had been going on and the risks involved. One day before the incident, Clinton’s Cuba point man, Richard Nuccio, ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to stop the flight. The FAA refused. With only a warning not to violate Cuban airspace, the Brothers filed a false flight plan and took off for Cuba.
The documents that make it clear that the Brothers to the Rescue were provocateurs and that Cuba was defending its sovereign airspace have all been declassified. A January 22, 1996 document calls the flights “flagrant violations” and worries that “one of these days the Cubans will shoot down one of these planes.”
A January 1996 FAA report says that the State Department had warned that the “Cuban government asserted its FIRM DETERMINATION to take actions to… prevent unauthorized incursions into Cuban… airspace.” It says that Cuba had made clear: “Any boats from abroad can be sunk and any aircraft downed.” The report adds, “The State Department takes this statement very seriously.”
A transcript of communications between Cuban flight controllers and Basulto makes it plain that the Brothers were warned “that the zone north of Havana is active. You run danger by penetrating.”
Considering how unwarranted is the alarm over Cuban drones, how flimsy the charges against Castro, and how intense the buildup of military assets in the Caribbean, there’s good reason to be concerned that Trump was serious when he warned that “Cuba is next.”
The post Trump Preps Another War, This Time in Cuba appeared first on The American Conservative.
