THE AGGRESSOR IN THE MIRROR: How Washington Manufactures the “Cuba Threat” While Strangling a Nation

When the historical record is consulted honestly, only one country in this relationship has consistently acted as an aggressor — and it is not the one being blockaded.

When a senior U.S. government official stands before Congress, posts on official platforms, or declares to the world that Cuba represents a threat to American national security, they are not speaking truth. They are performing a function. That function — the deliberate inversion of historical reality — is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of documented, declassified record.

The evidence has always been there for those willing to read it.

A Century of Intervention Before the Revolution

The United States never recognised Cuba’s Republic in Arms during its war of liberation against Spain. It actively intercepted patriotic expeditions carrying weapons and supplies essential to that struggle. When Spain was finally defeated, Washington intervened militarily, occupied the island by force, and stole the victory from the Cuban people who had bled for it.

The Platt Amendment of 1898 formalised what the guns had already established: Cuba as a protectorate, its sovereignty conditional on American approval. Repeated military interventions through the early twentieth century reinforced the point. Gunboat diplomacy was not a metaphor — it was policy.

When strongmen were needed to protect American commercial interests, Washington provided them. Gerardo Machado and Fulgencio Batista both enjoyed U.S. support while presiding over regimes responsible for thousands of deaths. The CIA actively advised Batista’s security apparatus and helped create the Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities — the BRAC — in the 1950s.

The monster was assembled in Washington’s workshops.

From Playa Girón to Operation Northwoods

The revolutionary triumph of 1959 triggered a response that can only be described as institutional panic. By 1960, President Eisenhower had approved a covert CIA plan to overthrow the new government. In 1961, CIA-trained mercenaries invaded at Playa Girón — the Bay of Pigs — and were defeated by people’s militias within 72 hours.

The defeat did not produce reflection. It produced escalation.

Operation Mongoose followed: a programme of economic sabotage, terrorist attacks, and more than 600 documented assassination attempts against Fidel Castro — nearly one every two weeks across three decades. Rebel gangs were organised, financed, and armed in the Escambray Mountains, sowing terror across the Cuban countryside.

The most chilling episode came in 1962 with Operation Northwoods, when the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff formally proposed carrying out attacks on American civilians and blaming Cuba — manufacturing a pretext for invasion. The document exists. It is declassified. It bears the signatures of the men who conceived it.

Terrorism With Impunity

In 1976, a Cubana de Aviación passenger aircraft was bombed over Barbados. All 73 people aboard were killed. Among them were 11 Guyanese victims. The mastermind, Luis Posada Carriles, lived out the remainder of his life free and protected in Miami. In 1997, simultaneous bombings struck Havana hotels, murdering Italian tourist Fabio Di Celmo. In total, more than 3,000 Cuban victims are still awaiting justice for acts of terrorism traced to networks operating from U.S. territory with the knowledge — and often the active support — of American intelligence services.

Biological warfare was also deployed. African swine fever was introduced in 1971, wiping out 40% of Cuba’s pig population. In 1981, a hemorrhagic dengue epidemic affected 350,000 people and killed 158, including 101 children.

These are not allegations. They are documented facts, available in the archives of the Church Committee, in declassified CIA files, and in the historical record that the United States government would prefer the world forget.

2026: The Energy Stranglehold

Against this backdrop, what is unfolding in 2026 is not a departure from pattern. It is its logical continuation — only now prosecuted with the tools of energy warfare.

Since January 2026, the Trump administration has imposed more than 240 sanctions against Cuba, including the interception of at least seven oil tankers bound for the island. An executive order signed on May 1st expanded restrictions across the energy, defence, mining, and financial services sectors. The effect has been devastating: Cuban energy imports have been slashed by 80 to 90 percent. Power outages now last up to 24 hours a day across more than half the island’s territory.

The blockade is total enough that Cuba’s aviation authorities have been forced to warn international airlines that jet fuel is no longer reliably available at nine airports across the island, including Havana’s José Martí International. Cuba’s Health Minister has warned of a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, stating that hospitals have been rendered helpless and that thousands of lives are at risk.

Public transport has stalled. Banks have reduced their hours. Rubbish collection has collapsed in Havana, leaving streets piled with waste. The cigar fair — a cultural institution — has been postponed indefinitely. The infrastructure of daily life is being systematically dismantled, not by the Cuban government’s failures alone, but by the deliberate application of external pressure designed to make life unliveable.

