Up Next: Cuba?
It's certainly looking that way.
from PxHere
POLITICO (“Pentagon puts building blocks in place for Cuba invasion“):
The Pentagon has spent months positioning the troops and weapons needed for the U.S. to launch a military attack on Cuba — all it needs is a final go-ahead from Donald Trump.
The president has floated an invasion of the island after economic and political pressure failed to topple the Communist government. But the Navy’s built-up presence in the region — the largest in the world outside the Middle East — would allow the U.S. to act immediately.
These strategically placed assets set the table for military action, from a capture of Havana’s leadership much like the seizure of former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, to a series of precision strikes. And they open the possibility that the U.S. throws itself into the third international conflict of the Trump administration.
While we’re still mired in the second, no less. (Presumably, we’re counting the EPIC FURY and MIDNIGHT HAMMER as a single conflict with Iran despite the temporal break.)
Cuba is “in a lot of trouble,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday at a full Cabinet meeting. “Having a failed state 90 miles from our shores is a threat to the national security of the United States.”
That we’ve rather helped in making it a failed state as a deliberate policy notwithstanding, I suppose.
The armada in the region is slightly smaller than it was in January when the U.S. captured Maduro. But the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier strike group entered the Caribbean in May, along with several guided missile destroyers and cruisers that can launch precision missiles at targets onshore. An array of advanced American drones and surveillance aircraft have also circled Cuba for months, according to flight tracking sites. The USS Kearsarge amphibious ships and escorts, which carry 2,500 Marines, are off the coast of Virginia preparing for a new deployment, and could replace some ships heading home.
The surge provides a variety of military options, although the Pentagon would need additional troops for a massive ground invasion.
One hopes “massive ground invasion” is not the preferred course of action.
The Nimitz arrived in the region on the same day as the U.S. indicted former president Raul Castro, in what appeared a public show of force. “The Nimitz is likely there primarily for intimidation, though it could be used in a military operation if needed,” said Mark Cancian, a former Pentagon official and now a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The ship, along with fighter planes based in Florida and Puerto Rico, would probably play a role in any military action in Cuba, he said. “Air strikes are possible to take out their air defenses to allow broader air operations or, perhaps, destroy their leadership with the idea of establishing a relationship as we have with Venezuela. Raul Castro would be their first target.”
I’m not sure why a 94-year-old former leader would be our first target. (He turns 95 next week.)
But the administration faces a timeline to act. Many of the biggest warships deployed in the summer are approaching 10 months at sea, far beyond the usual six to seven months. This has caused defense officials to worry about overextending crews, and adds to the stress on a naval force that is also conducting a blockade of Iranian ships in the Arabian Gulf.
The White House referred questions to the Pentagon. The Navy declined to comment on current deployments. Naval Forces Southern Command did not respond to a request for comment.
As a general practice, it’s not good policy to reveal plans for imminent military action to the press.
“These back-to-back long deployments will add up over time,” said a defense official, granted anonymity to speak candidly about military operations. “Keeping them out there so long creates more problems in the long run when it comes to refitting and repairing those ships once they come home.”
The prolonged missions come on the back of the record-setting 11 month deployment of the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, which ended this month after sailing from Europe to the Caribbean for the Maduro operation and then to the Middle East for the Iran war.
[…]
But the long deployments take a toll on the crews and Marines, who had planned for a normal rotation and are now months past their initial scheduled return home.
“You don’t sign up for an easy time, you know any deployment is going to be uncertain,” said Joe Plenzler, a retired Marine Corps officer. “But extending deployments like this, when it feels really open-ended, that starts to bleed into retention. How much more likely am I able to convince my family to do another enlistment and stick with it?”
Not to mention degrading the operational readiness of our forces in support of missions tangential to our ostensible national strategy of countering Chinese expansionism.
Sure, why not. The king’s ego needs to be fed.
The tragedy of Cuba is, if 40 years ago the US had lifted the sanctions and held a few carrots out, development would have created a middle class that would have demanded reform of the governing structure. It may not have been a US ideal, but the people of Cuba would be better off.
Trump’s behavior is that of a small child in some ways. If Iran drags on with no resolution he will get bored. He is already paying more attention to his ballroom, arch, reflecting pools etc., Cuba will be a welcome addition to his non-Iran interests.
@Sleeping Dog:
Florida used to be a swing state, the Miami Cubans had to be pandered to, bunch of Marco Rubio’s.
