We’re being asked to believe Cuba is Hamas, so the U.S. needs to strangle it to death in self-defense. That the U.S. has been pursuing regime change in Cuba for generations, we’re told, is mere coincidence.
“Recova” in front of the Capitolio in Havana, Cuba, 2011. (Jorge Royan, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
By Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter
Reading by Tim Foley
It’s just incredible how quickly and aggressively the U.S. is advancing long-standing agendas of global conquest under the Trump administration. Now they’re racing to take out Cuba.
The U.S. president has signed an executive order to impose new tariffs on countries which supply oil to Cuba, even indirectly, which is expected to dramatically increase the pressure on the already struggling island nation.
This comes as the Financial Times reports that “Cuba only has enough oil to last 15 to 20 days at current levels of demand and domestic production” after the U.S. cut off the supply from Venezuela and Mexico shelved a planned oil shipment.
Trump’s order itself contains the usual excuses we’ve come to expect from the empire of propaganda and lies, with its authors babbling without evidence about Hamas and Hezbollah and “transnational terrorist groups” receiving support from Havana, thereby making this crushing act of siege warfare a self-defense measure implemented in protection of the American people.
We’re being asked to believe that Cuba is Hamas, so Washington needs to strangle it to death in self-defense. The fact that the U.S. has been pursuing regime change in Cuba for generations, we are told, is merely a coincidence.
The lies get dumber and dumber with each new imperial power grab. It’s just insulting at this point.
The Wall Street Journal published an article titled “The U.S. Is Actively Seeking Regime Change in Cuba by the End of the Year” which cited anonymous senior U.S. officials saying they viewed the operation to remove Maduro from Caracas as a “blueprint” for bringing down Havana.
Here’s an excerpt:
“Emboldened by the U.S. ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the Trump administration is searching for Cuban government insiders who can help cut a deal to push out the Communist regime by the end of the year, people familiar with the matter said.
The Trump administration has assessed that Cuba’s economy is close to collapse and that the government has never been this fragile after losing a vital benefactor in Maduro, these people said. Officials don’t have a concrete plan to end the Communist government that has held power on the Caribbean island for almost seven decades, but they see Maduro’s capture and subsequent concessions from his allies left behind as a blueprint and a warning for Cuba, senior U.S. officials said.”
The Wall Street Journal reports that administration officials have been meeting with “Cuban exiles and civic groups in Miami and Washington” with the goal of “identifying somebody inside the current government who will see the writing on the wall and want to cut a deal,” in a way similar to how assets within the Maduro government were recruited to facilitate his removal.
In a new segment on Trump’s frenzied efforts to topple Havana, CNN’s Patrick Oppmann reports from Cuba that he’s “heard from a U.S. embassy source that diplomats there have been advised to quote ‘have their bags packed’ as the Trump administration explores new ways to destabilize the communist-run government.”
The U.S. likes to immiserate the populations of targeted nations using economic strangulation with the goal of fomenting unrest and turning people against their leaders.
In 2019 Trump’s previous secretary of state Mike Pompeo openly acknowledged that the goal of Washington’s economic warfare against Iran was to make the population so miserable that they “change the government”, cheerfully citing the “economic distress” the nation had been placed under by U.S. sanctions.
Economic distress has been widely cited as a primary factor in the deadly protests that have rocked Iran in recent weeks. Starvation sanctions are the only form of warfare where it is widely considered both normal and ethical to deliberately target a civilian population with deadly force.
Deliberately impoverishing an entire nation so that it erupts in conflict and civil war is one of the most evil things you can possibly imagine, but it’s the go-to Plan A for the U.S. empire when it comes to removing foreign leaders who refuse to kiss the imperial boot.
From Palestine to Lebanon to Yemen to Syria to Venezuela to Cuba to Iran, these last couple of years the U.S. has been in a mad scramble to eliminate governments and resistance groups which attempt to insist on their own sovereignty.
There’s a new excuse every time, but the end goal is always the same: the furtherance of planetary domination.
The U.S. empire is the single most tyrannical and murderous power structure on this planet. If any regime is in need of changing, it’s that one.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
This article is from Caitlin’s Newsletter and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Have guns will travel.
Have Stars and Stripes will wage wars.
