Will the U.S. Invade Cuba?

Ever since the daring capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January, the White House has signaled its designs on Cuba. U.S. President Donald Trump has said he believes he’ll have the “honor of taking” the island country, and U.S. officials have floated the idea of finding a “Cuban Delcy”—a reference to Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s former deputy who cut a deal with Washington to become his successor.

But Cuba is not Venezuela. And the fallout from the conflict in Iran may change how Trump is thinking about getting mired in another foreign-policy problem. What are the likely scenarios for what happens next? On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with Michael Bustamante, the author of Cuban Memory Wars and chair in Cuban and Cuban American studies at the University of Miami. Readers can watch the full interview on the video box atop this page or download the free FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited excerpt of the conversation.

Ravi Agrawal: We’ve had months of rhetoric out of the White House about “taking Cuba.” There are also strict new sanctions on Havana and an effective oil blockade. What is your understanding of the broader White House strategy on Cuba?

Michael Bustamante: It’s a great question to take at the top and a tough one. Some pieces on the very abstract level of what this White House is trying to pursue are clear. It gets a little muddier once you get beneath the surface.

At the basic level, this White House is hoping to see big political and economic change in Cuba. It’s no secret that Cuba is a one-party state. It’s also no secret that Marco Rubio, [the U.S.] secretary of state, as a Cuban American has long had an interest in seeing that country open up economically and politically. And this administration has pivoted, as the first Trump administration did, to using the tools of U.S. economic statecraft—i.e., sanctions—in particularly aggressive and unprecedented ways to try to put pressure on the Cuban economy and government to create conditions for those changes to emerge. That’s sort of the tagline. But once you think about how you get from point A to point B under the current policy, it gets a little muddier.

The Cuban government has already shown a certain willingness to open their economy. They’ve announced reforms that, at least on paper, seem quite significant, that definitely respond to the pressure campaign. It’s on the political issues where Havana remains allergic, to put it mildly, to any kind of change. There’s a deep nationalist thread that goes back decades about wanting to avoid any perception that they’re ceding to the pressure of the United States, even if that’s effectively what’s going on here.

One of the challenges that the Trump administration faces is that this is a government in Havana that’s very used to dealing with pressure (though this pressure is unprecedented). They’re very used to trying to figure out how to buy time. The Trump administration’s read of Havana’s options is not wrong. The Cuban government is up against the wall economically and politically. They don’t have allies to the degree that they used to. No one’s coming to bail them out. But the idea that there’s going to be a reformer or a Delcy Rodríguez-like figure who’s willing to roll over on his or her superiors—that’s not in the DNA of a one-party state. That is a fundamentally different political model from what you have in Venezuela.

RA: Let’s delve into that last bit deeper. There’s been a lot of talk of how something similar to the operation to extract Maduro could be tried in Cuba. Talk a little bit about why Cuba is not Venezuela.

MB: First and foremost, Cuba’s not Venezuela for this administration because Cuba doesn’t have oil, at least not to the same extent. Cuba has some offshore oil. Given that they’ve been cut off from international oil supplies, they’re subsisting on the little bit they produce. But this is not the kind of place that screams out to this White House as an attractive candidate for natural resource extraction.

The other reason I don’t think the Venezuela comparison is apt has to do with the very different political situations in both countries. I already alluded to the differences in the two political systems. For all that one can rightfully criticize the [Hugo] Chávez regime and then the Maduro government that followed it for their erosion of democratic norms, [Venezuela] is a country that still went through the democratic motions. It’s a country that never gutted its private sector to the extent that Cuba has. In Cuba, you’re not only looking at economic rebuilding to a degree that isn’t even the case in Venezuela—you are also looking at a political situation without even the motions of democratic process. There isn’t an opposition in a position to take over to the extent that there was and is in Venezuela. And we know where the Trump administration landed on Venezuela: They still didn’t think the opposition there was ready to take over. Delcy Rodríguez is somebody who had stuck her neck out a bit before January as someone who was sort of pro-market, working to open up the oil industry to international investment to a degree. That hasn’t existed in Cuba. Until very recently, there haven’t been significant signs that they’re actually willing to go deeper on market reform in a way that might interest this administration.

For a long time, the missing element in this Venezuela-Cuba comparison was that you had a standing indictment of Maduro in a U.S. court that created the pretext for the operation. That didn’t exist in the Cuban case until recently. The Trump administration has now indicted [former Cuban leader] Raúl Castro in court. But I think these are two different situations. Raúl Castro is 95 years old. Is the United States really going to go in and pick up a 95-year-old? Is Raúl Castro going to let himself get picked up in that kind of a way? I don’t think that kind of operation is really what’s on the table. If they’re thinking about military options at all, they might take a slightly different form.

RA: I will just point out that when it comes to Iran, the United States and Israel did indeed take out a very old supreme leader and then saw him replaced with a much younger person, his son.

MB: Fair enough.

RA: But on the point of using force and war, what is the rationale for wanting to use force? What I’m trying to get at here is: Why does this matter so much for U.S. interests? Why is it in America’s strategic national interest to care so much about the fate of Cuba?

MB: There are things I could point to that the administration is saying, and then there are ways I could maybe complicate that logic. One of the points that they’ve been hitting is on national security. They would reference Cuba’s long-standing ties to Russia and China and the talk that both of those countries have intelligence listening posts on the island. They would reference the long history of the Cuban government punching above its weight, so to speak, in the global espionage game. And they would also point to what they see as the Cuban government’s long history of interfering in regional politics across the Americas. This is an administration that has embraced a very 19th-century sense of the Western Hemisphere as the United States’ backyard and does not want to see a hemisphere that has U.S. adversaries, let alone a base from which those adversaries can operate.