Another war? Off the Florida coast? Wild. This regime wants to waste billions on endless wars, a terrorist trust fund, and lawfare against a woman Trump raped — but the right swears we have no money for healthcare, clean energy, transit, or housing.
Not normal. These Republicans are very weird. Running in 2026 and 2028 as the Wars Everywhere Party is…a choice.
@Sleeping Dog: Indeed–US policy towards Cuba has been utterly foolish and counter-productive since the end of the Cold War at least.
There is not a day that goes by that doesn’t have me thinking/dreading the enormity of the MESS this administration is creating, and how much time, work, and money it will take to clean it up.
Sleeping Dog is exactly correct. A managed approach of lifted sanctions and gradual improvement in circumstances over time for the public would likely have elicited the desired outcome. But no, performative chest-beating on the part of Republicans trying to secure the Cuban vote has led us to…this.
@charontwo: If they go through with this, a lot of people in Florida who have been raised on fairy tales about Cuba magically reverting to pre-1959 are going have reality slap them in the face–especially if Trump pulls a Venezuela, kindnaps one guy, and then leave the place in the hands of the current regime.
@Steven L. Taylor: We spent most of a week in Havana last year with several presentations about how the Cuban economy functions and the answer is . . . it doesn’t or that it is totally dependent on the central government . . . that doesn’t function. There is a long road between the removal of the current regime and the development of a functional economic society.
No Cuba until you finish your Iran!
Is the goal to turn Cuba into personal fiefdoms and Epstein islands for the Marco Rubios of Florida or just turn it into another Haiti? Perhaps making the world ready to accept the taking of a small island nation by a powerful neighbor? Look out Taiwan!
@Steven L. Taylor:
He may just kidnap the younger Castro (94 years old), and leave the regime in place. then declare Cuba has been liberated, and deport all Cubans in the US back home.
@Steven L. Taylor: Cuban nostalgia is pitiful, but not in a mean way. In the sweet way an 11 year old who still believes in Santa Claus is pitiful.
Pre-1959 Cuba was decades of coups, dictatorships, insurgencies, revolts, and failed constitutions — priming the pump for Castro’s strongman era. Talking to the cubanos mixed in the family of my brasilierio granddad, their nostlagia is mostly just rose-colored grief for lost youth, as nostalgia usually is. Except in Cubans’ case, it’s often nostalgia not from their own childhood, but from the collective memory of parents, grands, great-grands and beyond. They didn’t personally experience the relatively democratic + stable quarter century after Cuba’s 1890s independence.
Of course you’d yearn for the 1950s Cuban dictatorship if your family was higher up in caste back then. Just like Desi Arnaz’s generation, exiled after the 1933 revolution, yearned for 1920s Cuba. That was also a murderous dictatorship, but Desi was a rich kid from a powerful family.
It’d be like descendants of the British landed gentry pushing for the pre-1959 Empire, but actually missing the Edwardian Era. That world of great country houses with dozens of full time staff is gone. Gotta build something new.
First thought: total insanity. Invading Cuba was already a joke fifty years ago:
Second thought (different from the first): another major fucking war crime.
People need to go to jail. The ADX Florence kind of jail.
@Steven L. Taylor:
That wouldn’t be good for Cubans, either. Castro overthrew a dictator. The difference was one of ideological and geopolitical alignments, not the existence of, or lack thereof, liberal values.
So it’s not just a fairy tale about magical reversion, but ignorance and/or dishonesty about Batista. After Castro ousted him, who took him in? Trujillo, Salazar, and Franco.
More to the point of the first paragraph, the American Right Wing has long found more common ground with foreign autocrats than with their fellow citizens and elected officials.
There are Navy bases in Florida, if my very quick Google is to be believed. Is there any reason not to dock the ships for a bit, give the crew a rest, do any needed refitting, and then invade? It’s not far.
Or they could dock at Guantanamo, if they want to get cheeky.
(Also, I would assume Guantanamo is basically surrounded by Cuban artillery as a deterrence.)
@DK: I endorse all of this. It is a nostalgia that is based more in myth than reality at this point, and is born, as you note, from the fantasies of those descended from elites.
Indeed, I this was obliquely what I was getting at: if you grew up thinking at some point you and your family will reclaim the lost family estate, business, etc., that ship has sailed in more ways than one. And I think that when that fantasy bubble pops, some people are going to be very angry.
@Kurtz: Trust me, I am well aware. But as I noted in my previous post, they think they are going to get the property they lost back. That is an utter fantasy.
