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Is Trump coming for Cuba?

After Venezuela and Iran, Trump has a new target on his mind.

We’re not even three months in 2026, already it’s shaping up to be President Donald Trump’s year of regime change. He successfully removed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January, he took the US to war with Iran late last month, and now he may be eying a new target: Cuba, which he told a reporter last week is “going to fall pretty soon.”

To learn more about what could happen — and why Trump is eying Cuba in the first place — Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with The Atlantic’s Vivian Salama, who wrote recently about the administration’s Cuba ambitions.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Do we know what the Trump administration plans to do in Cuba?

We don’t know. I don’t know if they know, to be honest with you. I think the end game is very apparent to them, which is that they want the post-Castro regime that’s now running Cuba to go away.

This is part of the president’s grander scheme to lock down American supremacy in the Western Hemisphere. He’s talked about this at great length in the last year, as have many within his administration.

It was in his national security strategy. It is at the root of so........

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