The Island of Revenge

The United States has begun, quite openly, taking steps toward major change in Cuba. The director of the Central Intelligence Agency reportedly visited the island personally, signaling to the population that eight decades of Castro-style communism—just 75 miles from Florida and near the family residence of Donald Trump—may be approaching their end.

Washington has rarely faced a challenge as enduring and provocative as the Cuban one. At the height of the Cold War, Fidel Castro raised the red flag of revolution and allowed Soviet nuclear missiles to be stationed just off the American coast, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The United States fought a direct confrontation against Castro during the Bay of Pigs Invasion and lost. Washington reportedly prepared more than forty assassination attempts against Castro, none of which succeeded. In the end, America decided to leave the matter to time itself.

And now, according to this narrative, time has arrived.

Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother, is now ninety-five years old. Cuba faces severe economic collapse exacerbated by energy shortages linked to disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, with electricity reportedly available for only a few hours a day. The romanticism of the revolutionary past no longer appears sufficient to sustain the regime: neither Fidel Castro’s marathon speeches—one famously lasting seven hours—nor the support once offered by literary icons such as Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel García Márquez, or Régis Debray.

This, the article argues, is now the era of Donald Trump.

Cuba fears it may become the next target after Venezuela, whose president, according to the article’s dramatic portrayal, was seized by an American commando unit and taken to a prison in New York City. If Trump openly speaks of acquiring distant territories such as Greenland, then what about a warm Caribbean island situated only a short distance from his favored residence and golf courses?

The article further suggests that Iran has inadvertently delayed the moment of reckoning for Cuba. Trump’s preoccupation with the Iranian issue, it argues, has postponed the “final blow” against an exhausted Havana. Victory in Havana, from this perspective, would carry greater symbolic significance than victory in Caracas or any other Latin American capital. Cuba represents the small defiant power that challenged successive American presidents—from John F. Kennedy to Donald Trump himself.

Originally published in Asharq Al-Awsat