Tag: cuba

Axios Warns Cuba Stockpiled 300 Attack Drones With Crosshairs On U.S. Homeland

Well, well, well.

On Feb. 3, we first asked whether a Cuban Missile Crisis 2.0 was quietly taking shape on the collapsed, communist-run Caribbean island of Cuba.

But instead of Soviet missiles, we warned that Havana may be stockpiling Russian-made Geranium one-way attack drones with the operational range to threaten major U.S. oil and gas refineries in the Gulf of America, key military bases, data centers, power grid infrastructure, and potentially even Washington, D.C.

Nearly three and a half months ago, we laid out the framework for a potential drone threat against the homeland originating from Cuba, using an infographic published by the Russian think tank Rybar.

Rybar is a noteworthy source in this context, and Western officials are not fans. The State Department has offered a $10 million reward for information on the outlet through its Rewards for Justice program, while both the European Union and the United Kingdom have sanctioned it.

At the time, Rybar wrote: “But what would the Cubans do in the event of a conflict? Let us hypothetically imagine that Havana decides to resist the Americans and chooses to fight. In that case, the already world-famous Geran strike drones could come to their aid.”

Fast forward to Sunday: Axios, citing newly obtained U.S. intelligence, reports that Cuba has accumulated roughly 300 military drones from Russia and Iran and has discussed potential wartime strike scenarios targeting Guantanamo Bay, U.S. naval vessels, and possibly Key West.

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US plans to indict Cuba’s Raul Castro, US DOJ official says

The United States plans to indict Cuba’s Raul Castro, a U.S. Department of ​Justice official said late on Thursday.

The timing of the potential indictment, ‌which would need to be approved by a grand jury, was not immediately clear, but the official said it sounds imminent.

The potential indictment of the 94-year-old former ​president of Cuba and brother of Fidel is expected to focus ​on the downing of aircraft, the official said on condition ⁠of anonymity.

CBS previously reported that the case relates to Cuba’s deadly ​1996 shootdown of planes operated by humanitarian group Brothers to the Rescue.

Representatives for ​Cuba’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside of normal business hours.

A U.S. Justice Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request ​for comment.

Trump’s administration has called Cuba’s current communist-run government corrupt and ​incompetent and is seeking to replace it. The latest move comes as President Donald Trump ‌has ⁠heaped pressure on Cuba, effectively imposing a blockade on the island by threatening sanctions on countries supplying it with fuel, igniting power outages and delivering blows to its economy.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District ​of Florida has ​been overseeing an ⁠effort to examine potential criminal charges against senior Cuban government officials.

Officials from both countries acknowledged earlier this year ​that they were in talks, but the negotiations appeared ​to founder ⁠amid the ongoing U.S. fuel blockade.

However, on Thursday, the Cuban government confirmed it had met with CIA chief John Ratcliffe.

Ratcliffe told intelligence officials in Cuba that ⁠the U.S. ​was prepared to engage on economic security ​issues if Cuba makes “fundamental changes,” a CIA official said.

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Heated Protests in Cuba After Yet Another 30-Hour Blackout in Havana

Residents of Havana took to the streets of several neighborhoods in the capital city on Tuesday night for the second day in a row to protest against the communist Castro regime amid a new, over 30-hour-long blackout.

Over the past two days, Cubans living in Havana have been enduring yet another over 30-hour-long blackout as the ailing communist regime finds itself unable to consistently provide power to the Cuban capital city. Cuban-focused outlets reported that residents of the Havana neighborhoods of Bahía, Marianao, Diez de Octubre, Nuevo Vedado, Luyanó, and others banged pots, set up campfires, and burned piles of trash that the ailing ruling regime has failed to properly dispose of during Tuesday night’s protests.

Cuban dissidents with internet access successfully managed to publish footage of the protests on social media and share it with outlets. Cubanet published footage of a cacerolazo (“pot-banging”) protest in Diez de Octubre — a neighborhood described by the outlet as a location that has become a central spot for peaceful protests against the Castro regime in recent months. In another piece of footage, shared by Cuban dissident Eliécer Ávila and published by Cubanet, shows fires burning along the side of a road while dozens of people protest during the blackout.

Cuban activist Orlando Ramírez spoke with Martí Noticias on Tuesday and described the situation as “chaotic.” Ramírez resides in Santo Suárez, a neighborhood that lost power on Monday afternoon and only had power for a brief 14-minute period before it went out again. His area also lacks running water, as there is not enough pressure to pump water through the pipelines of his neighborhood and, without power, no one can operate any pumps to move water upwards into tanks. Having access to fuel-powered generators is no guarantee to overcome the blackout, Ramírez pointed out, as generators are not suited to provide power to the old refrigerators that are commonplace in Cuba — in addition to soaring fuel costs across the island, which make running generators an expensive endeavor.

