The president Donald Trump stated this Monday that he could promote the political transition in Cuba, as he did with Venezuela, and threatened to position the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of Havana.
"Could you do for Cuba what you did in Venezuela, by bringing in new leadership?" asked the host of Salem News Channel during a phone interview with Trump.
"Perhaps on our return from Iran, when we finish, we will anchor the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, the most beautiful aircraft carrier I have ever seen, a couple of hundred yards off the coast, and we will watch them wanting to do something," he said.
Additionally, he described Cuba as a "devastated" country and stated that it would be "an honor to liberate it," invoking his political debt to the Cuban-American community.
"I received 94% of the Cuban vote in the U.S. and I have a duty, frankly, to do something. What was done to the Cubans, what was done to the families of the people living in the United States is unimaginable, very similar to Iran in that respect."
These statements come just four days after Trump announced at a private dinner of the Forum Club in West Palm Beach that the U.S. "will take control of Cuba almost immediately" after concluding in Iran.
On May 1st, the president signed a new executive order that expands sanctions against key sectors of the Cuban economy, including energy, defense, mining, and financial services.
The threat of the aircraft carrier is not new
Trump had previously mentioned the deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln as a signal of maximum pressure, and the debate regarding whether the Cuban regime would yield to that pressure has dominated political analysis in recent days.
Trump's statements make an immediate reference to the capture of Nicolás Maduro in January, when the United States organized a highly precise military operation in Caracas that marked the change of government in Venezuela.
However, in the Cuban case, many analysts assert that there is no Delcy Rodríguez to take on the leadership and facilitate a peaceful political transition.
At the end of April, Marco Rubio stated that the future of Cuba boils down to two scenarios. One of them is the worsening of the crisis leading to the collapse of the system: "The situation worsens much more and collapses," he said.
The second scenario would involve an economic improvement in the country, but conditioned on deep political changes.
"The other possibility is that the situation improves. But for it to improve, they need very substantial and serious economic reforms. Those reforms are impossible with the people in charge. It can't happen."
The Cuban regime responds to Trump and Rubio with defiant rhetoric
For his part, the Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel declared that "no aggressor, no matter how powerful, will find surrender in Cuba."
The chancellor Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla described Trump’s statements as a “new clear and direct threat of military aggression” and stated that “Cubans will not be intimidated.”
The Cuban ambassador to the UN, Ernesto Soberón Guzmán, went further by stating on Fox News that words like "surrender" or "capitulate" do not exist in the Cuban vocabulary.
The Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Carlos Fernández de Cossío stated that the executive order of May 1 "clears up any doubts regarding the domination objectives that truly motivate the aggression."
The context surrounding these statements is one of extreme accumulated pressure. Since January 2025, the Trump administration has imposed more than 240 sanctions against Cuba, re-listed the island as a state sponsor of terrorism on January 20, 2026, and issued Executive Order 14380, which declares Cuba an "unusual and extraordinary threat" to U.S. national security.
This is compounded by the fall of Nicolás Maduro's regime in Venezuela in early 2026, which deprived Cuba of oil subsidies estimated between four and six billion dollars annually, worsening an energy crisis that already causes blackouts of up to 25 hours a day in more than 55% of the island's territory.
The USS Abraham Lincoln is currently deployed in the Middle East, where in April 2026, three aircraft carriers operated simultaneously for the first time since 2003, as part of Operation Epic Fury.
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