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 stumble upon a people determined to defend sovereignty and independence in every inch of national territory."
The post, tagged with the hashtag #LaPatriaSeDefiende, arrived hours after Trump threatened to send the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln to the shores of Cuba to force the regime's surrender, during a private dinner of the Forum Club held on Friday in West Palm Beach, Florida.
At that event, Trump stated that the United States “will take Cuba almost immediately” once military operations in Iran are concluded, and described his plan in these words: “Returning from Iran, we will have one of our great... perhaps the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, the largest in the world. We will have it approach and 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: “Let's 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 level" and called on the international community and the American people to take a stand: "The international community must take note and, alongside 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."
Alongside the verbal threats, Trump signed a new executive order on Friday that expands sanctions against Cuba, blocking the regime's assets and imposing secondary sanctions on foreign banks linked to the Cuban government.
The Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez described these measures as "collective punishment for 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—the 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 combat by invoking the doctrine of "total people's war."
Trump's threats have progressively intensified since the beginning of his second term.
In February, he declared 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 asserted 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 more than 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.
Filed under: