The Pentagon is planning a military operation in Cuba to topple the Castroite government in Havana, according to a USA Today report published Wednesday.
Sources familiar with discussions told the newspaper that the White House has issued a direct order to ramp up preparations for action against the island, marking a dangerous escalation in Washington’s long-standing campaign to reassert colonial domination across the hemisphere.
These preparations follow a series of increasingly explicit threats by Donald Trump. Standing next to a woman wearing a “DoorDash grandma” T-shirt at the White House on April 13, Trump spoke in the language of a gangster talking about a drive-by shooting, declaring that the United States “may stop by Cuba” after concluding its war of aggression against Iran. Two weeks earlier, he similarly said that “Cuba is going to be next” for military intervention.
Such statements are not idle rhetoric. They are the public expression of advanced war planning that is already underway. The same administration that is posturing as alternately escalating and de-escalating its war against Iran is, in reality, using negotiations as a tactical cover.
In the case of Iran, diplomatic maneuvers buy time to mobilize the necessary resources for the next phase of US operations: securing control over the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s vast oil and gas reserves, by whatever means necessary, including the open threat of annihilating Iranian society.
A similar strategy appears to be unfolding in relation to Cuba. Limited contacts with the Castro family, alongside carefully calibrated concessions—such as the decision to allow a single ship carrying Russian oil to dock with at most a two-week supply—could suddenly give way to a devastating military intervention against a country of roughly 8 million people whose economy and armed forces are already in shambles.
The humanitarian situation inside Cuba is catastrophic. Decades of the genocidal US economic blockade—intensified through an oil embargo since January—have resulted in daily blackouts lasting for hours, alongside severe shortages of drinking water, food, and medical supplies. The economy has effectively ground to a halt, with workers frequently unable to report to their jobs due to lack of transportation, electricity, or basic necessities.
Internationally, tensions are mounting. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated during a visit to China that Moscow would continue providing assistance to Cuba and expressed hope that the United States would not return to the era of “colonial wars.” A Russian tanker, the Universal, is currently sailing in the North Atlantic and is expected to reach Cuba within approximately 15 days. Analysts have identified it as the likely next fuel shipment to the island.
Washington, for its part, has indicated that such shipments will be permitted only on a “case-by-case” basis—another lever of pressure in its escalating campaign.
The United States is already deeply engaged in “colonial wars.” The Pentagon has deployed an additional 10,000 troops to the Middle East and has redeployed the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush and its strike group from the Caribbean to that theater.
This redeployment follows the completion of operations in Venezuela, where Washington orchestrated the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and the installation of a puppet regime now handing over control of the country’s vast oil reserves—the largest in the world—as well as key mineral resources to US corporations.
The planned regime change operation in Cuba must be understood as part of this broader geopolitical offensive. Like the interventions in Venezuela and Iran, it is aimed at securing strategic resources and commercial pathways while countering the growing influence of China in energy and infrastructure.
These objectives are reinforced by a pattern of escalating violence across the region, including near-daily boat strikes in the Eastern Pacific and Caribbean. These operations, carried out under the pretext of combating narcotrafficking, have killed at least 178 fishermen since September, without any evidence being presented to justify their being targeted.
Cuba occupies a position of immense strategic importance for US imperialism. Its proximity to Florida, its control over key Caribbean shipping lanes and its potential use as a military base all contribute to its significance. Washington has repeatedly invoked allegations that China and Russia maintain signals intelligence facilities on the island to justify its aggressive posture.
Executive Order 14380, issued in January 2026, declared a national emergency over Cuba and threatened punitive tariffs against any country supplying it with oil. This move effectively forced Mexico, Cuba’s primary supplier after the US intervention cut off Venezuelan exports, to halt shipments.
The current offensive is codified in what has been termed the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, outlined in the 2025 National Security Strategy. This doctrine reasserts US dominance over the Western Hemisphere by denying rival powers access to “strategically vital assets,” including ports, military bases and natural resources.
Framed in openly expansionist terms—akin to Hitler’s “Greater Germany”—the administration has advanced the concept of a “Great North America,” stretching from Greenland to the equator through a program of recolonization.
The objective is not merely geopolitical control but the dismantling of all social gains associated with the working class and national liberation struggles of the 20th century, including the 1959 Cuban Revolution that led to vast nationalizations and basic social and labor rights.
