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“Regime change is lined up” for Cuba, according to The Atlantic, who spoke to unnamed sources in the Trump administration.
“The Trump administration is squeezing Cuba to a breaking point—and is seemingly willing to engage in a high-seas stand-off that has pronounced Cold War echoes,” according to The Atlantic.
“Donald Trump’s goal appears to be to install more amenable leadership in Havana. Last week, Trump told reporters at the White House that he believes he’ll have the ‘honor of taking Cuba,’ adding: “’Whether I free it, take it—I think I can do anything I want with it.’”
The US Attorney’s office in South Florida is reported to be “preparing indictments against Cuba’s political and military leadership—including members of the Castro family—on a range of possible charges related to alleged violent crime, drug-trafficking, immigration, and espionage.”
The Trump administration is also said to be discussing roles in a future Cuban administration with “wealthy Republican donors of Cuban ancestry.”
The favored approach is to achieve regime change with a minimum of upheaval, avoiding a humanitarian crisis, so that American money can flow back into Cuba.
“We control our hemisphere, and we have the ability to do this,” an official told The Atlantic.
“We want these hostile regimes out of our hemisphere, and we’re going to set up the business community, because we don’t believe in diplomacy.”
“An island that was once the crown jewel of the Caribbean has plunged into extreme poverty and darkness,” the State Department said in a statement.
“This is the tragic result of over sixty years of Communist rule.”
In recent days, the whole of Cuba was left without electricity for the second time in a week as the US oil embargo pushed the country’s national grid to breaking point.
A majority of the system went offline on 4 March, and then the entire grid went down on Monday, for unexplained reasons.
Although power outages are common in Cuba, there have never been two complete failures in a week.
President Trump imposed an oil embargo on Cuba after deposing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro at the beginning of January.
Venezuela had been Cuba’s most important oil supplier and supporter in Latin America.
Venezuela, at the direction of President Trump, has now shut off its oil shipments to Cuba, and other Latin American nations, including Mexico, have followed suit because of threats of punitive tariffs, and also stopped providing other forms of humanitarian aid.
President Trump has also included provisions to prevent Russia providing oil to Cuba. Although sanctions have temporarily been lifted on Russian oil exports, as a result of surging prices, sanctions remain in place on transactions with Cuba, as well as North Korea and Crimea.
Senior members of the Trump administration, as well as Trump himself, have signaled their intention to topple the communist regime that has governed Cuba since the 1950s.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, himself the son of Cuban exiles, has made clear his support for regime change, and President Trump repeated his call for a “friendly takeover” of the island, before adding, “It may not be a friendly takeover.”
Although the Cuban regime have now entered into talks with the US, they have maintained the President’s status is not up for negotiation.
