Uncategorized
May 30, 2026

Is Cuba really a threat — or is it the company it keeps? 

Anna Smith

Trump administration officials and some U.S. lawmakers have maintained, especially in recent weeks, that Cuba is a direct threat to the United States. But others have cast doubt on the thought that the island nation presents any danger, given the current state of Cuba’s military capabilities.

Some critics are saying these assertions are meant to give President Donald Trump a stronger case for military action.

But even those who discount Cuba’s military might say its proximity to American borders and cooperation with competing superpowers complicate its geopolitical standing.

Speaking to the press on May 21 at the Miami Homestead Airport in Florida, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: “Cuba’s always posed a national security threat to the United States.”

Cuba, Rubio said, has weapons obtained from Russia and China over the years, and they “host Russian and Chinese intelligence presence in their country not far from where we’re standing right now.” 

“They, by the way, have been one of the leading sponsors of terrorism in the entire region, if you look at the groups that work out of Colombia that have destabilized that country over the years with full support from this regime over there,” Rubio said. 

Alejandro de la Fuente, a professor of Latin American History and Economics and director of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard University, said in military terms, Cuba is “not powerful at all.”

“I don’t think the Cuban armed forces would be a match to any display of U.S. military might by any stretch of the imagination,” de la Fuente told Straight Arrow. 

Sebastián Arcos, interim director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University, said the Cuban military in the 1980s was formidable. Back then, it represented a small but present threat to the U.S.

Since then, though, Arcos said, “it has been downgraded by the lack of resources and technology” to the point of being “fundamentally obsolete.”

“The capacity to mobilize forces has diminished significantly in the same way that the regime loses political and economic legitimacy within the island,” Arcos said.

While the Cuban military in the last few decades has been able to build businesses and a monopoly for many economic activities, and would have some capacity to respond to U.S. aggression, de la Fuente said he doesn’t “think anyone’s losing sleep” over their military capabilities.

Not Cuba, but the company they keep

Still, Arcos said, although not a military threat, Cuba does continue to be a security threat in the sense that the country has been a “steadfast ally of all the enemies that the United States has around the world.”

“Cuba has, or at least continues to have, a very effective intelligence service that has been able to infiltrate the United States over the years, over and over again,” he said. 

The administration’s concerns that Cuba is home to Chinese and Russian intelligence installations and capabilities are probably true, de la Fuente said. 

“Cuba has been close to both Russia and China for a very long time,” he said. “This is nothing new, and perhaps the one thing that would be suspect here is the timing of this realization, because this is something that has been true for decades.”

Jason Blazakis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, wrote in an article for Just Security that Rubio’s framing of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism has been used before, “but the factual basis for using it expired long ago.” This narrative, Blazakis said, is like the one the Trump administration built before striking Iran.

He noted that Rubio’s comments came as the U.S took two actions escalating the situation with Cuba: announcing the federal indictment of former Cuban president Raúl Castro and sending the USS Nimitz carrier and its strike group to the Caribbean. These moves, along with the 240 sanctions imposed on Cuba since January, the interception of Cuba-bound oil tankers, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s trip to Havana, “are not isolated events,” Blazakis said. 

“They are laying the groundwork for another possible conflict,” he wrote in Just Security. “The terrorism framing is the rhetorical scaffolding for it.”

Ranking members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Democratic Reps. Gregory Meeks and Nydia M. Velázquez also said the United States’ actions in Cuba are a potential pretext to justify U.S. military action.

In response to this, Meeks and Velázquez on Wednesday introduced a War Powers Resolution on Cuba. 

“Donald Trump’s belligerent foreign policy is creating new wars and conflicts across the world. As our country is already embroiled in a new war with Iran, the President has now set his sights on regime change in Cuba,” Velázquez said in a statement. “This administration is rushing toward another disastrous war, putting countless American and foreign lives at risk. Congress must reassert its constitutional authority if the President continues down this illegal path.”

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla maintained on X that Cuba is not a threat to the U.S.

“We are a peaceful country that does not aggress against anyone nor desires conflict,” he said. “I reject the repeated lies of U.S. politicians.”

In an interview with MS Now, Rodríguez Parilla denied reports about Russia and China running “spy bases” off the coast of Cuba. 

Another threat Rubio said Cuba poses is that the U.S. has a “failed state 90 miles from our shores run by friends of our adversaries.”

While the argument that a failed regime could create headaches for the U.S. is reasonable, de la Fuente said, it doesn’t make sense to then deepen Cuba’s socioeconomic crisis, which has been brewing for years.

The Trump administration didn’t create this crisis — that’s on the Cuban authorities, de la Fuente said. But punitive actions taken by the Trump administration are now contributing to it, he added. 

Under a U.S. energy blockade, Cubans are now experiencing daily power outages lasting up to 20 hours, The Associated Press reported. Millions are also experiencing water shortages. 

Antonio Rodríguez, president of the state-run National Institute of Water Resources, said the water system is heavily affected because it is one of Cuba’s largest energy consumers, according to the AP. 

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-N.Y, and Rep. Jonathan L. Jackson, D-Ill., wrote about a trip they took to Cuba in April for The New York Times to understand the humanitarian impacts of America’s energy blockade.  They said they saw women in the “final days of their pregnancies trudging up flights of stairs,” as the elevators could not function without power; hospital staff struggling to get to work without gas for their cars; and doctors having to manually pump ventilators to keep babies alive. 

“We came away shocked by the inhumane effects of the policy, whose goal appears to be strangling the economy until the Cuban people are brought to ruin and the country is available, as President Trump put it, for the ‘taking,’” the representatives wrote. 

Although it has a devastating effect on Cuba’s general population, the current problems are not affecting the regime’s security forces, Arcos notes. 

“This regime, over almost 70 years, has consistently placed their own security, their own permanence in power over the welfare of the Cuban population,” he said. “Power always comes first. “

And even some members of the public are affected more than others.

Cubans who receive remittances from their loved ones in America can more or less get by, unlike the “have-nots,” de la Fuente said, for whom this is “life-and-death.”

“We talk about crisis, we talk about the impact of these measures — there is a layer of this, which is the distribution of that impact to the interior of Cuban society, and that distribution is vastly unequal,” de la Fuente said.

Round out your reading

TAGS: