WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump renewed his threat to topple Cuba's government at a rally in Florida on Saturday, declaring that U.S. warships returning from his war on Iran would "stop about 50 yards off the coast" of the island and force its surrender.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio urged Cubans to collaborate with the CIA—a sequence that critics say follows a decades-old American pattern of invading, bombing and subjugating any nation deemed insufficiently obedient to Washington.

"We'll do a little stopover," Trump told supporters. "Actually, what we're going to do with Cuba is, we're going to come back from Iran. Those beautiful ships will pass Cuba. We'll have one of them stop about 50 yards off the coast. They'll raise up their hands. And then we're going to send Marco Rubio in to finish up the deal."  

Shortly after the rally, Rubio—the son of Cuban immigrants and now the architect of Washington's hemispheric policy—posted a message on social media openly recruiting for the Central Intelligence Agency.

"To those who seek to create positive change in Cuba—now is the time," he wrote. "The disappointment of failed promises, corruption, and the privileged lives of only a few; seize this opportunity to create the change you desire through a discrete partnership with the CIA."

The CIA subsequently uploaded a Spanish-language video instructing informants to use VPNs, private browsers and burner email accounts to contact the agency.

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez rejected the threats with a pointed geographical metaphor: "Our coastline is full of beautiful beaches, but there are also razor-sharp limestone spikes, an inhospitable environment for those who make it to our shores with hostile purposes and lust for domination."

On January 3, 2026, U.S. forces launched a large-scale military strike on Venezuela, kidnapped President Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores in a pre-dawn raid on Caracas, and flew them to New York to face federal drug charges. 

The legal pretext for the invasion was a months-long campaign of lethal airstrikes on small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, which Washington claimed were carrying drugs for Venezuelan cartels.

Since September 2025, the U.S. military struck at least 68 vessels, killing at least 223 people. A United Nations special rapporteur, Ben Saul, concluded that the strikes amounted to "serial extrajudicial killings" and "plausibly constitute crimes against humanity".

The cartel narrative was dismissed as "entirely fictional," used to justify Maduro's abduction and intensify propaganda against the Bolivarian revolution.

Earlier this year, Trump threatened regime change in Cuba after he successfully ousted Maduro and seized control of Venezuela’s oil. A January report by the Wall Street Journal revealed that his administration was actively seeking to topple the government in Havana.

The United States has invaded, bombed or militarily intervened in dozens of countries since the Second World War. Trump alone, in less than a year of his second term, has ordered military strikes on seven countries—Venezuela, Yemen, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Somalia and Nigeria—and ordered more than 626 airstrikes on foreign targets.

The Congressional Research Service has documented more than 200 U.S. military operations or interventions abroad since 1991. The death toll is staggering: approximately 3 million civilians killed in the Korean War; some 2 million civilians in Vietnam, plus another 400,000 killed by Agent Orange and 2 million more afflicted with cancer or birth defects; 3,000 civilians in the 1991 Iraq bombing and an estimated 500,000 children dead from subsequent sanctions; 2,000 civilians in NATO's 78-day bombardment of Yugoslavia; 174,000 dead in Afghanistan, including more than 30,000 civilians; and 200,000 to 250,000 civilians in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.

The numbers run into the millions—a figure no serious historian disputes.

The war on Iran was the culmination of this logic.

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a joint attack on Iran—a war of aggression with no United Nations authorization, no credible claim of imminent threat, and no provocation beyond Tehran's refusal to abandon its rights under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The operation, codenamed "Operation Epic Fury," targeted command facilities, air defenses and missile sites, and succeeded in assassinating Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—a head of state and religious authority—along with senior commanders and, later, Iranian scientists.

An elementary school in southern Iran was struck, killing 165 people, most of them children. At least 30 Iranian universities were attacked, with five professors and more than 60 students killed.

This is the terrorist assassination of a nation's leadership and intellectual class—acts that violate the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions and every norm of international conduct. No U.S. official has been held accountable. No tribunal has been convened. The impunity is absolute, and it is precisely this impunity that emboldens Washington to move from Iran to Cuba without pause.

Israel has learned from its patron and perfected the method.

While the American project is global imperial domination, Israel's ambition is territorial: a "Greater Israel" stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates, as imagined in the foundational texts of the Zionist movement.

Since October 2023, Israel has killed more than 20,000 children in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, and has continued killing Palestinians even after a ceasefire was announced—over 1,400 dead since October 2025, including 268 children verified by the UN.

It has invaded Lebanon, occupied southern Syria, and launched two wars against Iran. It has done so with American weapons, American diplomatic cover and American permission.

The pattern is not complicated. A country deemed disobedient is bombed. Its leaders are assassinated. Its infrastructure is destroyed. Its people are starved. And when it resists, it is called the aggressor.

Cuba is next on the list—not because it threatens the United States, but because it has refused to submit. The ships will pass, as Trump said. They always do.