And still, the narrative being broadcast from Washington is that Cuba is the threat.

The Carrier at the Door

On May 20th, 2026 — Cuba’s Independence Day — the United States Southern Command announced the arrival of the USS Nimitz carrier strike group in the Caribbean, alongside destroyers and replenishment vessels. This followed a May 5th threat from President Trump to deploy the USS Abraham Lincoln to Cuban shores. SOUTHCOM’s announcement boasted of the carrier’s record of operations “from the Taiwan Strait to the Arabian Gulf.”

The same day, the Department of Justice unveiled an indictment of 94-year-old former Cuban President Raúl Castro on charges related to the 1996 shootdown of civilian aircraft. A Cuban-born U.S. congressman openly stated the indictment provides “the legal basis to go and remove” Castro from Cuba. Secretary of State Marco Rubio — whose family history with Cuba is well known — addressed the Cuban people directly in Spanish, backing the fuel blockade while blaming the resulting blackouts on Havana.

The choreography is deliberate. The legal instrument, the military presence, the media message — all deployed simultaneously, on Independence Day, for maximum psychological effect.

Who Benefits From the Narrative?

The construction of Cuba as a “threat” has never been a misperception. It has always been a function. When we ask who benefits, the answer is instructive.

The narrative justifies the blockade to a domestic audience that might otherwise question its legality and its humanity. It prepares psychological ground for military escalation, wearing down international opposition incrementally. It distracts from the acknowledged failure of more than six decades of regime-change policy that has produced neither the collapse of the Cuban government nor the liberation of its people — only their suffering. And it remains an extraordinarily effective mechanism for harvesting votes in South Florida, where a politically organised exile community has long exercised influence over U.S. foreign policy disproportionate to its size.

International law scholars have now begun to weigh in. Legal analysts at Just Security have noted that a campaign designed to force a change of government by cutting off an island nation’s essential fuel supply threatens — and in important respects already crosses — the boundaries of what international law permits, even in pursuit of ostensibly legitimate objectives.

The Record Does Not Lie

The 592 Guardian does not editorialize on behalf of any government. We editorialize on behalf of truth, of documented fact, and of the principle that the people of the Caribbean and the Global South deserve analysis that does not simply reproduce the framing of the powerful.

The historical record of U.S. actions against Cuba is not a matter of ideology. It is available in declassified files, in the Church Committee’s own reports to the U.S. Senate, in the archives of GlobalSecurity, in the records of trial proceedings, and in the testimonies of survivors. It describes, with the precision of a scalpel, which party in this relationship has consistently organised invasions, funded terrorist networks, poisoned livestock, bombed civilian aircraft, and now, in 2026, cut off the fuel supply of eleven million people while positioning an aircraft carrier off their coast.

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The aggressor is not hidden. The aggressor is reflected clearly in the mirror of its own declassified record.

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The question for the rest of the world — and particularly for Caribbean nations who understand what it means to have powerful neighbours — is whether we will have the clarity, and the courage, to say so plainly.

EDITOR’S NOTE:

Context & Background for Our Readers

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To fully appreciate the gravity of what is unfolding between the United States and Cuba in 2026, readers deserve more than headlines. They deserve history. Because this crisis did not begin with Donald Trump, and it did not begin with any single act of defiance from Havana. It is the product of a relationship that has been defined, almost without interruption, by American dominance and Cuban resistance for well over a century.

The Root of the Antagonism: 1959

For most of the twentieth century, Cuba existed within the American sphere of influence as a virtual client state. American corporations owned vast tracts of Cuban land, its sugar industry, its utilities, and its hotels. The Batista dictatorship — brutal, corrupt, and sustained by Washington — kept that arrangement intact. When Fidel Castro’s revolutionary movement overthrew Batista on January 1st, 1959, it did not merely change a government. It broke an economic and geopolitical arrangement that Washington had treated as permanent.

The Eisenhower administration began planning a covert response almost immediately. What followed — the Bay of Pigs invasion, Operation Mongoose, the decades of assassination attempts, the economic embargo formalised in 1962 — was not a reaction to a military threat. Cuba has never invaded the United States, never bombed American cities, never funded insurgencies on American soil. The hostility was always, at its core, a reaction to economic and political independence.

