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Miguel Díaz-Canel responded this Saturday to the military threats from President Donald Trump with a defiant statement posted on his Facebook account, in which he asserted that "no aggressor, no matter how powerful, will find surrender in Cuba" and that any attacker "will encounter a people determined to defend sovereignty and independence in every inch of the national territory."
The post, tagged with the hashtag #LaPatriaSeDefiende, came hours after Trump threatened to send the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln to the coast of Cuba to force the regime's surrender during a private dinner at the Forum Club held on Friday in West Palm Beach, Florida.
In that event, Trump stated that the United States "will take Cuba almost immediately" once military operations in Iran are concluded, and he described his plan with these words: "Returning from Iran, we will have one of our great... perhaps the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, the largest in the world. We will have it approach, stop about 100 meters off the coast, and they will say: 'Thank you very much. We surrender'."
Regarding the order of priorities, Trump was explicit: “We will finish this one first, I like to complete tasks”, referring to Iran before taking action on Cuba.
Díaz-Canel described the threats as an escalation "to a dangerous and unprecedented scale" and appealed to the international community and the American people to speak out: "The international community must take note and, together with the people of the U.S., determine whether such a drastic criminal act will be allowed to satisfy the interests of a small but wealthy and influential group, driven by a desire for revenge and domination."
In parallel to the verbal threats, Trump signed a new executive order on Friday that expands sanctions against Cuba, blocking assets of the regime and imposing secondary sanctions on foreign banks linked to the Cuban government.
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez described these measures as "collective punishment of the Cuban people" and denounced them as "illegal and abusive," while Díaz-Canel criticized the "moral poverty" of the United States following the signing of the order.
The rhetoric of resistance from the Cuban leader is not new in this escalation. In April, in an interview with Newsweek —his first with a U.S. media outlet since 2023— Díaz-Canel had already warned: "If there is a military aggression, we will counterattack, we will fight, we will defend ourselves."
On April 16, the anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion, he called on the people to prepare for battle by invoking the doctrine of "total people's war."
Trump's threats have steadily intensified since the beginning of his second term.
In February, he stated that "taking Cuba would not be difficult"; in March, he told CNN that "Cuba is going to fall quite soon"; and on March 27, in Miami Beach, he claimed that "Cuba would be next." Secretary of State Marco Rubio added on April 27 that Cuba "only has two destinations: neither is good".
Since January 2025, the Trump administration has accumulated over 240 sanctions against the Cuban government, including the re-inclusion of the island on the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism on January 20, 2026, and Executive Order 14380, which declared Cuba an "unusual and extraordinary threat" to the national security of the United States.
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