For months, US President Donald Trump has been fixated on Cuba. He’s issued threats and imposed additional sanctions on the island. The US military has conducted dozens of intelligence-gathering flights off the coast in recent weeks, suggesting a prelude to an invasion.

The Cuban government has indicated a readiness to negotiate with the Trump administration on some issues, such as migration, drug trafficking and investment openings for Cuban-Americans. But Cuba’s sovereignty is not negotiable.

After interviewing Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel last month, US journalist Kristen Welker seemed to catch on:

Nothing gets under [Cubans’] skin more than the notion that the United States can tell the Cuban government who should lead it or what it should be doing, how it should be governing, because that challenges the very idea of the sovereignty of the country.

Nothing gets under [Cubans’] skin more than the notion that the United States can tell the Cuban government who should lead it or what it should be doing, how it should be governing, because that challenges the very idea of the sovereignty of the country.

This US obsession with controlling, influencing and coercing Cuba long predates Trump and even the Cold War. This is how President Theodore Roosevelt described the island in 1906:

I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth. All we have wanted from them was that they would behave themselves and be prosperous and happy so that we would not have to interfere. And now, lo and behold, they have started an utterly unjustifiable and pointless revolution.

I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its........

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