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Oz: Chinese Government Involved in Fraud, Suspect Russia, Cuba as Well

On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Jesse Watters Primetime,” CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz discussed fraud and said that “We’ve got the Chinese government involved in a big fraud ring in New York” in addition to suspected fraud that the Russian and Cuban governments are involved in.

Guest host Kayleigh McEnany asked, [relevant exchange begins around 2:25] “[L]ast time, when I spoke with you, you talked about the Cuban government possibly being involved in some Florida fraud, but it’s bigger than that. There are many foreign [governments] that are getting taxpayer dollars and taking advantage of taxpayers, tell me about what you found.”

Oz responded, “Well, we’ve got Russian government involvement, we believe, in Los Angeles. We’ve got the Chinese government involved in a big fraud ring in New York. And, of course, the Cuban connection that you mentioned was pointed out to me by the former mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez, who pointed out that we’ve got twice as many durable medical equipment suppliers — they sell wheelchairs and canes — twice as many as there are McDonald’s in South Florida and the owners all seem to be Cuban and they flee back to Cuba with the money when we come after them.”

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Democrat Rep. Pramila Jayapal Admits to Working with Foreign Countries to Aid Cuba in Defiance of President Trump.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) is proudly admitting to working with foreign countries to aid Cuba in defiance of President Trump’s policies.

In April,  Jayapal and Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-IL) spent five days in Cuba. During the congressional delegation visit, the two met with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez, and members of the Cuban Parliament.

She recently shared, “In January, Trump issued an executive order threatening tariffs on any country supplying fuel to Cuba. This was this January, just a few months ago.”

“And oil shipments from Venezuela, that’s where Cuba had been getting its oil, were halted after the US operations to kidnap Nicolás Maduro. Since January, only one Russian tanker of oil has made it to Cuba. In fact, it landed just a couple of days before I landed.”

“And one tanker has enough oil basically for 10 to 14 days of Cuba’s oil needs. So it’s a very limited amount of time. Now, Russia has said they’re going to send another tanker.”

“I was in conversations with the ambassadors from Mexico and some other places, and I know other countries in Latin America are trying to figure out how to get oil there. But it is a crisis beyond imagination.”

“Just this past Friday, on May 1st, Trump signed a broad executive order that widens sanctions and allows for new penalties similar to what we have for Iran and Russia against foreign banks and firms that are dealing with Cuba.”

“And it also reinforces the ban on U.S. tourism. I have called these sanctions an economic bombing of the infrastructure of Cuba. It is illegal. It is against the war.”

“We’ve been talking about this in Iran, obviously, to bomb the infrastructure of any country. That is against international law. This is essentially doing the same thing. It is bombing the infrastructure of Cuba with economic sanctions that essentially ensure that the infrastructure collapses.”

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Trump Goes All In On Regime Change In Cuba

The Trump administration just slammed the door on an effort by Cuba’s communist government to secure an economic lifeline while appearing to embrace reform. A May 1 executive order expands and sharpens longstanding American sanctions on Cuba, and appears to deliberately target a recent gesture at partially opening the Cuban economy. “All property and interests in property that are in the United States,” the order says, are barred from operating “in the energy, defense and related materiel, metals and mining, financial services, or security sector of the Cuban economy, or any other sector of the Cuban economy,” under the penalty of economic sanctions.

On March 16, in a bid for survival, the communist government of Cuba had announced a series of intended though vaguely executed reforms that would allow foreign investment in the island from Cubans living overseas. The reforms were to include a supposed expansion of private property rights. Deputy Prime Minister Oscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga said that the country was “open to maintaining a fluid commercial relationship with U.S. companies.”

Asked by email if the May 1 order was a deliberate response to the March 16 Cuban announcement, a State Department spokesman referred The Federalist to comments made on April 27 by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants. In a long discussion with Fox News Chief Foreign Correspondent Trey Yingst, Rubio rejected the possibility of reform under the current Cuban government, describing Cuba as “a failed state.”

Cuba “can get better,” the secretary of state added, but “serious economic reforms are impossible with these people in charge. It can’t happen. And these people in charge aren’t just economically incompetent. They have rolled out the welcome mat to adversaries of the United States to operate within Cuban territory against our national interest with impunity. We are not going to have a foreign military or intelligence or security apparatus operating with impunity 90 miles off the shores of the United States. That’s not going to happen under President Trump.”

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Donald Trump threatens to take Cuba ‘immediately’ in horror new invasion warning

US President Donald Trump has threatened to take over Cuba, claiming his military could do so “almost immediately.”

