Tag: cuba

The Truth About Cuba

Not distracted by the war on Iran, on March 3, President Trump, once again, warned that Cuba was in its “last moments.” The next day, he said, “It may be a friendly takeover. It may not be a friendly takeover. It wouldn’t matter because they are down to, as they say, fumes” before admitting that the U.S. has caused a humanitarian disaster in Cuba.

Trump’s rhetoric has continued to escalate. On March 17, Trump said,  “I do believe I will be having the honor of taking Cuba. Taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it. I think I can do anything I want with it. They’re a very weakened nation right now.” The Trump administration is reportedly pursuing a policy of removing  President Miguel Díaz-Canel from power while keeping in place his government. They have communicated to Cuba that no deal can be negotiated while he is leader.

The U.S. has cut Cuba off. The Secretary-General of the United Nations has said that he is “extremely concerned about the humanitarian situation in Cuba” and warned that it “will worsen, if not collapse,” if the U.S. does not ease its chokehold. But as the humanitarian catastrophe unfolds, while the world looks on, there are three enduring American myths about Cuba that need to be dispelled.

The Trump administration has cut Cuba off from its energy lifeline: “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO!, Trump announced. “I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.” With that threat, Trump declared a “national emergency” and signed an executive order imposing tariffs on any country that sends oil to Cuba. “Now there is going to be a real blockade. Nothing is getting in. No more oil is coming,” the U.S. Charge d’Affairs in the U.S. Embassy in Havana told his staff.

And, with the exception of a trickle of aid from Mexico and the promise of a drop of aid from Canada, nothing is getting in. “There’s no oil, there’s no money, there’s no anything,” Trump boasted. There is no longer enough oil in Cuba to guarantee your car, generator or hot water will run. There is not enough electricity to keep the lights on. Classes have been cancelled at many schools, and many hospitals have cut services. Tourism, the economic lifeblood of Cuba, is drying up. Cuba has announced that international airlines can no longer refuel there due to fuel shortages. On Monday, a “complete disconnection” caused a blackout across all of Cuba.

The American embargo has gotten so successfully out of hand that, after the leaders of Cuba’s Caribbean neighbours expressed alarm over the suffering of Cubans, the U.S. has relented a little and now says it will loosen some restrictions and let some Venezuelan oil into Cuba.

Foundational to the American embargo on Cuba are three myths that need to be undermined: the hostility to Fidel Castro and Cuba has been going on longer than expressed in the official narrative, the hostility was never about communism, and the intent of the embargo has always been to starve the Cuban people.

The hostility toward Cuba stretches back two years and one administration further than told in the official narrative. Though the embargo, the Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose’s determination to assassinate Castro are all attributed to Kennedy, they all need to be deposited in Eisenhower’s foreign policy account.

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Trump Says He’ll Have the “Honor” of “Taking Cuba” – “Whether I Free it, Take it, I Think I Can Do Anything I Want with It”

President Trump on Monday again floated “taking Cuba,” saying he believes he will have the “honor” of doing so. 

During a press conference in the Oval Office, Trump told reporters that Cuba is “very weakened,” noting that its “very violent” regime has destroyed the country.

“All my life, I’ve been hearing about the United States and Cuba. You know, when will the United States do it?”

This comes as the Department of Justice is preparing to charge Communist Cuban leaders in cases related to drugs or violence.

Cuba also faced a nationwide blackout after Trump cut off the flow of oil by threatening tariffs on any country that provides oil to Cuba through an Executive Order.

Meanwhile,  as The Gateway Pundit recently reported, U.S. Southern Command announced new operations with the Ecuadorian military against narco-terrorists in South America and is still surging troops to the region.

Trump told Fox’s Peter Doocy that Cuba is “talking to us” but declined to say whether he plans to use the military to invade Cuba as he did in Venezuela in January.

“I mean, whether I free it, take it, I think I can do anything I want with it, you want to know the truth. They’re a very weakened nation right now,” he said.

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Cuba’s Electrical Grid Suffers Complete Collapse

Cuba’s electrical grid has suffered a complete collapse as the Trump Administration prepares to take action on the island country.

“Cuba’s electrical grid has suffered a complete and total collapse. This is according to the country’s power operator,” CNN’s Brianna Keilar.

“It’s the 1st nationwide blackout since the US effectively shut off the flow of oil to Cuba,” she said.

“A total disconnection of the National Electric Power System has occurred. Restoration protocols are beginning to be implemented,” Cuba’s electrical grid provider said on Monday.

President Trump told reporters on Sunday evening that he will finish dealing with Cuba “soon.”

