-
Click here to listen to this article - Share via
See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Set us as preferred
With the United States’ attention fixed on Iran, Venezuela and other crises, the Trump administration’s increasing pressure campaign against Cuba has largely unfolded in the background. That may be why it has drawn less attention than other major foreign policy efforts. But the pieces add up to something larger than routine sanctions policy.
In January, President Trump declared Cuba an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security and foreign policy, accusing Havana of hosting adversary intelligence capabilities, aligning with Russia, China, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, supporting terrorism, destabilizing the hemisphere through migration and violence, and spreading communism throughout the region.
Since then, the administration has tightened sanctions, disrupted shipping, amplified warnings about drones and connections to Iran, expanded the U.S. naval presence in the region and recently indicted former Cuban president Raúl Castro. Trump sent CIA Director John Ratcliffe to Havana to warn Cuban officials against hostilities while urging political change as a path to relief from U.S. sanctions.
This all looks less like a response to a sudden crisis than the construction of one. Recent reporting that the Pentagon has positioned forces in the Caribbean capable of supporting strikes against Cuba reinforces the concern. No one on Trump’s team has answered the immediate question of what this pressure is meant to accomplish. The harder question is whether the administration is creating the very crisis it may later claim to be managing.
Maybe White House officials believe this pressure will force Havana to capitulate. But to what? Regime change? Democratization? Deterrence? Negotiation? No one has clearly said. And while Trump’s team searches for a theory of success, ordinary Cubans are the ones absorbing the cost.
Questioning these efforts is not a defense of the Cuban regime. Cuba remains authoritarian and economically mismanaged. Its leaders have denied their people political freedom and presided over decades of hardship. But a government can be repressive without posing an imminent threat to the United States. No one has made the case that Cuba does.
Reporting about Cuban drones illustrates the problem. According to Axios, U.S. officials said Cuba has acquired more than 300 military drones “of varying capabilities,” discussed possible attacks on Guantánamo Bay, U.S. vessels and possibly Key West, Fla. and studied how Iran resisted the United States militarily. But the same reporting explicitly notes that U.S. officials do not believe Cuba is an imminent threat or actively planning attacks.
Cuba’s efforts to harden itself against U.S. pressure are not proof of hostile intent. They are evidence that Havana can read the strategic environment. After watching Iran impose costs on the United States, any weak government facing sustained pressure would study how to survive U.S. coercion. The danger is that the Trump administration will weaponize predictable defensive preparation as evidence of Cuban aggression and use it to justify a confrontation it has not explained.
Trump has not earned the benefit of the doubt when it comes to strategy or justification. In Iran, his administration claimed an imminent threat even as officials with access to intelligence disputed that basis. In Venezuela, it described the capture of President Nicolás Maduro as an act of self-defense and law enforcement even as the operation blurred into military force and regime change in ways legal experts continue to contest. Cuba now shows similar warning signs: extraordinary pressure, expansive threat claims and no clear explanation of success.
This is not subtle pressure. Earlier this year, Foreign Policy reported that administration officials viewed energy as the regime’s “chokehold.” But fuel restrictions and disrupted shipping do not fall first on governments. They fall on families. For ordinary Cubans, the pressure shows up in darkened homes, stalled hospitals and empty store shelves. Reuters reported in March that nearly 100,000 Cubans were awaiting surgery, including 11,000 children, as shortages and blackouts strained the country’s health system.
Pressure is an instrument of state power. It is not a strategy by itself. Serious statecraft does not begin with pressure and hope the objective appears later. It defines a political end, chooses instruments suited to that end and considers who will bear the cost.
For more than 60 years, the United States has tried to pressure Cuba’s leadership into breaking or disappearing. It did not happen. The regime has endured. The people of Cuba absorbed the cost.
If the objective now is to help Cubans build a freer society, the administration should explain how cutting off fuel and deepening scarcity strengthens them. Hunger and blackouts do not build democratic institutions. Scarcity won’t facilitate the transfer of power from the regime to its people.
There is also a question of democratic accountability. This is not a Cuba policy debate in the abstract. American power is being used to deepen scarcity in a nearby country already facing severe hardship. If that is being done in the name of the American people, the public deserves more than vague warnings about drones and Iran. It deserves to know what humanitarian cost the administration is willing to impose, what political outcome is supposed to follow and who will answer if the pressure produces suffering without change.
If the goal of this effort is deterrence, what exactly are we deterring? If the goal is regime change, why should Americans believe another round of coercion will succeed where decades of pressure have failed? If the goal is democratization, how does making life harder for ordinary Cubans strengthen their political power?
Congress should not wait for a crisis to ask these questions. If sanctions, intelligence claims and criminal charges are being used to build toward military action or regime change, lawmakers should force that debate into the open now. If the policy is something short of that, the administration should be able to say what it is.
Before Americans accept another emergency narrative, this time about Cuba, the administration should have to explain why ordinary Cubans are being asked to suffer for a strategy it has not bothered to define.
Jon Duffy is a retired naval officer. He writes about leadership and democracy.
Insights
L.A. Times Insights delivers AI-generated analysis on Voices content to offer all points of view. Insights does not appear on any news articles.
Viewpoint
Perspectives
The following AI-generated content is powered by Perplexity. The Los Angeles Times editorial staff does not create or edit the content.
Ideas expressed in the piece
The article argues that the Trump administration is not reacting to a sudden Cuban threat but manufacturing a crisis by declaring Cuba an “unusual and extraordinary threat” and then rapidly layering on sanctions, naval deployments, criminal charges and alarmist rhetoric about drones and terrorism without evidence of an imminent attack or a clearly defined objective. It stresses that even U.S. officials cited in reporting on Cuban drones concede that Cuba is not actively planning strikes, suggesting that defensive military preparations are being recast as aggression to justify escalation rather than the other way around.
