By Marjorie COHN

Contact us: @worldanalyticspress_bot

The Cuban people have vowed to resist a new U.S. invasion, writes Marjorie Cohn. Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said the nation is a “free sovereign state” with the right to “self-determination,” and not “subject to the designs” of the U.S.

Since the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the U.S. government has sought to foment regime change in Cuba.

In 1961, the C.I.A. orchestrated the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, when C.I.A.-trained Cuban exiles landed at Playa Girón, on Cuba’s southern coast. They were defeated within two days by Cuban military forces.

Over the years, the C.I.A. organized hundreds of assassination attempts on the life of Cuban President Fidel Castro and supported myriad acts of terrorism against Cuba.

Now, impelled by Cuban-American Secretary of State Marco Rubio, President Donald Trump is moving steadily toward accomplishing regime change in Cuba.

Trump claims that Cuba will be “next” after Iran. He said he will “have the honor of taking Cuba,” and “Whether I free it, take it – think I could do anything I want with it.” On May 1, the day he issued an executive order intensifying sanctions against Cuba, Trump said the U.S. will be “taking over” Cuba “almost immediately.”

The U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida is reportedly preparing to announce the indictment of former Cuban President Raúl Castro on May 20.

This mirrors the pretext the U.S. used for its illegal invasion of Venezuela in January and kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whom the U.S. had also indicted.

In recent weeks, U.S. military and intelligence agencies have stepped up surveillance flights near and around Cuba. This is also a pattern that mirrors U.S. intelligence flights in the weeks before the January aggression against Venezuela and seizure of Maduro.

Meanwhile, Washington is manufacturing another pretext to attack Cuba. Officials in Cuba said the Trump administration is leveling “increasingly implausible accusations” as it tries to justify, “without any excuse, a military attack against Cuba.” The Cuban statement responded to a report in Axios that quotes an unnamed White House official as saying that the Cuban government has been “discussing plans” to launch drones against the United States.

Trump Toughens the Blockade Against Cuba

The U.S. policy of ousting the Cuban government was enshrined in a 1960 secret State Department memorandum that advocated

“a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

In response to that memo, the U.S. government imposed an illegal embargo — now a punishing blockade — on Cuba. It continues to this day.

Damages caused by the blockade exceed $170 billion, according to the Cuban Foreign Ministry. In 2025 alone, the blockade cost Cuba $7.5 billion.

Trump has taken several steps to toughen the blockade of Cuba. During his first term, he reversed some measures President Barack Obama had instituted to weaken the blockade. Trump also imposed 243 onerous new sanctions as part of his “maximum pressure” strategy against Cuba.

Now Trump is using his second term to hasten the downfall of Cuba’s government with actions that elevate U.S. cruelty toward Cuba to an unprecedented level.

The infant mortality rate in Cuba rose from 4.0 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2018, to 9.9 in 2025. An estimated 1,800 Cuban infants died. They would have survived were it not for the U.S.’s intensified sanctions.

On Jan. 29, Trump issued an executive order tightening the U.S. noose around Cuba’s neck. Trump’s order declared Cuba to be “an unusual and extraordinary threat,” without citing any evidence, and warned that he would impose punitive tariffs on states that deliver fuel to Cuba, which relies on oil for 80 percent of its electricity.

Then the Trump administration established a naval blockade of Cuba — considered an act of war.

Cuba depended on Venezuela and Mexico to supply the oil it could not produce. Cuba has received no oil from Venezuela since the U.S. invasion and kidnapping. Oil from Mexico likewise stopped in response to Trump’s threats.

Although the Trump administration allowed a Russian delivery of 100,000 tons of oil last month, that supply has been exhausted.

On May 13, Cuba announced it had run out of oil.

The U.N. Human Rights Office warned in February that “Intensive care units and emergency rooms are compromised, as are the production, delivery, and storage of vaccines, blood products, and other temperature-sensitive medications.”

That statement continued,

 “In Cuba, than 80 percent of water pumping equipment depends on electricity, and power cuts are undermining access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene. The fuel shortage has disrupted the rationing system and the regulated basic food basket, and has affected social protection networks — school feeding, maternity homes, and nursing homes — with the most vulnerable groups being disproportionately impacted.”

In May, the U.N. special rapporteurs on the right to development, the right to food, and the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation said that the U.S. fuel blockade on Cuba amounts to “energy starvation” with grave consequences for human rights and overall development.

On May 1, Trump issued another executive order, reinforcing and expanding the existing framework of illegal unilateral coercive measures (UCM’s) imposed against Cuba.

The order significantly strengthened the extraterritorial application of the UCM’s to foreign entities, individuals, and financial institutions engaged in trade or economic relations with the country. And the order further tightened restrictions on international financial transactions, trade, travel, and access to banking and payment systems.

Impending Indictment of Raúl Castro

Since 1959, right-wing anti-Cuba organizations based in Miami have conducted a pattern of terrorism against Cuba in attempts to overthrow the Cuban government.

Those terrorist groups include Brothers to the Rescue, Alpha 66, Commandos F4, Cuban American National Foundation and Independent and Democratic Cuba. They have operated with impunity in the United States — with the knowledge and support of the F.B.I. and C.I.A.

Their acts of terrorism include planting a bomb on a Cubana airliner off the coast of Barbados in 1976, killing all 73 persons aboard. Although the C.I.A. knew that Cuban exiles were planning to blow up a Cubana airplane, it didn’t warn Cuba.