“Cuba’s a failed nation. Cuba also wants to make a deal, and I think we will pretty soon, either make a deal or do whatever we have to do,” Trump told Bloomberg’s Jeff Mason during a gaggle on Air Force One.

“We’re talking to Cuba, but we’re going to do Iran before Cuba,” he said.

“They’ve been waiting 50 years for what’s happening with Cuba. So, I think something will happen with Cuba pretty quickly,” Trump added.

“You know, people have been waiting 50 years to hear this story with Cuba, and when I left Palm Beach today, there were thousands of people in the road. I’m sure you saw them, and they were from Cuba and from Venezuela, all friendly, all friendly, waving the flag and waving the American flag,” he said.

“They’ve been waiting 50 years for what’s happening with Cuba. So, I think something will happen with Cuba pretty quickly,” Trump said.

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Cuban protesters ransack Communist office as energy crisis deepens

Protesters in Cuba have ransacked a Communist Party building following a rally over steep food prices and persistent power cuts, in a rare show of public dissent.

Five people were arrested after a small group vandalised the offices in the central city of Moron overnight into Saturday, Cuba’s Interior Ministry (Minint) said.

Discontent among Cubans has been mounting as the island is buffeted by rolling blackouts and shortages of food, fuel and medicine, exacerbated by a prolonged US oil blockade.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said that, while the protesters’ complaints and demands were “legitimate”, “violence and vandalism that threatens citizen tranquility” would not be tolerated.

He wrote on X that the prolonged blackouts had understandably caused “distress”, blaming them on the US blockade that he characterised as having “cruelly intensified in recent months”.

The protest came hours after the government in Havana confirmed that talks with the US to “seek solutions through dialogue” to the two countries’ differences were under way.

Díaz-Canel said in a national broadcast on Friday that no fuel had entered the country in three months as a result of the US oil blockade.

US President Donald Trump has made no secret of his desire for a change in Cuba’s leadership. He said on Monday that Cuba was in “deep trouble” as he threatened a “friendly takeover”.

Trump previously said the one-party state would be “next” following the capture of its ally, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, in January.

Since then, the US has blocked Venezuelan oil shipments – which provided for about half of Cuba’s energy needs – and threatened to impose tariffs on any country that sold oil to the island nation. This is on top of a six-decade US trade embargo.

Havana relies heavily on imported fuel for electricity generation, and the oil blockade has brought Cuba’s beleaguered economy close to collapse.

The crisis has affected rubbish collection, emergency hospital wards, public transport and education.

Friday’s demonstration “initially began peacefully” before escalating into “acts of vandalism”, state-run newspaper Invasor said.

“A smaller group of people stoned the entrance to the building and started a fire in the street with furniture from the reception area.”

Other state-run facilities, including a pharmacy and a government-operated market were also targeted, it added.

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First Iran, Then Cuba: Trump Has Dropped the Peace-President Mask

Donald Trump did not merely let slip a reckless aside when he said he wanted to “finish this one first” – meaning Iran – before turning to Cuba. He revealed a governing mindset. Countries become items in a queue. War becomes a scheduling matter. One theater before the next, one pressure campaign before the next, one performance of toughness before the cameras move on. That is not strategic restraint. It is imperial casualness masquerading as command. Reuters reported on March 5 that Trump said he wanted to finish the war in Iran first and that it would then be only “a question of time” before attention shifted to Cuba; two days later, Reuters reported him saying Cuba was already negotiating with him and Marco Rubio.

What makes the remark more damning is the promise it betrays. Trump sold himself to voters as the man who would stop wars, not start them. In his inauguration address, he said his “proudest legacy” would be that of a “peacemaker and unifier,” and that America’s success should be measured not only by the battles it wins but by the wars it ends and the wars it never gets into. Even in late February, the White House was still branding him the “President of Peace.” Yet the administration is now openly talking about winning the war with Iran, rejecting negotiations, and even asserting a right to shape Iran’s political future.

You do not have to praise the Iranian state to recognize the danger in that. The issue is not whether one approves of Tehran. The issue is whether an American president who campaigned against endless war is now normalizing the oldest and most discredited habits of Washington foreign policy: regime-change rhetoric, contempt for diplomacy, and the fantasy that bombing can substitute for strategy. When Trump says he is not interested in negotiating and muses that there may be nobody left to say “we surrender,” he is not sounding like a dealmaker. He is sounding like every hawk who has ever confused devastation with victory.