Speaking on Saturday, he said: “Cuba, which we will be taking over almost immediately.”

Addressing the crowd in Florida, Trump suggested the US could move away from the Iran war and deploy vessels towards Cuba on their return.

He added: “On the way back from Iran, we’ll have one of our big, maybe the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, the biggest in the world, we’ll have that come in, stop about 100 yards offshore.

“They’ll say ‘thank you very much. We give up…I like to finish a job.”

Trump has sparked intnerational outrage with his threats to attack Cuba.

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Why Trump’s Cuba Plan Won’t Work

It is clear that the US wants to conduct some kind of regime change operation in Cuba, egged on by Republican and Democratic hawks, though polling indicates it is not popular within the US, Cuba, or the international community. Figures like Marco Rubio have said that Cuba will need to open their economy up, in a nod to when the island was a completely deregulated vassal for US casino companies, ruled by a pro-US brutal dictator, Fulgencio Batista, who was deposed by the Cuban Revolution led by the Castro brothers and Che Guevara.

The US has been applying maximum pressure on Cuba and negotiating like it did in Venezuela to put a new leader compliant to US interests, perhaps even one of the Castros, reportedly.

The Trump administration says it is getting closer to a “deal” as Venezuela has stopped its partnership with Cuba and Mexico has, according to the White House, stopped sending oil shipments. However, Mexico is still sending some oil and aid, Russia is sending more, and China has also sent help. China’s sustained attacks on the Cuban campaign have brought it diplomatic capital. The narrative of a collapsing support network for Havana is wishful thinking.

Conditions on the island are dire thanks to the US blockade, in place since 1958 but increased by Trump. There are rolling blackouts lasting up to 20 hours a day. Hospitals are shutting down wings, and patients have died because respirators lost power. Food is spoiling due to lack of refrigeration, pushing child malnutrition rates to levels not seen since the 1990s. But despite the suffering, Cuba has not budged. Negotiators have said they are “not going anywhere.”

Cubans are reminded daily of what subjugation under the US’s thumb was like, and they see a live demonstration in Venezuela, where the US extracts resources with no regard for the local population. No matter how much the US pushes, Cubans may only be urged to rebel further.

There have been massive youth protests in Cuba, but notably, they rebuke the US and the blockade, throwing out the possibility of an inside coup. Progressives in the US have pushed back, and Cuba’s young population has lost more than 1 million people to emigration (10 percent of the population), which has slowed the economy and decreased the risk of an insurgency. Rich right-wing Cubans are in South Florida. An older, more ideologically-committed population remains.

The history of American interference in Cuba is long and bloody. There was the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. There have been hundreds of assassination attempts against Fidel Castro. There is the ongoing blockade, codified by the Helms-Burton Act. For six decades, Washington has used OFAC to seize Cuban assets. Every tool in the regime change toolbox has been used. None have worked.

What Cuba hawks like Trump, Rubio, Ted Cruz, Maria Elvira Salazar, and Mario Diaz-Balart want is not new. All come from wealthy conservative families, with Rubio, Cruz, and Salazar being of Cuban descent, and they have a personal and ideological vendetta against socialist Cuba – many of their families held positions within the old Batista regime.

They want a throwback to the old pro-US regime that will do the bidding of American corporations and the military. The island is a strategic base for other operations. Washington wants Guantánamo not just for detention but as a staging ground for airstrikes against fishing boats in the Caribbean – strikes that are war crimes according to international law.

Cuba is an older, more resilient regime than the ones the US has successfully toppled. Cuba was the main socialist revolution that spurred anti-colonial revolts throughout Latin America, Europe, and Asia. The Cuban revolutionary government, while blockaded and sanctioned, helped socialist movements in Angola, Bolivia, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, El Salvador, Granada, Colombia, Ethiopia, Congo, Mozambique, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, and elsewhere.

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Trump: “Cuba’s Next By the Way But Pretend I Didn’t Say That Please… Cuba’s Next.”

President Trump on Friday renewed his threats to invade Cuba while speaking at the Future Investment Initiative Priority Summit in Miami Beach, Florida.

While speaking about the US’s invasion of Venezuela, where Nicolas Maduro was captured, Trump told the crowd, “Cuba’s next by the way,” before joking that the media should disregard his comments. Then, he doubled down, stating, “Cuba’s next.”

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

Trump has also cut off the flow of oil by threatening tariffs on any country that provides oil to Cuba through an Executive Order last month.

WATCH:

Trump: MAGA wants strength, and they want victory. They want success. And that’s what we have, and we have been very, very successful. You know, when I went into Venezuela, I said, “meh,” because I campaigned on the fact, peace through strength, that you wouldn’t have to use it. But I built this great military. I said, You’ll never have to use it, but sometimes you have to use it.