I was very deliberate with the phrase “fairy tales.”
@DK:
Yeah, this.
It should also be noted than Arnaz’s roots were not indigenous, but European. His ancestral family was one of the first to be granted land in Cuba by the Spanish Crown.
Rubio’s family immigrated to Cuba much later than Arnaz, but is also of European descent. Mestizo, they are not.
Even after decades of American pressure and dictatorship, the Cuban-American population is far more European than what is found in Cuba itself.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Who knew a comparativist would have a solid grasp of such things?
—
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned in a previous comment, but when I read OP, I laughed out loud at:
Is that much different from the plan in Iran?
@Joe: “There is a long road between the removal of the current regime and the development of a functional economic society.”
Sure. But that’s their problem. And before they can solve it, there’s a huge potential for really grand scale looting by our billionaire class.
What I see as most likely, if El Taco isn’t restrained, is a collapse in Cuba that leads to civil war and even worse conditions for the bulk of the population. This will trigger a large exodus of refugees, most of which won’t be allowed to set foot in the US.
I can also see this so-called administration sinking refugee boats en route. they have plenty of practice murdering people on boats in the ocean.
@wr:
What exactly are they going to loot? When the Soviet Union collapsed, there were a working power grid, an oil and gas industry, large manufacturing, vast agricultural resources, etc. The steel industry alone was big enough to get multiple oligarchs started. Cuba is desperately poor, without any of that. Cuba’s total exports are worth about $1.2B per year.
@Gustopher:
Assuming a real invasion — not just a snatch-and-grab on Raul Castro, not just unopposed bombing — they need the big amphibious assault ships and their support vessels. The ones that carry 2,500 Marines, air support, and all that stuff. The US has seven of those. Four of them home port in Norfolk, VA. That’s where they would go for refit, crew swaps, any of that stuff. Norfolk to Havana is 1,000 miles, so a couple of days steaming.
@Kurtz:
Yes, and Desi’s ancestors also received income from land grants in Southern California, including present-day Beverly Hills. His father was mayor of Santiago from a political dynasty of mayors. His mother, an heiress to the Bacardi rum fortune, was thus dismissive of Desi and Lucy’s Hollywood royalty status.
The Arnazes had to flee Cuba in 1933 because they were fabulously wealthy ruling class nobility complicit with its (first) post-democratic dictatorship. So it’s not clear Rubio and the current Cuban-American diaspora are as anti-authoritarian as marketed. They hate the Castros’ commie dictatorship, but maybe not the pre-Castro military dictatorship that had kept their ancestors more enriched and empowered than the poorer, more indigenous underclass you mention.
It all tracks with the willingness to back Trump, throwing under the bus Latinos with less proximity to whiteness.
Old men stuck in the Cold War sure have done a lot of damage the last decade, haven’t they? Putin’s infamous nostalgia for the Soviet Union is obvious but so is Trump’s focus, really. Venezuela “stole” our oil in the 70’s by nationalizing it-we’re taking it back! Iran, of course, had the hostage crisis so he has to be the big man finally taking the ayatollahs out. And finally Cuba and the Castros. The early 80’s called, they want their villains back.
It’s pathetic but also, unfortunately, incredibly damaging to the world in general and the US in particular. I’m reduced to hoping that the other old man in power (Xi) isn’t as foolish and obsessed as the US and Russia have turned out to be about old events they can’t let go of.
@Just Another Ex-Republican:
It might help China was far from being at its best during the Cold War. they held on to north Korea in the 50s. Next they had The Great Leap “Forward” catastrophe, the cultural revolution catastrophe, the gang of four affair, and at some point they lost a war with Vietnam. Things then began to improve when Mao died.
So, the economic powerhouse in manufacturing, then tech, now cars, renewables, and important inroads in aerospace, all came in the closing days of the cold war, or after it was over.
Hopefully Xi is not nostalgic for mass starvation, a gargantuan waste of resources, violent unrest, etc.
On the late 79-80 hostage crisis, it pales compared to the 50s coups against Mosaddeq and the subsequent tyranny under the Shah. About the only thing that mollifies that period, is that the mad mullahs have done much worse.
It would justify a military operation the same way Maduro’s rendition was justified: the FBI went in to arrest an indicted criminal and the military tagged along to protect them. No question of the War Powers Resolution applying.
Noted earlier this week BTW:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/ap-trump-administration-prosecutors-venezuela-leader-rodriguez/
So much for regime change in that wretched country.