Trump still wants a winnable war: Is Cuba next? [View all]

Trump still wants a winnable war: Is Cuba next?
What Iran war? In desperate search of a legacy, Trump goes after Cuba’s failing regime. It's sad on both sides

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published May 24, 2026 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) From every imaginable point of view, the story of the Cuban revolution is a tragedy. How to make sense of that story is quite another matter. Like all tragedies, Cuba’s is haunted by unanswered questions, fatal mistakes and sliding-doors alternative possibilities. As is customary in the genre, what we think of its protagonists is a subjective question, determined by perspective more than anything else. Every viewer of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” must draw their own conclusions about Brutus and Marc Antony; so too with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

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We may be drawing near the final act of the specific tragedy of post-revolutionary Cuba, although nowhere near the end of the larger melodrama of that island’s tormented relationship with the United States. Donald Trump’s badly wounded administration is now searching for a “second Venezuela,” meaning a weaker, smaller nation it can victimize after the extraordinary humiliation of its botched war with Iran.

It appears to be Cuba’s time in the crosshairs, although whether a U.S. military intervention will actually happen, or would be successful in any sense, remains very much in doubt. There’s no alternative leader or defrocked monarch that American power could install, as was accomplished in Venezuela and hoped for in Iran, at least not short of full-on invasion, conquest and occupation. It is not, of course, a coincidence coincidental that Barack Obama, whose presidency now feels like a rumor from a distant galaxy, began to forge more reasonable and humane relations with both Cuba and Iran barely a decade ago.

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Rubio is certainly behind this new push for regime change in Havana, since his boss understands the issue, as he understands everything else, only in the vaguest and most vainglorious terms. Asked about Cuba during a brief Oval Office chat with reporters last week, Trump said: “Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years, doing something. And it looks like I’ll be the one that does it. So I would be happy to do it.” Words to be inscribed alongside those of FDR and Churchill, no doubt. ......................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/05/24/trump-still-wants-a-winnable-war-is-cuba-next/