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Trump May Be Serious About ‘Taking Over’ Cuba

Image by Planet Volumes.

The US, with Donald Trump as president, has become a bizarre place. The country is at the moment in a sort of lull in a major war that Trump and his Israeli sidekick Benjamin Netanyahu launched against Iran over three months ago—not quite a cease-fire, but not full-blown war. Nearly $50 billion dollars spent on it, and the global economy is reeling from the shutdown of one-fifth of the world’s supply of oil and natural gas, and Trump still can’t explain why the war was necessary and how and when he’s going to end it….if he can.

Even weirder, Trump’s war was launched even as the US has left Venezuela in chaos in the wake of his Jan 3 “shock and awe” attack on that country’s capital, followed by a midnight raid by US Special Forces who killed 32 Cuban soldiers guarding Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro, whom they then kidnapped, spiriting him and his wife Celia Flores away to Manhattan. There, they face spurious drug smuggling charges in a US federal court.

As if that weren’t enough, Trump is now threatening to “take over Cuba,” the island nation whose economy has collapsed because of Trump’s blockade of all oil shipments.

So is Trump, America’s least popular president in his second term since G.W.Bush, going to invade Cuba? With Trump, it’s hard to know, but his recent actions and threats are ominous. First, to provide a pretext for his threatened assault and kidnapping in Cuba, he has had his ever-compliant Department of “Justice” indict 94-year-old Raúl Castro, the frail and ailing younger brother of Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel. Raúl was the vice president in 2008 when Fidel stepped down as Cuba’s president for health reasons. Raúl became acting president and then president until stepping down in 2018.

The US indictment lodged against Raúl, who is no longer a Cuban leader, is based upon the dubious allegation that as Minister of Cuba’s armed forces he “gave the orders” to two Cuban Air Force MiG fighter jets to down two civilian US Cessna aircraft violating Cuban airspace, killing all four men in the downed planes from an organization called “Brothers to the Rescue.” (One of the pilots who died, murder José Basulto, a right-wing Cuban exile who co-founded “Brothers to the Rescue,” owner of the planes and one of the downed pilots who died, was known by Havana to have been trained and slipped onto the island ahead of ther Bay of Pigs invasion, tasked with committing acts of sabotage to draw away Cuban defenders from the planned invasion landing area. Later, in 1962, he took a speedboat to the island and fired a cannon at a beach hotel, the Paquita de Hornedo, which was frequented by foreign technicians, mostly from the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries. He gave a press conference about his action on his return to the U.S.)

As the BBC report on the indictment notes, at this point the US has in the span of several months targeted three national leaders and former leaders of three countries with serious felony indictments, or simply killed them: One, Ali Khamenei, was targeted and deliberately killed (along with dozens of other political and military leaders) by the bombing of his office compound; a second one, Venezuela’s elected president Maduro, was kidnapped and is in a US prison awaiting a possible trial; and the third one, Raúl Castro, who has been out of government for ten years, has been charged with an alleged crime that dates back 30 years and is facing possible abduction by US Special Forces,

As a BBC article notes drily:

With the indictment of Raúl Castro, the US has now targeted three current or former heads of state in recent months — an unprecedented level of foreign interventionism that may be difficult for President Donald Trump to sell to voters ahead of the November midterms…

The cases of Venezuela, Iran, and now Cuba are different, of course.

But they share one thing in common: a willingness by Trump in his second term to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries, after running in 2024 on a promise to end America’s entanglements abroad.

With Venezuela and Iran, Trump argued the countries posed a direct national security threat to the US. It’s unclear how he’ll explain the threat posed by Castro, a 94-year-old who will likely never be tried in a US court.

The main reason the murder and other felony charges are likely to be dropped at some point, one that the BBC, like most Western media, fails to explain, is that Cuba for over 60 years — including the time of the downing of the two Cessnas — has been the victim of a brutal blockade by the US, which is an act of war under international law. The Cessnas, while civilian planes, were being flown into Cuban airspace from airports in Florida, with US knowledge and permission, even though they were known to be dropping flyers calling upon Cuban residents to revolt. That is a hostile act that would certainly justify downing a plane.

I have to add that these attacks and threats of attack against foreign leaders also share the fact that the US has chosen in each case to ignore the legal tools available to it to pursue alleged crimes by foreign leaders: the International Court of Justice, or a direct petition for extradition as the US made in Its effort to extradite journalist Julian Assange.

Even as Trump is growing increasingly panicked at his inability to walk away from the Iran war he illegally launched three months ago without looking like a loser, as Iran refuses to budge on key issues like surrendering its refined uranium-235 stockpile and its continued blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, Trump’s $50-billion war and the massive disruption of the global oil supply it caused is looking like a foolish blunder.

So now Trump, who ran for office twice claiming he would be a “peace president” and put an end to America’s endless wars, is trying to change the news channel, petulantly........

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