The Trump administration is reportedly preparing to indict Raúl Castro for allegedly ordering the 1996 downing of two small planes flown by Brothers to the Rescue (BTTR) that killed four people. Castro was then minister of Cuba’s armed forces.

In 1995, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said it was investigating BTTR (which had engaged in a campaign of dropping anti-government leaflets over Cuba) for violating Cuban airspace.

Pilot José Basulto, a former C.I.A. operative and veteran of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, founded BTTR. During the 1990s, BTTR was part of a network that executed bombings against Cuban tourism targets, assassination plots and paramilitary operations against Cuba.

Cuba had warned Basulto not to cross the 24th parallel, a line approximately 40 to 60 miles north of Cuba’s coast. Although it is part of international waters and airspace, Cuba considers the area that stretches to the line to be its defense zone. Cuban airspace extends 12 miles off its coast.

On Feb. 26, 1996, Basulto informed Havana’s air traffic control that he would cross the 24th parallel and fly north of Havana. Cuban air traffic control responded, “We inform you that the area north of Havana is activated. You are taking a risk by flying south of 24.”

Basulto replied, “We know that we are in danger each time we fly into the area south of 24, but we are ready to do so as free Cubans.”

“According to the Cuban pilots and air command, two of the pirate planes were at a distance of from five to eight miles from Cuba’s coasts,” Roberto Robaina González, then foreign minister of Cuba, said in a statement to the United Nations General Assembly.

The BTTR planes were shot down by Cuban MiG fighter jets. Four people, not including Basulto, were killed.

“[BTTR] had carried out premeditated acts, which were not civil in nature and which violated both international law and Cuba’s sovereignty,” former Cuban Foreign Minister Ricardo Alarcón told the U.N. shortly after the shootdowns. “They were also related to very serious crimes against the Cuban people.

The Cuban Five

In the face of the anti-Cuba terrorism, five men — known as the Cuban Five — traveled to Miami from Cuba to gather intelligence to prevent future terrorist acts against Cuba. They peacefully infiltrated criminal exile groups, then turned over the results of their investigation to the F.B.I. But instead of working with Cuba to stop the terrorism against it, the U.S. government arrested the five men.

The Cuban Five — Gerardo Hernández, Fernando González, René González, Ramon Labañino, and Antonio Guerrero — were convicted in 2001 of criminal charges, including conspiracy to commit espionage and conspiracy to commit murder, in a trial in U.S. district court in Miami. They were sentenced to four life terms and 75 years, collectively.

Hernández was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the 1996 shootdown of the BTTR aircraft.

In 2005, a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals unanimously reversed the convictions of the Cuban Five. But the convictions were reinstated by a decision of all the 11th Circuit judges.

Judge Phyllis Kravitch wrote in dissent that the government failed to present evidence sufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Hernández agreed to participate in a conspiracy to shoot down planes over international airspace, resulting in the deaths of four members of Brothers to the Rescue.

The five men were subsequently released in 2011 and 2014.

In 2015, as Barack Obama was moving toward normalizing relations between the U.S. and Cuba, I visited Cuba and met with René González and Antonio Guerrero.

“We were occupied by U.S. troops in 1898. From then on, we were a subject of the U.S. government and especially the U.S. corporations. Then came the Revolution, which tried to correct that imbalance,” González told me. “Then came a different stage — of aggressions, blockade and policies against Cuba, which has lasted for than 56 years. You cannot expect that establishing normal relations … [for] the first time in history is going to be an easy process.”

Normalization, González continued, will require

“the dismantling of the whole system of aggression against Cuba, especially the blockade. Everybody knows how damaging it has been for the Cuban people. It’s a small island. For 50 years, it has been asphyxiated by the biggest power in the world. It had a cost on the Cuban people, on their economy.”

“Since 1959, Washington has pursued a singular, near-fanatical obsession with reversing the Cuban Revolution and restoring the neocolonial shackles it once imposed on the island,” Eric Ross wrote in a piece republished today by Consortium News. “Its aim has been not only to undermine Cuba’s social transformation and internationalist commitments, but to extinguish the example the revolution represented: that an alternative to U.S. hegemony and capitalist underdevelopment was possible.”

The Cuban people have vowed to resist a new U.S. invasion. Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said Cuba is a “free sovereign state” with the right to “self-determination,” and it is not “subject to the designs of the United States.”

On Monday, Diaz-Canel said that

“Cuba, which is already suffering from multidimensional aggression by the U.S., does have the absolute and legitimate right to defend itself against a military offensive, which cannot logically or honestly be used as an excuse to impose a war against the noble Cuban people.”

“Cuba does not represent a threat and has no aggressive plans or intentions against any country. It does not have them against the U.S., nor has it ever had them, something that nation’s government knows well, especially its defense and national security agencies,” Diaz-Canel added.

He warned that a U.S. military attack on Cuba would have devastating consequences for the U.S., Cuba, and the region. “If it materializes, it will trigger bloodshed with incalculable consequences, in addition to the destructive impact on regional peace and stability,” he said.

“There’s nothing they can effectively do to resist a U.S. invasion or attack at the moment it happens,” Cuba expert William LeoGrande, professor at American University, told The Wall Street Journal. But the Cuban government plans to mount a guerrilla war if the U.S. occupies Cuba. “It does not take a lot of people to make an occupation really hard.”

Original article:  consortiumnews.com