Harry Targ
"With God’s help, a free Cuba is what we will soon achieve… I am canceling the last administration’s completely one-sided deal with Cuba."( President Donald Trump, New Cuba Policy in Speech in Miami’s Little Havana, 2017),
With these words, President Trump early in his first term announced the return to the almost 70-year Cold War against Cuba, a war that has cost the people on the island and their relatives in the United States dearly. He initiated efforts to resume travel restrictions, limit trade and investment on the island, and to punish US citizens who traveled to Cuba on their own. These policy changes were motivated primarily by Trump’s promises to a dwindling sector of Cuban Americans in the Republican Party (and a few Democratic politicians as well).
In 2026 Trump escalated the economic blockade of Cuba, threatening to punish any country that continued to engage in commerce with the island. (He had already put Cuba back on the “state sponsor of terrorism” list in January 2025). The most brutal part of the renewed policy now is the blockade of Cuba’s access to oil. The island now suffers blackouts, shortages in transportation, energy access to hospitals and schools and in the main the United States has enshrined the policy of starving Cuba, an approach to the island resembling Israel’s genocidal policy against Gaza. And during the spring of 2026 the Trump administration moved a battleship and troops to the Caribbean, threatening a US war on Cuba.
And most recently, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the publication of a new 100-page State Department report, “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” The report asserts that Cuba has engaged in subversion and has “infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government.”
The most menacing part of this document is its identification of who it regards as supporters of Cuban terrorism in the United States, both individual politicians who oppose the administration and leading organizations that have been providing material aid to Cuba during its darkest hour of starvation. The Venceremos Brigade of volunteer farm laborers has been a favorite target for years but the new list includes the National Network on Cuba, IFCO Pastors for Peace, the National Lawyers Guild, Code Pink, and Democratic Socialists in America. Individuals who support “terrorist” Cuba, the report suggests, include Karen Bass, mayor of Los Angeles, Zohran Mamdani, Mayor of New York, Congresspersons, Illan Omar, Maxine Waters, and Ayanna Presley, and Amy Goodman, journalist.
In short, The Trump Administration has escalated its brutal assault on Cuba and at the same time is reinventing the age of McCarthyism by defining any groups or individuals who disagree with US policy toward Cuba and/or provide material aid to its starving population as supporters of terrorists. These truly are dangerous times.