The Cuba remark matters for another reason as well. It suggests that Iran is not being treated as a singular emergency but as one stop in a broader politics of coercion. That is how permanent interventionism works. Every crisis is packaged as exceptional, urgent, and morally self-evident – until the language starts to slide. First this country, then that one. First “finish” Iran, then move on. First present force as a necessity, then sell the next confrontation as inevitable. Trump’s words make that rhythm impossible to miss. The vocabulary may shift from threat to negotiation to triumphalism, but the premise remains the same: Washington decides, others adjust.

Congress, meanwhile, is doing what Congress so often does when presidents discover a taste for undeclared war: almost nothing. On March 4, a Senate majority voted to block a bipartisan war-powers resolution that would have required congressional authorization for hostilities against Iran. That abdication is not a procedural footnote. It is one of the great mechanisms by which American wars become easier to start, harder to stop, and almost impossible to own. Presidents escalate. Legislators grumble. Then the war machine keeps moving.

And it is moving fast. Reuters reported this weekend that the administration used emergency authority to bypass Congress and expedite the sale of more than 20,000 bombs to Israel, just as the joint U.S.-Israeli air war against Iran entered its second week. This is what “peace through strength” usually means in practice: fewer restraints, more munitions, and a shorter distance between rhetoric and rubble. The slogan is designed to comfort Americans into believing that force is a form of stability. More often, it is simply the marketing language of escalation.

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Trump and Rubio Give Final Offer to the Castros and Díaz-Canel: “Off-Ramp” to Cede Power Without Forced Exile or End Up Like Maduro in Prison

President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are pushing an economic agreement with the Cuban regime that includes an “off-ramp” —a negotiated exit— to allow the Castro family and President Miguel Díaz-Canel to cede power without forced exile, according to an exclusive report from The Telegraph.

The plan would allow these leaders to remain on the island in exchange for concessions in ports, energy, and tourism, with possible selective relief in sanctions.

The conversations involve Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, grandson of Raúl Castro, who maintains key influence. Rubio, son of Cuban immigrants, leads the high-level negotiations, as confirmed by Trump in public statements.

The president has said that “Cuba is in its final moment of life as it is” and that an agreement will be reached “very easily”.

This pressure intensified after the capture of Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores on January 3, 2026, in Caracas by U.S. forces.

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CIA accused of secret bioweapon experiments linked to major outbreak in its own people

A biochemist has claimed to have found evidence that the modern Lyme outbreak in the US could have been the result of CIA bioweapon experiments.

Dr Robert Malone, who helped lay the groundwork for mRNA vaccine technology, made the explosive allegations this week after analyzing declassified government documents, historical records from Cold War biological weapons programs and scientific research on tick-borne diseases.

Malone highlighted experiments in the 1960s that allegedly released more than 282,000 radioactive ticks in Virginia and open-air tick research at Plum Island, a federal laboratory located near the Connecticut community where Lyme disease was first identified.

The experiments were designed to track how disease-carrying ticks spread through the environment, with scientists marking the parasites using radioactive Carbon-14 so their movements could be detected with Geiger counters, a portable, gas-filled instrument. 

Malone’s report argued the research was part of a much larger Cold War biological weapons program known as Project 112, which involved dozens of secret tests aimed at studying how insects could be used to spread pathogens.

The program, authorized by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in 1962, oversaw 134 planned tests and included facilities capable of breeding millions of infected insects each week.

According to the report, the same region where these experiments took place later experienced an unprecedented surge in tick-borne illnesses.

Malone’s claims follow calls from US officials to investigate whether federal agencies experimented with pathogen-laden ticks as tools of war.

In December 2025, an amendment by New Jersey Representative Chris Smith called for a review of military, NIH and USDA projects from 1945 to 1972 involving Spirochaetales and Rickettsiales, bacteria linked to tick-borne diseases. 

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has also suggested Lyme disease may have originated from a failed US bioweapons program in the 1970s tied to research at Plum Island. 

Plum Island is an 840-acre island off the northeastern coast of Long Island, New York, and home to the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, a government lab used since the 1950s to study infectious animal diseases.

However, the Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly said Lyme disease was never studied at the facility.

Malone’s report also claims key research into a second tick-borne pathogen may have been suppressed.

He alleged the government sidelined research on a pathogen known as the ‘Swiss Agent,’ which was detected in Lyme patients in Europe during the 1970s.

Malone, an expert in biology who earned multiple degrees at the University of California, also accused the government of suppressing research on a second disease called the ‘Swiss Agent’ found in Lyme patients in Europe in the 1970s.

