Version imprimableTHE SADISTIC SAVAGERY of the Trump regime’s starvation-and-regime-change assault on Cuba comes into relief when you look at the surrounding circumstances and context.
The controversies within the left over the character of the Cuban government and state are irrelevant to the brutality that the United States is practicing. It’s the U.S. imperialist state and government that need to be on trial.
That’s the state and Trump regime that brags of blowing up more than 50 boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, on the lying pretext that they were “running drugs,” killing close to 200 people including victims of “double-tap” bombings — probably fishing vessels in most cases — without a shred of evidence, let alone judicial process.
That same regime has now indicted Cuban former president and defense minister Raul Castro in the shootdown of Cuban exile “Brothers to the Rescue” planes three decades ago.
It’s nothing to do with justice or any national security threat, but raw imperial power exercised under the “Donroe Doctrine” of a floundering U.S. presidency, combined with the zealotry of Marco Rubio’s savior-complex obsession over “rescuing Cuba from communism.”
That arrogance was on full display with the kidnapping of Venezuelan ex-ruler Maduro. Trump expected to duplicate that triumph in Iran — overlooking the detail that Tehran had the capacity to fight back. (Admittedly, those of us who knew that Trump’s tariff idiocies and tax cuts would damage the U.S. economy underestimated his potential to crash the whole world economy.)
Hemispheric Ruin
More broadly, the U.S. assault on Cuba is an intended warning to any present or future progressive movements or governments in Latin America. Today, the lives of Cuban children, women in pregnancy and those needing health care, dying from the lack of electricity and medical supplies are human sacrifices on the altar of imperial rapacity and ideology.
There was a time when post-revolutionary Cuba presented some kind of radical challenge to U.S. hegemony, or at least what was called Cuba’s “threat of a good example” with its advanced educational and public health achievements. In all honesty, such a “threat” ended long ago with the defeat of the 1980s Central American revolutions and then the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The ensuing 35 years, beginning with the early 1990s “special period” of austerity and hardship, have seen a struggle to preserve Cuba’s independence and economic viability under conditions of constant menace, as well as waves of emigration. The events of the shootdown of the exile-flown planes in 1996 occurred in that context.
Those Brothers to the Rescue flights, whatever humanitarian assistance they may have provided to refugee boats in the early 1990s, were also deliberate provocations against Cuba’s sovereignty. They had murky connections with the CIA and FBI, some of which were revealed by Cuban government operatives who infiltrated the group.
By 1996, entering Cuban airspace and dropping leaflets over Havana, they were engaging in a game of Chicken that ended tragically.
Did that justify the Cuban air force blowing small civilian planes out of the sky? In my own opinion, clearly not — whatever malicious mischief or performative defiance they may have intended, those flights were no imminent security or military threat.
Cuba certainly had non-lethal methods of intercepting them. And the political impact was destructive, resulting in even tighter anti-Cuba sanctions by “bipartisan” agreement of the Clinton administration and Republican congressional leadership
Was the shootdown perhaps worthy of an independent investigation? Maybe so — in a different world with a body competent to perform it. In the real world, the United States government and judicial system are no such entity, and have no right to prosecute Cuba or its officials for this or any other case. U.S. imperialism should be the defendant.
There are Cuban exiles, and not only extreme right-wingers, who think that Trump and Rubio will “liberate” the island. They ought to have a look at Venezuela, where Maduro’s post-Chavista police-state regime remains in place under new Washington-client leadership and the miserable conditions of life persist.
The intention of the assault on Cuba is part and parcel of the effort to subjugate all of Latin America to multinational and especially U.S. corporate domination and privatization, democracy be damned. It is a fast-track road to hemispheric ruin, which makes the stakes especially high.
28 May 2026
Source: Solidarity webzine.
