On October 23, 2026, President Trump announced that he may direct the US Navy’s vessels returning from the Middle East to head toward the Caribbean.
Does this mean that Trump contemplates a military solution to the so-called Cuban problem because he is fed up with waiting that his embargo succeed in forcing regime change in Cuba?
Cuba is facing a serious economic and political crisis. This was predicted to happen a long time ago as you can see from the blog I wrote in 2013:
AFTER FIDEL – RAUL, AFTER RAUL – WHO?
Fidel Castro is nearing death and Raul, his brother turned 82 on Monday.
“The succession from Fidel to Raúl Castro, programmed since the early days of the Cuban revolution, was efficient, effective and seamless. Gen. Castro now is orchestrating his own succession, but this one lacks the historical legitimizing elements of the 1959 revolution.
The recent appointment of Miguel Diaz-Canel, a 52-year-old party apparatchik factotum, as first vice president of the Council of State places him in line to succeed Raúl Castro in that state body. This, however, is not equivalent to being No. 2 in the regime as the international media seem to have concluded,” writes Jose Aziel in an article published in The Miami Herald on April 27, 2013.
Aziel is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, University of Miami, an institution dedicated to intensive Cuba-watching.
Aziel goes on: “It is not often understood that Raúl Castro leads Cuba not because he is president of the Council of State, but because he is first secretary of the Communist Party and Fidel’s brother. Under the Cuban governing succession scheme, the military-dominated Politburo would recommend Cuba’s next leader.
Behind the Diaz-Canel designation — let’s make sure we do not label it an election — is a venal plot of political maquillage. The role of the Cuban military in the economy is extensive and pervasive, with the military managerial elite controlling over 60 percent of the economy. What follows when the Raúl era comes to an end, leaving the generals in control of both the Politburo and the economy?
They will be highly motivated to arrange a manipulated privatization of the economy in order to monetize their positions. Alas, this corrupt mockery of privatization ends with the generals and colonels as the new Cuban ‘captains of industry’.”
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Miguel Diaz-Canel is First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba and top leader since 2021. During his watch the country’s economy is heading toward total collapse mainly for two reasons:
1) a centrally planned economy run by high-ranking corrupt military officers
2) the US embargo and sanctions.
Stubborn, inflexible and selfish confrontation with the US to resist regime change is making an already difficult situation more precarious.
Meanwhile, as always and everywhere, the poor have to put up with hardship caused by mismanagement it had no hand creating and no means of correcting.
