Batter Up. Cuba on Deck.
American Foreign Policy in Ruins. Trillions in Debt. Rubio Wants Another War. Trump Needs a Win.
Wars that begin with aircraft carriers always end at grocery stores.
The administration promised another clean demonstration of American power over Iran. Instead, the country got another expensive, bleeding, open-ended catastrophe. Trump claimed an absolute triumph from a Washington briefing room while the public watched the numbers roll over at the pump, paying five dollars a gallon and driving on. Now, the same men who built that disaster are looking ninety miles south toward Cuba like gamblers hunting one last winning hand. After Iraq. After Afghanistan. After Libya. After Iran, where negotiations abruptly ended in U.S. military strikes, these men have decided Cuba is next.
American foreign policy now resembles a casino addict chasing losses with borrowed money.
There is something diseased about a country that cannot keep its libraries open but can always find another enemy. And the libraries were not a metaphor. For nearly three decades, USAID ran real programs in Cuba. It trained independent journalists. It supported civil society networks and independent bloggers. It delivered food and medicine to the families of political prisoners. It provided IT training, journalism workshops, and connections between American and Cuban communities that outlasted administrations. The Government Accountability Office reviewed the program and found it was improving, its financial oversight strengthening, its reach expanding to women, youth, and rural communities across the island.
Elon Musk called it a criminal organization. Rubio absorbed the wreckage into the State Department. To eliminate a handful of nonprofit civic programs ninety miles off the Florida coast, this administration chose to dismantle an entire global agency. A Lancet study projects that single ideological purge will produce roughly 14 million additional deaths worldwide by 2030, including 4.5 million children under five.
So now the people who destroyed diplomacy are reaching for coercion.
On January 29, 2026, Trump invoked emergency powers to threaten tariffs against any nation selling oil to Cuba. Mexico, Cuba’s second-largest supplier, abandoned its shipment immediately. Venezuelan oil was already cut off. On February 3, Trump signed Executive Order 14,380, formally titled “Addressing Threats to the United States by the Government of Cuba,” declaring a national emergency.
The emergency he cited was an artificial catastrophe engineered entirely by his own White House. Senators Markey and Warren put the question directly to Trump in writing: does the administration believe that sixty years of American embargo had any role in driving Cuba toward the very adversaries the order now invokes as justification? Nobody answered.
The blockade created the dependency. The dependency justified the threat. The threat justifies the guns.
Cuba is not a peer adversary. It never was, not even when the Soviet Union was parking missiles there. Cubans rely on imported fuel for electricity, transportation, healthcare, and clean water. The blockade is not targeted at a government; it is targeted at a power grid, a transit system, a hospital. Ten million people cannot keep the lights on. They are lining up for bread. And the policy producing this suffering is also producing the migration crisis Washington claims to oppose. Over 600,000 Cubans sought asylum in the United States over five years. Between 2022 and 2023 alone, an estimated ten percent of Cuba’s entire population left the island. More pressure does not produce fewer refugees. It produces more. The policy fails by its own arithmetic.
Marco Rubio sounds less like a Secretary of State than a man trapped inside a 1987 Miami radio broadcast that never ended. He speaks about Cuba the way failed men always speak about weaker countries—loudly, and with total certainty. The CIA director flew to Havana last week to deliver ultimatums. The federal indictment of 94-year-old former Cuban leader Raul Castro, connected to the 1996 shootdown of civilian planes, was unsealed on Wednesday—the exact day the Cuban diaspora celebrates Cuban Independence Day, the anniversary of the founding of the republic.
Former diplomat Ricardo Zuniga, who helped build the Obama-era restoration, warned that the indictment could doom any remaining chance of a negotiated exit. When Washington shuts down communication, both nations back into a corner until one of them moves.
Cuba’s military is already running maneuvers across the island. Díaz-Canel has promised a bloodbath awaits any invading force. Unlike Venezuela, whose military folded fast, Cuba’s people have been told for sixty years they are defending the revolution or dying for it. They mean it.
The party that cannot lower costs or keep public institutions functioning still somehow believes it can reorganize Cuba. The escalation has become so reckless that Congress is scrambling to strip the executive’s war powers before the first missile leaves the rail. On Wednesday, Senators Tim Kaine, Adam Schiff, and Ruben Gallego introduced a War Powers Resolution specifically designed to block the administration from deploying U.S. armed forces against the island.
Failure does not produce humility in the West Wing. It produces planning sessions, talking points, and a deeper commitment to forever wars and regime change. U.S. Southern Command has already begun drafting military options ranging from a single airstrike to a ground invasion.
Trump needs a victory photograph. Rubio needs history to take him seriously.
And somewhere in Washington, men who have failed everywhere else are already measuring Cuba for uniforms, contracts, and graves.
Batter up.
By a Former Foreign Service Officer
Writing from Ashland, Oregon