The Cold War Framework and Its Convenient Legacy

Washington packaged its aggression in the language of the Cold War. Cuba’s alignment with the Soviet Union, formalised after the revolution, gave the United States the ideological framing it needed to justify extraordinary measures. The 1962 Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war — genuinely so — and that moment has been used ever since to retroactively legitimise every act of economic warfare and covert destabilisation that preceded and followed it.

What is rarely noted in mainstream Western discourse is the sequence: it was the relentless pressure of American-backed sabotage, embargo, and invasion attempts that pushed Cuba deeper into Soviet alignment. The threat Cuba sought protection from was not hypothetical. It had already landed at Playa Girón.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba entered what it called the “Special Period” — a catastrophic economic contraction that saw the Cuban economy shrink by more than 35 percent. Many in Washington anticipated that the revolutionary government would collapse within months. It did not. That survival, against all prediction, hardened both sides. For Cuba, it became a point of national pride. For Washington, it became an enduring humiliation that successive administrations have never fully processed.

The Clinton-to-Obama Arc:

Hardening, Then Thawing
The 1990s brought the Helms-Burton Act of 1996, which codified and entrenched the embargo in statute, making it nearly impossible for any president to lift unilaterally without Congressional approval. The legislation was partly triggered by Cuba’s shootdown of two aircraft operated by Brothers to the Rescue — the same incident now being used to justify the 2026 indictment of Raúl Castro. Washington framed it as an outrage. Havana maintained the aircraft had repeatedly violated Cuban airspace on provocative missions. The truth of that specific incident remains contested. The legislative consequences were not.

For the next two decades, the basic architecture of U.S.-Cuba relations remained frozen. Then, in December 2014, Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro jointly announced a historic diplomatic opening. Embassies were reopened. Travel and trade restrictions were partially eased. For a brief moment, it appeared the century-long antagonism might finally find a different expression.

That opening lasted less than three years.

The Trump First Term and the Rollback

When Donald Trump came to office in 2017, he began systematically reversing the Obama-era normalisation. By the end of his first term, Cuba had been redesignated as a State Sponsor of Terrorism — a designation the Biden administration controversially maintained, before partially reversing it in the final days of its tenure in January 2025.

The Biden years were marked by ambivalence. Meaningful reform of Cuba policy was perpetually postponed, caught between the administration’s stated values and the political calculus of Florida’s electoral importance. The terrorism designation remained in place for most of Biden’s term. Remittance restrictions continued. The fundamental structure of the embargo was untouched.

The Second Trump Administration and the Escalation to 2026

When Trump returned to office in January 2025, Cuba policy moved with unusual speed and ferocity. Cuba was immediately redesignated as a State Sponsor of Terrorism. Within days of taking office, Trump posted on Truth Social: “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA — ZERO!” It was not rhetoric. It became operational policy almost immediately.

The mechanism chosen was energy strangulation. By threatening tariffs and secondary sanctions against any country or company that sold or transported oil to Cuba, Washington effectively weaponised Cuba’s dependence on imported petroleum. Venezuela — long Cuba’s primary oil supplier — had already been targeted through the kidnapping and removal of President Nicolás Maduro in early January 2026. Mexico, under pressure, ceased oil shipments. Tankers were intercepted at sea. By early February, Cuban airports were running out of jet fuel. Hospitals were losing power. Rubbish was piling in the streets of Havana.

Hurricane Melissa, which struck Cuba in late 2025 and caused widespread destruction, compounded a humanitarian situation that was already deteriorating rapidly. The United States offered a modest $6 million in humanitarian supplies — even as its own policies were the primary driver of the crisis those supplies were meant to address.

Where We Stand Today

By May 2026, the USS Nimitz carrier strike group is in the Caribbean. Raúl Castro has been indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice. A sitting American congressman has publicly stated that the indictment provides legal grounds for a military removal. The Secretary of State is broadcasting messages in Spanish to the Cuban people, framing a man-made energy catastrophe as the natural consequence of their government’s choices.

This is where more than sixty years of policy has arrived. Not at resolution. Not at the collapse of the Cuban government Washington has long sought. But at the edge of something more dangerous — a militarised confrontation that Caribbean nations, and all people of the Global South, have the clearest interest in preventing.

Understanding how we got here is not an academic exercise. It is the necessary foundation for any honest conversation about what comes next.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.