Pressure on the Cuban government has been building almost by the week, and the latest sign of it came on 10 June, when US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a visit to the naval base at Guantanamo Bay to warn Havana against acquiring weapons capable of reaching the base or the American mainland. Doing so, he told reporters, would invite a confrontation the island “could not stand”, according to Al Jazeera. The warning sat on top of a months-long military build-up that, by several accounts, has left Washington able to strike at short notice should Donald Trump give the order.
POLITICO has reported that the Pentagon spent months positioning warships, aircraft and Marines across the Caribbean, in what is now the largest concentration of American naval power outside the Middle East. The USS Nimitz carrier strike group moved into the region in May, the same week prosecutors unsealed an indictment against Ral Castro, and an amphibious group carrying around 2,500 Marines has been readied for deployment. The forces in place still amount to a coercion package rather than a full invasion force, though the gap is narrowing.
How easy such an operation would actually be is a matter of debate. The Washington Times reported this month that a strike on Cuba could prove simpler than January’s raid to seize Venezuelan leader Nicols Maduro, given that the Cuban military is badly outmatched and relies on ageing Soviet-era equipment. A more cautious assessment came from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where analysts Christopher Hernandez-Roy, Mark Cancian and Henry Ziemer argued that air strikes or a decapitation mission against President Miguel Daz-Canel or Castro would not necessarily deliver the change Washington wants. Drawing on the Iran experience, they wrote that the most likely immediate result of a strike is a hardline response from the ruling party rather than a quick collapse.
Havana, for its part, has answered the pressure with defiance. Axios reported in late May that Cuba had obtained more than 300 attack drones from Russia and Iran, with leaked intelligence pointing to plans to target Guantanamo, US ships in the Caribbean and even Key West. The CSIS analysts judged that figure far too small to close the Florida Straits or pose any serious threat to the mainland. Daz-Canel has dismissed the Castro indictment as a fabricated pretext for aggression and warned that any attack would produce a “bloodbath”, telling Newsweek his government would wage a guerrilla campaign causing heavy losses on both sides.
The military signals sit on top of an economic squeeze that began in January. After capturing Maduro, Trump cut off the Venezuelan oil Cuba had depended on, then issued an executive order threatening tariffs on any country that shipped fuel to the island, which prompted Mexico to halt its deliveries. The New York Times described the result as the first effective US blockade of Cuba since the 1962 missile crisis. The island has since suffered repeated nationwide blackouts, and fresh sanctions on GAESA, the military-run conglomerate that dominates the economy, have driven European firms out. Spanish hotel groups Meli and Iberostar withdrew their branding from dozens of properties, while shipping lines CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd suspended their Cuban routes, according to POLITICO.
The sequence looks deliberately familiar. Much the same combination of indictments, naval deployments and tightening sanctions preceded the capture of Maduro on 3 January and two rounds of American strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, in June 2025 and again in February. Trump has made the link himself, telling an audience in Miami in March that “Cuba’s next”, having earlier floated a “friendly takeover” of the island in remarks reported by Reuters and the Associated Press.
The domestic logic is not hard to read. Finishing off what remains of the Castro system would resonate with a large Cuban-American electorate in Florida, a constituency Secretary of State Marco Rubio knows well as the son of parents who left before the revolution. For an administration that has tied much of its foreign policy to visible wins, Havana offers a target with deep symbolic value.
The history weighs against rushing in. The Bay of Pigs landing in 1961, when a CIA-backed exile force was crushed within days, remains the standing lesson in assuming a government will fold on contact. The missile crisis a year later took the world to the edge of nuclear war. For six decades Havana has blamed the American embargo, what it calls el bloqueo, for failures that other former communist states managed to reform their way out of, and a military strike now would hand it that argument once more, even as it removed the government from power.
Then there is the day after, where the planning looks thinnest. A collapse in Havana could send a wave of migrants across the Florida Straits, much as the 1994 rafter crisis put some 35,000 Cubans out on boats, an outcome that fits awkwardly with Trump’s immigration stance. Prolonged disorder is at least as plausible as an orderly handover, complicated by a diaspora many of whom have never set foot on the island yet expect to shape its future. Legal scholars have already challenged the lawfulness of the Venezuela and Iran operations, and the same questions would follow any move on Cuba.
For now the warships stay offshore and no order has come. Talks of a sort flickered earlier in the year, with Cuba releasing more than 2,000 prisoners in April, though Daz-Canel insists any deal rest on equal footing and respect for international law. Whether Trump strikes or simply keeps the island under siege, Washington is wading into a corner of the world where its interventions have rarely ended the way they were drawn up.
So is this a bluff? The most likely reading is that it sits closer to coercion than to a real plan for invasion. The build-up is loud and public, and it comes with an open line to Havana, which is the signature of pressure diplomacy rather than a surprise attack. The economic blockade is already doing the heavy lifting, and if the government falls under its own weight Trump collects the credit without owning the wreckage, the migration wave or the reconstruction bill that would follow. The domestic dividend is just as real, and it pays whether or not a shot is fired, locking in Florida’s Cuban-American vote and handing the administration a symbolic win over an old adversary. On that reading, the image of Marines wading ashore in the coming weeks is the least probable outcome.
The reason not to relax entirely is that the assumption Trump is bluffing has been wrong twice this year already. He captured Maduro in January and struck Iran in February, in both cases after critics insisted he would not follow through. Telegraphed threats carry their own danger, because a leader who is publicly called out can feel pushed to act, and the leaked drone intelligence offers a ready pretext if he wants one. The more plausible risk is a limited strike or a decapitation attempt rather than a full occupation, the kind of move analysts warn would harden the government rather than topple it, leaving Cuba broken and Washington with no plan for what comes next. The safest conclusion is also an uncomfortable one: this is probably leverage, but leverage in the hands of a president who has already shown he will use the real thing.