It contends that this pattern fits a broader Trump-era playbook seen in Iran and Venezuela, where the administration invoked imminent threats, blurred law enforcement with regime change and expanded the use of force without transparent public justification or clear legal foundations. The piece suggests that Cuba is now showing similar “warning signs”: sweeping threat claims, extraordinary pressure and no coherent theory of success, prompting concern that Washington could drift toward confrontation on the basis of a self-created emergency.
The article emphasizes that pressure is a tool, not a strategy, and criticizes the administration for escalating economic coercion without specifying whether the aim is deterrence, regime change, democratization or some narrower objective. It notes that for more than six decades, U.S. efforts to force political change in Havana through embargoes and sanctions have failed to topple the regime or produce meaningful democratization, while ordinary Cubans have borne the brunt of the hardship.
It highlights the humanitarian impact of the current campaign, arguing that targeting Cuba’s fuel supply and shipping—described by officials as going after the regime’s “chokehold”—inevitably hurts families first, not leaders. The article cites blackouts, stalled hospitals and long surgical backlogs as evidence that sanctions are deepening scarcity in ways that darken homes and endanger health rather than building the civic institutions or political leverage needed for a freer society.
The piece also criticizes the increasingly expansive use of financial and legal tools, such as emergency economic powers, to tighten secondary sanctions on entities that trade with or finance Cuba, echoing outside analysis that this represents a structural escalation of U.S. pressure by reaching beyond the traditional embargo into foreign transactions that sustain the Cuban economy.[1] It warns that these moves risk sliding toward a de facto economic blockade and possible military confrontation without a forthright debate over ends and means.
The article raises a democratic accountability concern, arguing that when American power is used to intensify scarcity in a neighboring, already struggling country, the public deserves more than vague references to drones, Iran and terrorism. It insists Congress should interrogate whether sanctions, intelligence claims and criminal charges are being used to build toward regime change or military action, and should force that debate into the open before another “emergency” narrative hardens into accepted policy.
Finally, the piece stresses that criticizing the pressure campaign is not a defense of Cuba’s government, which it describes as authoritarian and economically mismanaged. Instead, it suggests that because Cuba’s leaders have proven durable and the population has repeatedly absorbed the cost of outside coercion, a policy that deepens hunger and blackouts without a clearly articulated path to political change is both strategically incoherent and morally questionable.
Different views on the topic
In contrast, administration officials and some members of Congress have framed Cuba as a serious and evolving security challenge, pointing to its longstanding ties with U.S. adversaries, support for Venezuela’s security apparatus and hosting of foreign intelligence capabilities. From this perspective, formally redesignating Cuba as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism” and then escalating pressure is presented as a necessary response to alleged Cuban support for terrorism and regional destabilization, rather than an invented crisis.[1]
Supporters of Trump’s approach argue that six decades of a relatively static embargo have failed precisely because the measures did not sufficiently target the financial lifelines of the Cuban state, particularly the military conglomerate GAESA, which controls large swaths of the economy. New sanctions and the use of emergency economic powers to impose “secondary sanctions” on foreign banks and firms doing business with key Cuban entities are therefore defended as a “shot across the bow” designed to cut off the revenue streams that keep the regime in power.[1]
Some hawkish lawmakers maintain that U.S. law effectively conditions lifting the embargo on regime change in Havana and contend that a tougher sanctions regime is the only realistic way to satisfy that mandate.[1] From this vantage point, ratcheting up economic pressure—despite humanitarian costs—is seen as a hard but necessary route to weaken the security services, fracture the ruling elite and eventually open space for a political transition that decades of engagement and limited sanctions have not achieved.
Additionally, proponents of the pressure campaign often argue that any short-term suffering will ultimately be outweighed by the long-term benefit of dismantling a repressive system and reducing Cuba’s capacity to aid authoritarian allies. They contend that by squeezing state-controlled sectors and entities linked to the armed forces, sanctions can redirect economic activity toward the island’s nascent private sector and empower independent entrepreneurs and civil society, a logic echoed in analysis that notes Washington is simultaneously trying to incentivize private business while cutting off state fuel and finance.[1][2]
Some foreign-policy analysts also caution that easing pressure on Havana could push Cuba to deepen intelligence and military cooperation with Russia, China, Iran and other U.S. rivals, thereby increasing the strategic costs to Washington over time. In this view, a firm stance backed by robust sanctions and the clear option of further escalation is seen as a deterrent that signals U.S. resolve, discourages hostile activity in the Caribbean and reassures regional partners that Washington will not tolerate a hostile, militarized outpost close to U.S. shores.[1][2]
Finally, defenders of the administration’s approach tend to reject the charge that Washington is “manufacturing” a crisis, instead arguing that the crisis already exists in the form of chronic repression, economic mismanagement and security partnerships that undermine U.S. interests. They maintain that, while humanitarian consequences are serious and must be monitored, responsibility for Cuban hardship ultimately lies with Havana’s leaders—and that sustained external pressure is one of the few levers available to compel those leaders to alter course or accept meaningful reforms.[1][2]
More From the Los Angeles Times
Podcasts
It started as a ploy to scare Texas out of redrawing its congressional map and ended with California voters approving a new map of their own, one that could hat could help alter the balance of power in Washington.
William Mulholland was the water boss who made L.A. possible. His reputation gave him unchecked authority as a dam builder. In 1928, that led to one of America’s deadliest disasters--and the question of whether it was a crime.