Unpublished papers from Willy Burgdorfer, the scientist who discovered the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, suggested the pathogen complicated treatment because it triggered persistent symptoms that did not respond to standard antibiotics. 

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Iraq and Cuba hit by blackouts amid US pressure and attacks on Iran

Both Iraq and Cuba have been plunged into nationwide blackouts, with the Middle Eastern country’s grid collapsing after a sudden drop in gas supplies to a major power plant in Basra, while the Caribbean island’s outage is being blamed on chronic fuel shortages worsened by the US blockade on Venezuelan oil.

The day before the Iraqi blackout, an Electricity Ministry spokesperson was quoted as saying that “incomplete supplies” of gas from neighboring Iran were already affecting power plant operations. Iran has been facing a massive US-Israeli air campaign since Saturday.

A separate power facility also experienced a shutdown in central Salah al-Din province, with local police explicitly denying reports that the station was targeted by an attack, according to the state-run INA news agency.

Iraq relies on Iranian gas for 30-40% of its power generation. The dependence is a direct consequence of decades of foreign intervention in the country. Before the 1991 Gulf War, the grid, though strained by sanctions, largely met demand. The war destroyed 75% of its generating capacity, and the 2003 US-led invasion caused a catastrophic collapse to less than 10% of prior output.

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Declassified Documents Link U.S. Bioweapons Program to Lyme Disease Outbreak

An extensive investigation based on declassified government documents and previously suppressed scientific research has uncovered compelling evidence that U.S. biological weapons programs contributed to the emergence of Lyme disease, which now affects hundreds of thousands of Americans annually.

The investigation reveals a pattern of concealment spanning six decades, including the systematic suppression of critical medical research and the release of nearly 300,000 radioactive ticks across Virginia to study how the disease-carrying insects would spread.

CIA Deployed Infected Ticks Against Cuba

Declassified documents and testimony from a CIA operative describe the 1962 deployment of infected ticks against Cuban sugarcane workers as part of Operation Mongoose, the Kennedy administration’s effort to destabilize Fidel Castro’s regime.

The operative, now in his seventies, told researchers that the “strangest thing he ever did was drop infected ticks on Cuban sugarcane workers” using C-123 transport aircraft flying nighttime missions “almost skimming the surface of the Caribbean to avoid Cuban radar.”

After returning from Cuba, the operative’s four-month-old son developed life-threatening fever requiring emergency surgery. His CIA commander advised him to “burn all the clothes you took to Cuba. Burn everything,” indicating contamination concerns.

The deployment was canceled when “Cuba’s shifting winds made accurate payload delivery difficult,” according to the operative’s account.

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‘Cuba’s Next,’ Says Lindsey Graham as Illegal Trump-Israel War on Iran Kills Hundreds

As American and Israeli bombs kill hundreds of Iranians – reportedly including at least 180 students and others at a girl’s school in Minab – Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday that President Donald Trump is “on a roll” and that Cuba is the next nation in the US regime change crosshairs.

In an interview on Fox News, Graham (R-SC) said prematurely that “Trump finished the job” that former President Ronald Reagan “failed to do,” namely, destroy Iran’s Islamist government after the overthrow of a brutal US-backed monarchy in 1979. “I am a big admirer of Ronald Reagan but I’m here to tell you that Donald Trump, in my opinion, is the gold standard for Republicans, maybe any president, when it comes to foreign policy.”

“Maduro – everybody talked about him, well, Donald Trump’s got him in jail,” Graham said of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who was abducted along with his wife two months by invading US forces.

“Cuba’s next. They’re gonna fall,” Graham said of the revolutionary government in Havana that’s outlasted a dozen American presidents, despite decades of US-led assassination attempts, sabotage, and subversion. “This communist dictatorship in Cuba, their days are numbered.”

The remarks by Graham – who previously berated Trump as a “jackass,” “nut job,” and “loser” unfit to be commander-in-chief – come amid reporting that Trump is feeling buoyed by what he views as successful attacks on Iran and Venezuela.

“The president is feeling like, ‘I’m on a roll,’ like, ‘This is working,’” one unnamed Trump administration official told the Atlantic‘s Vivian Salama over the weekend.

This, from a president who said he deplored regime change and vowed “no new wars” while running for reelection.

A day before launching the US-Israeli war of choice against Iran, Trump floated what he described as a “friendly takeover” of Cuba, prompting vehement condemnation from Havana. Cuba is already suffering under decades of US sanctions that have devastated the socialist nation’s economy and the well-being of its people.

In January, Trump issued an executive order baselessly declaring that Cuba poses “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security and tightening the blockade to further starve the island of fuel.

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