“The US should be careful what it wishes for in Cuba.”
Three weeks ago, Cuba hit what seemed to be at the time rock bottom. “We have no fuel, no more reserves,” the country’s energy minister, Vicente de la O Levy, told the public. Since then the US government has further tightened the screw, announcing fresh sanctions on Cuba’s president, some of his immediate family and the Cuban business mega-conglomerate GAESA.
In recent days, waves of foreign businesses, including European hotel operators that have been on the island for decades, are fleeing the island out of fear of having their assets frozen or getting locked out of the US financial system. Jobs continue to be destroyed and livelihoods wrecked as the economic noose tightens around the world’s longest-sanctioned nation.
Foreign Businesses Are Fleeing Cuba as Its Economy Collapses https://t.co/nprZN7fdaA
— David Luhnow (@davidluhnow) June 7, 2026
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned on Monday that the recent expansion of US sanctions is causing widespread harm to the population and endangering lives.
“The fuel restrictions imposed since early 2026 and recent tightening of extraterritorial sanctions, taken together, are directly harming Cubans, especially the most vulnerable,” said Türk. Children are dying because doctors lack access to essential medical supplies and medicines. This is unacceptable.”
While conditions on the island deteriorate, frustration is rising in Washington over the Cuban government’s refusal to crumble in the face of such pressure. When the 95 year-old former President Raúl Castro was charged with murder just over a month ago, it was widely assumed that a kidnapping similar to that of Nicolás Maduro would swiftly ensue. That hasn’t happened.
From The Guardian:
The USS Nimitz, an aircraft carrier, has just left Jamaica, to the south of Cuba. Surveillance aircraft circle the island. John Ratcliffe, the CIA chief flew into Havana to meet Cuban intelligence leaders, and according to US broadcaster CBS brought the “operator” responsible for killing 32 Cuban security guards in the Venezuelan operation.
However, the US should be careful what it wishes for in Cuba. That is the warning of an op-ed published by Dr. Hal Philip Klepak, a professor emeritus of History and Strategy at the Royal Military College of Canada and former strategic analyst at NATO headquarters, in The National Interest, a prominent US bimonthly international relations magazine.
Though the National Interest is published by the Center for the National Interest, a DC-based public policy think tank that was set up by Richard Nixon, and was founded by Irving Kristol, the godfather of Neoconservatism, it is today broadly associated with the realist school of international studies.
There’s plenty of realism on offer in Dr Klepak’s article. Firstly, he rebuts Rubio’s characterisation of Cuba as a “failed state which poses a threat to the United States” to justify the Trump administration’s tightening of sanctions, the near-total fuel blockade, and repeated threats of military strikes against the island:
This claim flies in the face of some three decades of assessments made by the Pentagon and by SouthCom. As of the mid-1990s, congressional requests to the Department of Defense regarding the extent to which Cuba constituted a threat to the national security of the United States received, in the clearest form, an assessment of the island as in no way such a threat, except if disorder prevailed and caused a mass exodus to the United States and the wider region.
Since then, security cooperation with the island has proven the point, with active collaboration on illegal narcotics interdiction, illegal migration control, natural disaster relief, and even toxic waste disposal. The DOD joined other departments in welcoming the idea of opening up to Cuba under President Barack Obama, and cooperation grew until the first Trump administration…
In a region plagued by criminal networks and narcotics trafficking, Cuba has long been a remarkable outlier. The US government-funded Global Organized Crime Index ranks Cuba 168th out of 193 countries in terms of criminality. For comparison, Haiti, right next door, is 35th. Jamaica is 53rd. And the United States itself is 60th.
Indeed, it is often forgotten that before the revolution of 1959, it was not Caracas or Bogota that were the center of drug trafficking in the Americas. Rather, it was Havana that enjoyed that dubious distinction.
Since then, Cuba has worked intensely not only to control the spread of illegal narcotics use within the country but to cooperate actively in the Caribbean region and on the world stage to stymie the trade in these substances. Its success has been remarkable, and the country has dozens of active cooperation agreements with other countries to combat the scourge.
The US State Department in 2016 recognized this achievement: “Cuba is not a major consumer, producer, or transit point of illicit narcotics…Cuba’s intensive security presence and interdiction efforts have kept supply down and prevented traffickers from establishing a foothold…Cuba dedicates significant resources to prevent illegal drugs and their use from spreading, and regional traffickers typically avoid Cuba…
The Cuban government is responsible for its own share of crimes. Still, its long-term stability, strong institutions, and commitment to law enforcement have made it an island of order in a region rife with criminality. That’s critical for US national security.
While Cuba may not pose a security threat to the US right now, that doesn’t mean it won’t in the future. The ultimate goal of all the economic privations Washington has imposed on the people of Cuba — the five-month fuel blockade, causing widespread hunger, water shortages and lack of medical treatments and care, leading to the preventable deaths of countless patients — is to instigate a popular rising. That may not have happened yet, but it doesn’t mean it won’t.
In recent times, Washington has turned the creation of chaos and instability into a finely tuned business model, but it has tended to focus its energies far from home — primarily the Middle East and Africa — where the externalities of war are borne by others. What it is doing in Cuba risks creating a hive of chaos and instability on its very own doorstep. As Dr Klepak warns, if US policy continues down its current path, a national security threat may yet materialize:
The collapse of state power in Cuba could create a black hole for law enforcement, a mere 90 miles from US shores…
If President Donald Trump continues to destabilize the country through economic strangulation or launches a war that few US voters appear to want, this bulwark could give way to something far worse for US interests.
