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In recent months, President Donald Trump’s blockade against Cuba has generated blackouts and hunger, stretching society to its breaking point. Exploiting the crisis, Cuban American reactionaries across Florida are pressing for regime change. Decked in MAGA swag, they frequently gather along the palm tree-lined streets of Miami to excoriate socialism, promote escalation, and sport signs declaring “Make Cuba Great Again.” Since the war against Iran began, their demand has been simple: “Cuba next.”

While lobbying for intervention, community leaders have drafted detailed agreements for dividing the political spoils and implanting unfettered capitalism on the island. From Guantánamo Bay, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently primed activists’ expectations by declaring that Trump is “taking back our hemisphere,” insinuating the imminent use of force.

Cuban American conservatives and U.S. officials claim to champion Cuban democracy. Yet the intensified sanctions and pro-war demonstrations lay bare the violence of U.S. policy, while revealing a horrific tolerance for human suffering. Far from defending Cuban sovereignty, Washington and its reactionary allies have long attempted to thwart the island’s aspirations for self-determination. For over a century, U.S. officials have regarded Cuba as a plantation to exploit, rival to defeat, or dissenting voice to silence, never shedding their colonial outlook. The current crisis mirrors this troubled history, as policymakers and right-wing extremists revive siege warfare in the Caribbean.

The Blood-Stained Facade

The latest string of U.S. sanctions and promises to liberate the island resound with bitter irony. In 1898, Washington justified intervening in Cuba’s war for independence against Spain by citing mass starvation among civilians. Leading the charge, Sen. George Hoar declared that Madrid “deliberately [plotted] to starve them to death.” After invading, President William McKinley proclaimed Cuba’s liberation, yet refused to cede power to local revolutionaries, excluding them from negotiations with Spain.

Instead, his administration turned the island into a U.S. protectorate, while claiming that its large population of color made self-rule dangerous. Echoing this sentiment, The New York Times warned against “an irresponsible government of half-breeds,” and the San Antonio Express argued that foreign control was necessary to “save the Cubans from themselves.” For four years, U.S. military authorities attempted to disenfranchise Black citizens, established the Rural Guard to squash dissent, and oversaw a land grab by foreign businessmen, who displaced thousands of farmers.

Cuba Has a Rich History of International Solidarity. US Wants to Extinguish It.

In 1901, Washington linked independence to acceptance of the Platt Amendment, which granted the United States “the right to intervene” to protect strategic interests. Sen. Orville Platt argued that it was essential for stability, since local politicians were as “irresponsible as children.” The statute allowed U.S. officials to establish a naval base in Guantánamo Bay, before again invading the island in 1906, 1912, and 1917. U.S. leaders mocked Cuba’s sovereignty. Deploying U.S. soldiers in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt derided “that infernal little Cuban Republic,” claiming that he wanted to “wipe its people off the face of the earth.”

In large part, tensions remained high because of economic exploitation. Following the War of 1898, U.S. businessmen manipulated the widespread destruction of legal records to seize Cuban land. Between 1905 and 1911, the number of farms in Guantánamo alone fell from 1,154 to 419, as foreign investors consolidated massive sugar plantations. The sociologist Lowry Nelson observed that property disputes were “one-sided affairs,” since U.S. corporations employed high-powered lawyers and “corrupt[ed] the officials … with bribes.” Poverty spread across the island, and male unemployment rates surpassed 20 percent by 1907.

Popular outrage finally exploded in 1912, when the Independent Party of Color organized mass protests against racial and economic exclusion. In response, Secretary of State Philander Knox pressured Cuban officials to stifle the uprising by threatening another invasion. Historian Louis Pérez, Jr. emphasizes that U.S. Marines blitzed from the local naval base to protect U.S. property, freeing Cuban soldiers to undertake a cruel campaign of repression. “They have lopped off the heads of probably some six thousand negroes in this province,” a U.S. citizen in Guantánamo claimed. One Afro-Cuban resident recalled that soldiers “killed everything that was Black” and set fire to piles of........

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