Patrick Iber
April 6, 2026
Cubans on electric tricycles decorated with Cuban flags ride past the U.S. embassy during the anti-imperialist youth march in Havana on April 2, 2026. Yamil Lage/AFP/Getty Images To call Donald Trump a hypocrite serves no real purpose, but cast your mind back, if you will, to December of 2016. He had just won his first presidential election, running on the stupidity of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, which he called “a big, fat mistake.” He emphasized his anti-interventionist stance at an event before taking office: “We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with,” Trump said. He spoke out against “nation-building,” saying “we have to build our own nation.”
Ten years later, now in office for a second time, Trump has placed three countries on the list for a good toppling: Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba. On January 3, the U.S. bombed Caracas. A special forces team captured the country’s ruler, Nicolás Maduro, who now awaits trial in New York City. Trump shunted aside Venezuela’s opposition and cut a deal for oil with Maduro’s former vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez. So satisfied, at the end of February he turned to Iran, assassinating its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, via air strikes. Waves of attacks have followed; the Strait of Hormuz is closed; oil and fertilizer are in short supply; and the regime remains in place, now headed by Ali Khamenei’s son.
“Cuba’s next,” Trump announced at the end of March to an audience of Miami investors. “All my life I’ve been hearing about the United States and Cuba,” he said at another event in the Oval Office. “When will the United States do it? I do believe I’ll be having the honor of taking Cuba. … I think I can do anything I want with it. They are a very weakened nation.”
In a way, Trump has been true to this word. There are not yet any boots on the ground in any of his targets; there is no “nation-building” taking place. Trump’s strategy relies on destruction and domination. He commits atrocities without apology. He threatens and carries out attacks on civilian infrastructure. He believes that the rule of law and humanitarian sentiment have held back the United States, and that the world should be remade through violence: overwhelming, cruel force, followed not by a hand up but a business opportunity, offered to one lucky winner under coercive terms. What will it mean for Cuba?
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No bombs have yet fallen on Cuba, but U.S. attacks on the island’s civilian infrastructure have been under way for more than 60 years. The economic embargo the U.S. put in place shortly after Cuba’s revolution of 1959 restricts business and travel, and hurts its economy. Cuba, like most islands, is not capable of sustaining an industrial economy without trade. During the Cold War, it had the Soviet Union to prop it up. The 1990s, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, were times of desperate want. In the 2000s, oil-rich Venezuela stepped into the USSR’s old role. But as of January, Cuba has no patron. Trump has used tariffs threats to pressure Mexico to halt oil shipments.
“THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO!” Trump posted in January. “I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”
As a result of U.S. pressure, an already shambolic energy grid, and an economy that is dysfunctional for reasons both internal and external, is on the verge of collapse. There are rolling blackouts across the island. Cuba is simply not receiving a sufficient number of barrels of oil to sustain daily needs. Economic activity is curtailed, and shortages are even worse than normal. The country’s vaunted, state-run health system has well-trained doctors but few supplies, if people can manage transportation to a clinic or hospital when they need it. The Trump administration reportedly hopes that the pressure will force the resignation of Miguel Díaz-Canel, the island’s first non-Castro head of state since the revolution, and — as in Venezuela — open the island to U.S. investment under a new ruler, an intact regime, and a new condition of semi-sovereignty.
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Most ordinary Cubans would like to stop being pawns in the geopolitical game between their government and the United States. The last time Cubans could look to the future with a collective sense of hope was about 10 years ago, when Barack Obama put in place a normalization plan. Though he could not fully lift the embargo without congressional authority, Obama eased travel and export restrictions, reasoning that after 50 years of failed policy it was best to try something else. Obama became more popular in Cuba than any living Cuban politician.
Obama’s theory was that a more open Cuba would strengthen reform-minded members of the government against its hardliners, and open space for Cubans to push for changes. Raúl Castro, Fidel’s younger brother and the country’s president from 2008 to 2018, recognized this and cautioned against embracing the arrangement. (Now 94, Castro is still considered the most powerful political figure in the country.) Cubans in Miami were also skeptical, albeit for different reasons: They want the Castro regime to be swept away, not improved relations with it. Trump, a creature of reactionary Florida politics as much as one of New York’s outer boroughs, reversed Obama’s opening during his first term. Then Covid-19 dealt a further blow to tourism, which Cuba needs to obtain hard currency. The government responded harshly to protests in 2021 and 2024, and the Biden administration, frightened by Republican gains in Florida, showed little interest in restoring Obama’s policies.
Many Cubans have responded to the impasse by leaving. Though exact figures are not available, it is likely that between 1 and 2 million have emigrated since 2020: about 10-20 percent of the population. Those leaving skew young, leaving Cuba with the oldest average age of any country in the Americas. Many older people have seen their children depart without hope for their return. Some who have left might have formed the core of a political “opposition,” but they are gone.
Like any people, Cubans are not of one mind about their government. Older generations, who remember the ways that their lives improved after the revolution or the relatively good years of the 1970s, used to defend its legacy from those who grumbled. Criticism of the Castros used to be sotto voce and never in public. Only in the last couple of years has it been praise for the regime that is likely to be met with public derision. Fidel Castro had once called on the Cuban people to do great things through sacrifice. But you can’t sacrifice forever.
So now Cubans suffer hunger and sickness as Trump’s fiery eye has turned to them. Some people — more in the diaspora than those who have to live through it — will embrace the pressure as the only way out of an untenable present. But Cuba is a revolutionary regime. Its people fought hard for sovereignty. Its economy remains state-controlled: groups connected to the military manage foreign investments, ensuring that profits accrue to those loyal to the government. If Trump gets Díaz Canel to step down and some kind of business deal, it may end up strengthening the regime. Furthermore, just because many Cubans are ready for change doesn’t mean that they will want it to come by way of humiliation. In a recent interview with CNN, Sandro Castro, Fidel’s influencer grandson and certified doofus, insisted that most Cubans prefer capitalism to communism. But even he said it would have to be a sovereign capitalism.
It is an irony of history that it is precisely this sort of imperialistic behavior from the United States that produced the current regimes in Iran and Cuba. In 1953 and 1954, the CIA worked to overthrow the governments of Iran and Guatemala. Both had nationalist presidents who had, in their efforts to secure new arrangements for their populations, nationalized, respectively, a foreign oil company and a banana company. Both campaigns were “successful” for the CIA — in the limited sense that the offending governments were removed, and more compliant regimes were put in place.
But both would have long-term consequences: civil war and genocide in Guatemala’s case, and the anti-American character of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which overthrew the shah the U.S. put in place after the coup. One lesson that the CIA drew from Guatemala and Iran was that it knew how to overthrow a government. One lesson that Che Guevara (who was in Guatemala at the time of the coup) drew was that the U.S. would have to be ejected by force. That conclusion shaped the course of the Cuban Revolution when it triumphed in 1959. Meanwhile, the CIA’s hubris was a factor in the failure of the attempted invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and the consolidation of Fidel Castro’s power in a communist Cuba.
Trump, speedrunning his way through history, thought that the tactical success in Venezuela meant that Iran and Cuba would soon fall. He is now trapped in an escalatory spiral in Iran, while Cuba sweats. Ten years ago, it is understandable that some heard Trump’s skepticism of nation-building and extrapolated a commitment to principled anti-interventionism. But it never was that.
