Get audio access with any FP subscription. Subscribe Now ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN

Get audio access with any FP subscription.

ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday said the United States is “looking into” whether Cuba is stockpiling Iranian drones and suggested that Washington could take action if that’s the case.

“If they do have that, and they might very well have that … we’ll take care of it in short order,” Trump told reporters. “We’re not going to allow that to happen. So, it could be that they’re storing some. We’re looking into it now. It could be so, and it maybe isn’t.”

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday said the United States is “looking into” whether Cuba is stockpiling Iranian drones and suggested that Washington could take action if that’s the case.

“If they do have that, and they might very well have that … we’ll take care of it in short order,” Trump told reporters. “We’re not going to allow that to happen. So, it could be that they’re storing some. We’re looking into it now. It could be so, and it maybe isn’t.”

Foreign Policy has not been able to independently verify whether military drones are present in Cuba, and the White House referred us to Trump’s remarks when contacted for more information. The Cuban Embassy did not respond to a request for comment.

National security and Latin America experts told FP that it’s probable that Cuba has such drones, but they also emphasized that it’s extraordinarily unlikely that Havana is planning on taking offensive actions against the United States. The experts also believe that the recent alarm raised over drones in Cuba is part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to establish a pretext for U.S. military action against the island as it works toward the goal of collapsing the government in Havana.

Cuba probably has a few hundred unmanned aerial vehicles in its possession, such as Iranian Shahed drones, Brian Fonseca, vice provost for defense and national security research and director of the Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy at Florida International University, told FP. “The Iranians have proliferated cheap Iranian drone technology wherever they can,” Fonseca said, and Cuba is a “potential market” for such weapons.

Havana also may have speculated on various scenarios involving drones, which the U.S. Defense Department routinely does in its military planning, as well, Fonseca said. But he added that it’s “crazy” to believe that Cuba would plan on taking preemptive action against the United States. “It would be suicidal for the regime, even against the backdrop of what’s going on now,” he said.

Fulton Armstrong, a former national intelligence officer (the U.S. intelligence community’s most senior subject-matter analyst) for Latin America, told FP that during the more than 30 years he worked in intelligence, he often witnessed people beat the drums on a “threat that doesn’t exist” in Cuba to make........

© Foreign Policy