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 several civilian US-registered Cessna aircraft alleged to be violating Cuban airspace,, killing all four men in the downed planes operated by an organization called “Brothers to the Rescue.”

A third plane piloted by José Basulto, a right-wing Cuban exile who founded “Brothers to the Rescue,” managed to escape the attack and fly back to the US. Basulto was known by Havana to have been secreted, as part of the Bay of Pigs invasion plan, into another part of Cuba, tasked with committing acts of sabotage so as 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, known to be frequented by foreign technicians, mostly from the Soviet Union and some Warsaw Pact countries. He gave a press conference about his action on his return to the U.S.)

Following the shooting down of the two planes, then US President Bill Clinton blasted the Cuban government, saying the civilian planes were unarmed and were flying over international waters.

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,

The Trump regime’s brief against Raúl Castro seems rather weak and hypocritical, given that Trump himself and his ‘War’ Secretary Pete Heseth have authorized the killing of over 200 civilians on speedboats in international waters off the coast of Venezuela (some by so-called “double taps” that hit survivors stuggling to avoid drowning after the initial attacks) claiming—on no evidence—that they were “invading” drug smugglers headed for the US.

As he grandiosely boasted to Washington journalists at the White House last month, “I think I can do anything I want with it [Cuba]. Whether I free it, take it…You want to know the truth? They’re a very weakened nation now.”

What could go wrong? Well, let’s see…

It’s true that Cuba’s economy is in a state of collapse, with malnutrition rampant, infant mortality soaring, hospitals unable to function, schools closed, and transportation difficult to impossible. But this collapse has nothing to do with the fact that Cuba is run largely as a socialist state as Trump and his toadying Cuban-American Secretary of State Marco Rubio claim, but rather because it is being literally destroyed by an almost total Trump-ordered US blockade of oil shipments, leaving the island nation almost completely without electricity, fuel, and medicines that require refrigeration, etc. (The island does contain some small deposits of mostly very heavy crude oil, and of natural gas deposits and has the ability to refine the former into useable oil and petroleum.)

There is, sad to say, not much global solidarity being shown for Cuba in this crisis, even by countries that have long been Cuban allies. Maduro had been sending Venezuelan oil to Cuba, but even before overthrowing and kidnapping him, the US had been blocking or taking........

© Eurasia Review