And Cuba’s next, by the way. But pretend I didn’t say that please. Pretend I didn’t say that. Please, please, please, media, please disregard that statement. Thank you very much.

Cuba’s next. So, despite the radical left Democrat shutdown, we will continue to defend the sovereign borders of the United States of America, and we’ll defend our allies, your ally. You didn’t know they were that tough, did you? You didn’t know they were pretty tough, Iran. Not tough anymore. Now, we’ll continue to deport dangerous criminal aliens from our country.

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The Foreign Communist and Leftist Organizations Behind Pro-Cuba Regime Propaganda in the U.S.

The Nuestra América Convoy, composed of American and international leftists that recently delivered aid to the Cuban regime, was a network of at least 23 Marxist, socialist, and anti-American organizations, many with foreign ties and funding, including connections to the Chinese Communist Party.

Several have a documented history of organizing or participating in anti-American protests in the United States, including pro-Hamas demonstrations in Times Square within hours of the October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks, the July 2024 mass-vandalism protest at Washington’s Union Station, “Hands Off Iran” rallies, anti-ICE protests, pro-Maduro demonstrations, and other pro-communist causes.

The convoy’s primary organizing body was Progressive International, a self-described worldwide anti-capitalist organization formally founded in 2020, growing out of a 2018 call by Bernie Sanders’s institute and the Democracy in Europe Movement.

Its manifesto asserts that “capitalism is the virus” that must be eradicated, supports “revolution” to “transform society and reclaim the state,” and warns that “winning elections is not enough.”

The organization dismisses concerns about Chinese military aggression as an “invented narrative” and “anti-China hysteria.”

Its advisory council includes British Member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn, a self-identified socialist who participated in the convoy, and Yanis Varoufakis, a former Greek finance minister who describes himself as an “erratic Marxist” or “libertarian Marxist.”

Progressive International co-organized the convoy alongside the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, which a 1978 CIA study prepared for the House Intelligence Committee described as “one of the most useful Communist front organizations at the service of the Soviet Communist Party,” noting its consistent alignment with Moscow’s foreign policy.

National Lawyers Guild president Suzanne Adely participated in a joint Progressive International and IADL delegation to the Palestinian Territories in 2024.

A central organizing and fiscal node for the convoy was the People’s Forum, a New York-based 501(c)(3) whose executive director, Manolo de los Santos, spoke at press conferences in Havana.

De los Santos has spent years in Cuba and built a career organizing protests in New York City. In April 2024, hours before anti-Israel protesters occupied Hamilton Hall at Columbia University, he addressed roughly 100 activists at the People’s Forum’s Manhattan offices, urging them to recreate the “summer of 2020,” a reference to the BLM riots that resulted in $400 million in damage across the country, and to “give Joe Biden a hot summer.”

Isra Hirsi, daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar, traveled to Cuba as part of a People’s Forum delegation. She had previously been suspended from Barnard College for participating in a siege of parts of neighboring Columbia University during pro-Hamas protests.

The House Ways and Means Committee stated in a formal letter that the People’s Forum received over $20 million from Neville Roy Singham and his wife, Jodie Evans, between 2017 and 2022 through shell companies and donor-advised funds, and that it has “acted as a foreign agent of the Chinese Communist Party” while maintaining tax-exempt status. Singham, a U.S.-born tech mogul who sold his company for $785 million in 2017, moved to Shanghai and in July 2023 attended a Communist Party workshop on “promoting the party internationally.”

He shares premises with a Chinese propaganda firm whose goal is to “educate foreigners about the miracles that China has created.”

The People’s Forum hosted courses in late 2024 glorifying the Chinese revolution and events with diaspora groups defending the CCP. A George Washington University Program on Extremism report identified the People’s Forum as a key node funding activist groups with anti-U.S. and anti-Israel agendas aligned with China’s global messaging.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley urged an investigation into whether the People’s Forum should register as foreign agents under FARA.

Code Pink, founded in 2002 by Jodie Evans and Medea Benjamin, is a 501(c)(3) with a 23-year record of opposing U.S. foreign policy, actively opposing sanctions on Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Cuba, and disrupting congressional hearings including those of Henry Kissinger and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Code Pink chartered a plane for 100 convoy participants, delivered 6,300 pounds of medical supplies valued at $433,000, and charged each participant $1,600 for the trip.

Since 2017, roughly 25 percent of Code Pink’s funding has come from groups connected to Singham, who married co-founder Evans in 2019.

Since that marriage, Evans and Code Pink have, according to Senate Judiciary Committee documents, “stridently supported China,” with Evans publicly describing the Uyghurs as “terrorists” and defending their mass detention.

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