With U.S. attention focused on Iran, Venezuela and other crises, the Trump administration's growing pressure campaign against Cuba has largely played out in the background. Perhaps that's why it has attracted less attention than other major foreign policy efforts. But the pieces add up to something bigger than a routine sanctions policy.
In January, President Trump declared Cuba an “unusual and extraordinary threat”to the national security and foreign policy of the United States, accusing Havana of harboring adversary intelligence capabilities, aligning with Russia, China, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, supporting terrorism, destabilizing the hemisphere through migration and violence, and spreading communism throughout the region.
Since then, the administration has tight sanctions, disrupted shipping, amplified warnings about drones and connections with Iran, expanded the US naval presence in the region and recently accused Former Cuban president Raúl Castro. Triumph sent CIA Director John Ratcliffe travels to Havana to warn Cuban officials against hostilities while urging political change as a means of easing US sanctions.
All of this seems less like a response to a sudden crisis than the construction of one. Recent reports that the Pentagon has positioned forces in the Caribbean capable of supporting attacks against Cuba reinforce the concern. No one on Trump's team has answered the immediate question of what this pressure is intended to accomplish. The harder question is whether the administration is creating the same crisis it will later claim it is handling.
Perhaps White House officials believe this pressure will force Havana to capitulate. But to what? Regime change? Democratization? Deterrence? Negotiation? Nobody has said it clearly. And while Trump's team searches for a theory of success, ordinary Cubans are the ones absorbing the cost.
Questioning these efforts is not a defense of the Cuban regime. Cuba remains authoritarian and economically poorly managed. Its leaders have denied their people political freedom and presided over decades of hardship. But a government can be repressive without posing an imminent threat to the United States. No one has argued that Cuba does it.
Reports on Cuban drones illustrate the problem. According axiosU.S. officials said Cuba acquired more than 300 military drones “of various capabilities,” discussed possible attacks on Guantanamo Bay, U.S. ships and possibly Key West, Florida, and studied how Iran resisted the United States militarily. But the same report explicitly notes that U.S. officials do not believe Cuba is an imminent threat or actively planning attacks.
Cuba's efforts to toughen up against American pressure are not evidence of hostile intentions. They are evidence that Havana can read the strategic environment. After watching Iran impose costs on the United States, any weak government facing sustained pressure would study how to survive American coercion. The danger is that the Trump administration will weaponize predictable defensive preparation as evidence of Cuban aggression and use it to justify a confrontation it has not explained.
Trump has not earned the benefit of the doubt when it comes to strategy or justification. In Iran, its administration reclaimed an imminent threat even as officials with access to the intelligence questioned that basis. In Venezuela, it is described the capture of President Nicolás Maduro as an act of self-defense and law enforcement, even as the operation turned into military force and regime change in the way legal experts continue contest. Cuba is now showing similar warning signs: extraordinary pressure, claims of expansive threats, and no clear explanation for success.
This is not subtle pressure. Earlier this year, Foreign Policy reported that administration officials viewed energy as the “chokehold” of the regime. But fuel restrictions and shipping disruption do not fall first on governments. They fall on families. For ordinary Cubans, the pressure appears in darkened houses, paralyzed hospitals and empty store shelves. Reuters reported In March, nearly 100,000 Cubans were waiting for surgery, including 11,000 children, as shortages and blackouts strained the country's health system.
Pressure is an instrument of state power. It is not a strategy in itself. Serious statecraft does not begin with pressure and hope that the target will appear later. Define a political goal, choose the appropriate instruments for that purpose, and consider who will bear the cost.
For more than 60 years, the United States has tried to pressure Cuba's leadership to break or disappear. It didn't happen. The regime has resisted. The people of Cuba absorbed the cost.
If the goal now is to help Cubans build a freer society, the administration should explain how cutting fuel and deepening shortages strengthens them. Hunger and blackouts do not build democratic institutions. Scarcity will not facilitate the transfer of power from the regime to its people.
There is also the question of democratic accountability. This is not a political debate about Cuba in the abstract. American power is being used to deepen shortages in a nearby country already facing serious difficulties. If that is done in the name of the American people, the public deserves more than vague warnings about drones and Iran. It deserves to know what humanitarian cost the administration is willing to impose, what political outcome is supposed to follow, and who will respond if pressure produces suffering without change.
If the goal of this effort is deterrence, what exactly are we deterring? If the goal is regime change, why should Americans believe that another round of coercion will succeed where decades of pressure have failed? If the goal is democratization, how does making life more difficult for ordinary Cubans strengthen your political power?
Congress should not wait for a crisis to ask these questions. If sanctions, intelligence claims and criminal charges are being used to move toward military action or regime change, lawmakers should force that debate open now. If the policy is anything less than that, the administration should be able to tell what it is.
Before Americans accept another emergency narrative, this time about Cuba, the administration should explain why ordinary Cubans are being asked to suffer for a strategy it hasn't bothered to define.
Jon Duffy is a retired naval officer. Writes about leadership and democracy.