A report published Monday by the Wall Street Journal details backroom talks between US officials and relatives of Raúl Castro, brother of the late Fidel Castro and president until 2018. His son, Alejandro Castro Espín, and grandson, Raúl Rodríguez Castro, have participated in discussions with American representatives.
Rodríguez Castro, known as “the Crab,” has been filmed enjoying a lavish lifestyle, including yacht parties and nightclub appearances in Miami. He is now reportedly a regular presence in elite diplomatic and business circles in Europe.
Alejandro Castro Espín, a general in the interior ministry, played a central role in negotiating the restoration of diplomatic relations with the United States under the Obama administration in 2015. He has continued to seek contact with US officials, who have described him as “nonideological” and “pragmatic.”
Another figure, Raúl Castro’s grandnephew Oscar Pérez-Oliva, has rapidly risen through the political ranks and is widely viewed as a potential successor to President Miguel Díaz-Canel. Now serving as deputy prime minister and minister of foreign trade and investment, Pérez-Oliva has openly courted foreign capital, declaring in a US television interview that “Cuba is open for business.”
These figures are closely linked to GAESA, a vast military-controlled conglomerate that dominates the most profitable sectors of the Cuban economy, including tourism, foreign exchange and fuel distribution. Observers estimate that GAESA controls more than 40 percent of the national economy.
Alongside them stands a younger generation, exemplified by Fidel Castro’s grandson Sandro Castro, a social media influencer who flaunts luxury cars and has openly declared that Cubans want capitalism.
The political significance of the social character of the Castro family and the Cuban state is clear. It does not represent, even in a distorted or bureaucratic form, the Cuban working class. It constitutes a privileged ruling elite, integrated into global capitalist networks and concerned above all with preserving its wealth and privilege under whatever political arrangement emerges. Its readiness to negotiate with US imperialism underscores its fundamentally counterrevolutionary character.
Already, the Cuban regime has implemented sweeping measures to open the economy to foreign investment and has actively courted wealthy Cuban exiles in Miami—the very social layers that have historically supported terrorist attacks and coup attempts against the island.
In this context, the continued role of pseudo-left organizations to mischaracterize the regime and thus US imperialism’s actions is particularly pernicious. The Morenoite Left Voice, affiliated with the so-called Permanent Revolution Current, claims that the Cuban government continues to be a bureaucratic workers’ state that retains a “socialist character” and merely needs to be pressured by the working class to adopt more democratic policies. It warns of “capitalist restoration” in the absence of greater mass participation, thereby promoting the illusion that the existing regime can be reformed in a progressive direction.
Within the United States, Left Voice calls for opposition to Washington’s policies through appeals to union bureaucrats and activist networks dominated by the Democratic Party. These proposals are designed not to mobilize the working class independently but to subordinate it to the very institutions of the capitalist state responsible for imperialist aggression.
This mirrors the role played by revisionist tendencies in the 1960s, which hailed Fidel Castro’s movement as a model for socialist revolution and denounced the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) as “ultra-left” and “sectarian” for rejecting this characterization. The Socialist Workers Party, led by Joseph Hansen, promoted the Cuban revolution as the “acid test” for Trotskyism, arguing that a petty-bourgeois guerrilla movement had established a workers’ state.
In opposition, the Socialist Labour League, the British section of the ICFI, defended the fundamental principles of Marxism. It insisted that conscious revolutionary leadership by the working class is indispensable, that Cuba represented a negative confirmation of the Theory of Permanent Revolution and that Hansen’s empiricism amounted to an adaptation to bourgeois and non-proletarian forces.
Today, as the United States prepares for a new colonial war against Cuba, these lessons assume urgent relevance. It is not long before Trump speaks of turning Cuba into the 52nd state—having already proposed the annexation of Venezuela as the 51st. The implications of this war must be grasped in their full historical and political significance.
For Lenin, the central question in World War I was not simply the denunciation of imperialist policies but the transformation of imperialist war into a revolutionary struggle by the working class against its own ruling class. This required a relentless struggle against opportunism and chauvinism within the labor movement.
Today, no tendency other than the ICFI raises the necessity of building an independent revolutionary leadership capable of uniting the struggles of workers across the hemisphere. The crisis of Cuba underscores the necessity of a conscious struggle for socialism as the only means of halting the descent into an imperialist world war and dictatorship.