One can fairly question, though, whether there’s a bit of threat inflation going on here. I’m not a U.S. intelligence official, but I think the national security argument could be flipped on its head. There are folks who have said that an economic collapse—which could be the result if things keep going as they are—would also have dramatic implications for U.S. national security, whether in terms of mass migration or a social decomposition 90 miles from U.S shores that allows entry points for bad actors and criminals in the region. That’s why I think you’ve seen this administration try to thread a needle and talk about some kind of a negotiated outcome. It’s why the administration has paired inordinate economic pressure on Cuba with these very interesting and bizarre direct talks with none other than Raúl Castro’s grandson. They’re trying to figure out how to convince the Cuban government and use enough leverage to get them to change on their own terms, short of military action.

But you’re right. I don’t think the administration has made a particularly effective case as to why this matters so much. The president references this just as often as people seem to be in his ear at Mar-a-Lago or elsewhere talking to him about it. And we can’t ignore the symbolic factor here. This is about being able to do the thing that no other U.S. administration had done—end communism in the Western Hemisphere—and all the ways that tracks onto the administration’s domestic political narrative of anti-socialism. The symbolism factor here is certainly important for the president.

RA: Interesting. And just one more beat on this, because you were mentioning the voices in Trump’s ear when he’s in Mar-a-Lago. I’m curious about how much domestic support there is for Trump’s approach as you’ve described it because, on the one hand, after Venezuela there was momentum to talk about Cuba. But maybe now that Iran has largely been seen by Americans as a war that had adverse domestic reactions, I’m curious whether that calculation changes. Are Americans at all in favor of Trump’s policies here? And what about particularly the Cuban American community?

MB: The opinions of the Cuban American community, as a general rule, are not much in doubt. People are jazzed up by this pressure campaign. Expectations have been set inordinately high in South Florida, which has been led to believe that this is the year of big change—snap your fingers, and the paradise Cuba future is around the corner.

The task ahead in Cuba, though, is very complicated because even if that government falls tomorrow, the degree of rebuilding that’s required is substantial. This gets to your Iran comparison. I think this cuts both ways, and this is probably, I imagine, part of the conversation happening internally. Post-Iran, there’s going to be one impulse, given the embarrassment that this has meant for the administration, to try to pivot to something that could be an “easy win” and to change the narrative. But to think that Cuba would be an easy win like Venezuela is to underestimate how complicated it is. I don’t know if the remote management strategy they’ve been pursuing in Venezuela works in Cuba, for all the factors that I’ve laid out.

Add on to that what we’ve been seeing in the last few days with the devastation in Venezuela because of the earthquake. If the Iran war kicked Cuba down the road for a while, the Venezuela response—which should require an all-government response at this moment—potentially kicks Cuba down the road further as well. To what extent does that change the calculation? As we get closer to the U.S. midterms, is that the moment to get involved in some kind of foreign entanglement, as brief as it may be, that seems pretty high-risk, high-reward? If you can get the job done in Cuba with enough lead time before the midterms to be able to sell it, sure, I guess there’s still time. But there’s an interesting window there that is on everyone’s minds and that certainly the authorities in Havana are also watching closely.

RA: And of course, this isn’t just an abstract conversation about policy. I have to bring up the humanitarian situation in Cuba. There is a water shortage, a food crisis. My understanding is that there are widespread blackouts that are hitting hospitals, the economy, much else.

MB: It’s gutting. The first point to make is that the crisis in Cuba didn’t just start in January or in the wake of the Maduro raid. Cuba has been on a pretty steady descent economically and socially since at least the pandemic, with a few ups and downs along the way but largely down. Part of that longer story, of course, is about the cumulative impact of U.S. sanctions and the way they’ve been intensified by both Trump administrations. But it’s also about the stubbornness of Cuban authorities to reform their own economic model in ways that, notwithstanding the effects of sanctions, could make Cuba’s economy more resilient to the external pressure they’re facing now.

But obviously, when you cut Cuba off from imported oil in January (with the exception of one Russian tanker that the Americans have let in), that’s going to have devastating ripple effects. If the blackouts before January could be 10 to 15 hours a day, now we’re seeing blackouts of sometimes 24 hours or more. Imagine what that means on a day-to-day basis. Unless you have a solar panel—which some Cubans have managed to get into the country through the help of relatives—and unless you’ve got power banks to recharge your appliances or run an appliance when there’s no electricity, you’re waking up at 2 in the morning, if that’s when the power comes on, to cook whatever you have. So that basic infrastructure just means that economic productivity, to the extent that it existed to begin with, has ground to a halt. So it’s really hard to envision the economy mounting any significant recovery in these circumstances.

On a day-to-day basis, the effects across the social welfare system are clear. It’s important to also understand—and this has been the subject of much polarized debate among Cubans and Cuba watchers—that if there’s no oil coming into the country (and oil powers the power plants), that’s going to have ripple effects. But the Cuban government has also underinvested in the electric grid over years. During these years of downturn, something like 30 percent of the state’s investment budget was going to building hotels that are sitting empty. There’s a legitimate question there about where the government’s priorities have been and how late they are to confronting some of their own economic issues internally.

But make no mistake: It’s just gutting. It’s an old Cuban story of people getting fed up and leaving. This dramatizes it like no other statistic: Since 2021, when Cuba lifted its COVID-19 border restrictions, between 1 and 2 million Cubans have left. It’s a massive hit to the population. So a population of around 11 million is now, we think, somewhere around 9 million. And that’s young people, the working-age population, who are mostly leaving, and they’re sustaining their relatives back home through remittances and things like that, but it just makes it really difficult to think about an economic recovery even in the best of circumstances.