Empire of Lies is the Empire that Dies. Thank you Caitlin
The “Cuban exiles” in Miami are nothing but gusanos. Traitors.
Haven’t we been here before? Oh, yes,
“President Obama today issued a new Executive Order (E.O.) declaring a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela. The targeted sanctions in the E.O. implement the Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Act of 2014, which the President signed on December 18, 2014, and also go beyond the requirements of this legislation.”
Already the most warmongering country in the past 80 years, the US under Trump (the peacemaker and would-be Nobel laureate) is hell bent on imposing its own form of government on a variety of countries. Not content with eyeing off Greenland and Canada for incorporation, Trump’s threatening Iran, Venezuela (pacified if not defeated) and now Cuba, again or is it still? Clearly the man is too stupid to see that even though he has a snowflake’s chance in hell of getting a Nobel, these actions are a further hindrance. The big question is when are the dumb Republicans going to wake up to the harm he’s doing their country internally and externally?
I would not be too sure about Trump not getting the Nobel Peace prize. It’s a mad mad world at the moment. Anyway has the prize got any kudos left? Kissinger anyone? Obama? Although the only reason Obama got it was because he was not George Bush. Me a cynic? Perish the thought.
My original comment from William Blum’s “The Other Side of the Berlin Wall,” republished by Consortium News on Nov. 9, 2022:
William Blum’s statements regarding sabotage in East Germany (GDR / DDR) remind me of CIA recruit Verne Lyon’s allegations regarding sabotage missions in Cuba, ostensibly after being coerced into joining “The Company” after initially ceasing ties with them following his involvement in Operation CHAOS on the Iowa State University campus (for more information, see his book “Eyes on Havana: Memoir of an American Spy Betrayed by the CIA,” co-authored with Philip Zwerling of UTRGV, and published by McFarland and Co. in 2018):
Verne Lyon: “I signed up to collect intelligence [in Cuba, from 1969-73]. My initial mission morphed into sabotage. I adulterated children’s milk – in Cuba, they went and built these classrooms and dormitories outside the city, and they would take the kids out there to study all week. They would live in the dorms, and get their fresh milk delivered every week. This is the one thing that [Fidel] Castro always guaranteed – that the children would have milk. Older people, not so much, but children, yes. Now, we knew the route that the milk truck driver took, so I had the driver bribed, and when he stopped for coffee, we put cement powder in the milk. I did not, but I ordered it done. I am thinking, ‘I am waging war on children. This is not collecting intelligence – this is way beyond what I ever expected!’”
Source:
“From ISU Student to CIA Spy: The Dangers of Clandestine Government Operations,” Iowa State University Lecture Series, February 7, 2022
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My original comment from Vijay Prashad’s “Punishing Haiti’s Liberation,” syndicated by Consortium News on May 13, 2025:
[T]here is some evidence that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) introduced the African Swine Fever Virus (ASFV) to Cuba in the early 1970s (Ken Lawrence, “New Evidence Implicates CIA in 1971 Attack on Cuba with African Swine Fever Virus,” CovertAction Magazine, Oct. 5, 2020), dovetailing with contemporaneous covert efforts to engage in acts of sabotage there (for instance, see the revelations of CIA veteran Verne Lyon). Subsequently, this ASFV outbreak seemingly spread from swine in Cuba to biologically-distinctive populations of Creole pigs in Hispaniola (island on which both Haiti and the Dominican Republic are located) during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In response, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in coordination with other international development organizations, launched an initiative known as the Program to Eradicate African Swine Fever and to Develop Pig Raising (PEPPADEP) that eradicated Creole pig populations and thereby decimated the traditional Haitian pork economy by extension (“The Creole Pig: Haiti’s Great Loss,” Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), Feb. 3, 2025), increasing Haitian dependence on North American pig breeds and, with it, dependence on US and foreign development authorities and livestock industries.
Once again, you nailed it!
Should we all have a bumper sticker that quotes you? “The U.S. empire is the single most tyrannical and murderous power structure on this planet. If any regime is in need of changing, it’s that one.”
I think it’s time.
Past time.
Let me cry on top of my voice.
For the sake of humanity the US should leave these countries to choose their own destiny!
Enough of killings!