President Trump and Secretary Rubio would claim that state collapse is not the plan. But their current policies are pushing Cuba in that direction… Mass discontent may indeed lead to the overthrow of the current government. But in a country without a unified or organized political opposition, it can hardly install a stable and ready alternative.
The likeliest outcome of the current approach is either state collapse and a resulting security vacuum, or a long-term US military occupation and nation-building project—a task that would have little chance of a better outcome than in Iraq or Afghanistan.
It could even be another Vietnam, especially if Cuban society is mobilised in mass non-violent resistance to the occupier. Of course, much the same was said of Venezuela, before the US forced its economic will on Caracas after a fly-by military operation in which its president and his wife were abducted and 32 Cuban soldiers were eliminated.
Like Cuba, however, Vietnam is tough terrain to tame. Even an economically defeated Cuba may prove difficult to dominate. In a recent comment, NC reader Victor Sciamarelli recalled an episode from David Halberstam’s book “The Best and the Brightest”:
In a meeting with JFK and his advisors over invading Cuba, Marine General David Shoup, a WW2 veteran, brought with him overlay maps. Shoup first put down a map of the US, then an overlay of Cuba on top. To nearly everyone’s surprise Cuba was much bigger than most in the room imagined. Cuba extended from NY to Chicago more than 800 miles. Shoup then put down a single red dot. When asked he said that’s the island of Tarawa and it took us 3-days and 18,000 marines to take it.
Granted, the people of Cuba today are weakened — as one would expect after six and a half decades of US sanctions and five and a half months of a near-total energy blockade. But Cuba has faced and thwarted countless coup attempts and incursions. Put simply, it is built to resist, as even Chatham House senior fellow Chris Sabatini grudgingly admits.
"The Cuban regime, for all of its sins, has basically survived under a defensive crouch…. it is built to resist."@ChrisSabatini on the nature of the regime in Cuba and its relationship with the United States. pic.twitter.com/RX3sohR7o3
— Chatham House (@ChathamHouse) June 7, 2026
“The US occupation of Afghanistan demonstrated that even relatively low-intensity insurgency can steadily impose casualties, financial costs and political exhaustion, reputational damage, and demands for expanding troop commitments over time despite overwhelming conventional military superiority,” Haig wrote in his recent post on Cuba.
As such, a US invasion of the island, rather than demonstrating hemispheric dominance, “could trigger hemispheric turmoil on a scale not seen in decades”:
A military operation against Cuba would immediately revive historical memories of gunboat diplomacy, regime manipulation, covert action, unilateral sanctions enforcement, and American-backed regime change operations throughout the hemisphere.
The political repercussions could spread rapidly throughout the hemisphere… Nationalist movements across the ideological spectrum could converge around fears of renewed hemispheric interventionism. Governments attempting to maintain cooperative relations with Washington would face growing domestic pressure to distance themselves publicly from the operation…
Migration pressure could further destabilize the regional environment. Large refugee outflows toward Florida and neighboring Caribbean states would create simultaneous humanitarian, logistical, and political pressures. Even limited maritime migration crises can rapidly consume coast guard, law enforcement, and emergency management resources while intensifying domestic political tensions within the United States and throughout the region.
This, lest we forget, would be happening as US forces are already significantly over extended and US military supplies significantly depleted. It is also happening as Washington works to destabilise other Latin American countries with somewhat sovereign-minded governments, including Mexico, Colombia and Nicaragua, Marco Rubio’s latest bugaboo, from which there will no doubt be additional blowback.
Meanwhile, the only thing that can stave off a disorderly collapse in Cuba and the creation of a security vacuum, or even outright war is, to quote Winston Churchill, more jaw-jaw. For the moment, there are little signs of progress. In recent days, Cuba has begun distributing weapons to civilians, urging them to prepare for an imminent US invasion, according to the Venezuelan newspaper Versión Final.
Trump’s recent statements about “dealing with Cuba” after the end of the conflict with Iran are also hardly encouraging. If recent developments in post-Maduro Venezuela are an indication, “Dealing with Cuba” essentially means forcing Havana to make huge economic concessions to Washington, opening the market to US investors and expelling US strategic rivals.
Lastly, it’s worth noting the recent words of Vladimir Putin at a meeting with the heads of foreign media on June 4. The Russian president acknowledged that he had spoken with President Trump on the issue of Cuba, but refused to disclose further details, mentioning only the dispatch of a Russian tanker there — presumably in reference to the Anatoly Kolodkin, which docked in Havana in late March. Since then, no other shipments of oil have arrived.
“Cuba is a friendly country, relations have traditionally developed for decades, the US administration knows this. Our contacts with Cuba continue,” the Russian president said.
Whether these words were intended as a veiled warning to the US or simply an acknowledgment that Moscow is engaged in negotiations with the Trump administration aimed at securing a gradual transition in Havana, it is impossible to say. On the surface at least, Moscow appears determined to deepen its economic ties with Cuba, even as the energy-starved island teeters on the brink of a US-engineered collapse.
Two days after Putin’s comments, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernishenko reaffirmed Russia’s willingness to invest in Cuba despite the rising pressure from Washington. Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Chernishenko said that some 90 Russian companies are interested in exporting meat, dairy and fish products to Cuba, and that Moscow can offer Havana solutions in IT, cybersecurity, telemedicine and business automation.
Thanks for the excellent piece Nick. Cuba’s fate seems grim, but I think whatever mischief the US ends up doing it’ll bite them back tenfold. At the end of the day Rubio and his ilk may come to wish Castro was still in power. Nonetheless, this is a very ill omen for Latin America, and the saying remains true: either the countries hang together or they’ll hang separately.