Trump: Invading Cuba will be a “Great Honor”

The exiled Cuban elite are planning for a neoliberal, post-communist future.

During an Oval Office interview, President Trump declared Cuba is his and he can do whatever he likes with it, the same as he does with Mar-a-Lago and Trump Turnberry.

“I think I’ll have the honor of conquering Cuba,” said 47, hunched over the Resolute Desk. “That wouldn’t be bad. It would be a great honor. I can liberate it or conquer it, I think I can do what I want with it,” he said.

Last week, Trump hinted at an invasion of Cuba. Marco Rubio said the broken-down and impoverished communist island nation is a threat to the national security of the United States.

Beyond that specious claim, the Trump administration wants to kidnap the former leader of Cuba, Raúl Castro, brother of the late Fidel, and charge him with murder. Cuba shot down two aircraft operated by an admitted CIA operative and anti-Castro Cubans, known as the Miami Mafia.

The United States imposed a harsh embargo on Cuba after the revolutionaries deposed the brutal military dictator Fulgencio Batista and the Mafia in 1959. Castro and the communists nationalized US industry and foreign-owned land holdings. This was a serious offense for a United States steeped in Cold War anti-communist propaganda.

The CIA spent decades trying to murder Fidel Castro and destroy the revolutionary communist government in Havana. The CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion failed, and so did the efforts to murder Castro and key revolutionaries, with the exception of the Argentine Marxist Che Guevara, tracked down and killed in Bolivia with the CIA playing a supporting role.

Marco Rubio, born to undocumented Cuban immigrants, emerged from Florida’s Cuban exile community. In the 1970s, the Miami Mafia and anti-Castro groups were responsible for a wave of bombings in America, with authorities linking them to approximately 113 bombings, resulting in around a dozen fatalities. The FBI labeled Miami as the “terrorist capital of the United States” due to the high incidence of violence associated with Cuban exile groups.

The CIA recruited, financed, trained, and coordinated anti-Castro groups in Miami. Through Operation Mongoose, the CIA and Defense Department backed efforts to destabilize and ultimately overthrow Castro’s government, including covert aid for select exile organizations and plans for sabotage and infiltration. In the early 1960s, the CIA budget for operations against Cuba was $13 million (equivalent to $142 million in 2026).

The exiled Cuban elite are already planning for a post-communist future. The Cuban American National Foundation, a lobbying organization modeled after AIPAC, calls for “a free-market democracy grounded in private initiative.” In other words, a return to the neoliberal status quo.

Before the 1959 Cuban Revolution, foreign investment in Cuba was primarily dominated by American companies. Approximately 30 US companies controlled a substantial portion of foreign investment, including utilities (the Cuban Electric Company, Companía Cubana de Electricidad), agriculture (United Fruit Company and various sugar and tobacco corporations), and manufacturing (primarily textiles and clothing).

Cuba, under the dictatorship of Batista, was described by Arthur Miller “as hopelessly corrupt, a Mafia playground, a bordello for Americans and other foreigners.” The critic Susan Sontag, in an article in Ramparts, described Cuba as “a country known mainly for dance, music, prostitutes, cigars, abortions, resort life, and pornographic movies.” Gambling, illicit drugs, and the sex trade were profitable and engendered widespread corruption.

Prior to the revolution, Cuba experienced significant economic disparities, including portions of the population living in abject poverty. Sugar production followed a seasonal rhythm, and the macheteros—sugarcane cutters employed only four months each year—formed an army of the unemployed, continually in debt and existing on the edge of survival.

After the revolution and Batista’s departure, the United States established an embargo that disrupted every part of Cuba’s economy, causing economic harm estimated at $1.1 trillion over 55 years (in 2015), according to the United Nations. This policy restricted Cuba’s trade and credit access while adding to ongoing humanitarian problems.

The embargo has deepened difficulties in Cuba by limiting essential goods such as food, medicine, and fuel, which has produced severe shortages and declining living conditions. Rubio and Trump implemented a strict economic pressure campaign against Cuba, increasing sanctions that have significantly harmed the island’s economy.

Rubio blames communism for Cuba’s economic hardship. “Their economic model doesn’t work,” he said. “And the people who are in charge can’t fix it… The reason they can’t fix it is not just ‘cause they’re communists, that’s bad enough, but they’re incompetent communists. The only thing worse than a communist is an incompetent one.”

During the period of socialist influence in Latin America, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean recorded notable poverty reduction, as tens of millions moved out of extreme poverty between 2002 and 2014.

Yet when commodity prices fell 38% in 2014–2015, the financial base for social programs weakened alongside them, while inflation, corruption scandals, and flat living standards undermined public confidence in left-wing rule overall.

The neoliberalism of the Milton Friedman influenced Chicago Boys “manufactured a debt crisis, then offered structural adjustment as the cure. The medicine was always the same: shrink the state, open the market, accept foreign ownership, abandon protection. The patient rarely recovered. But the investors always profited,” writes Claudia Webbe.

During his second term, Trump forged closer ties with rightwing figures and governments in Latin America, including the “libertarian” Javier Milei in Argentina, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Keiko Fujimori in Peru, Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia, José Antonio Kast in Chile, Nasry Asfura in Honduras, and Laura Fernández Delgado in Costa Rica.

Rightwing populism in Latin America has undermined democratic institutions via market liberalization. Alberto Fujimori and Nayib Bukele used institutional gaps to weaken norms and diminish equity. Neoliberalism broadened markets and reduced services, intensifying inequality.

The Trump administration, under the influence of Miami Mafia’s Marco Rubio, who incidentally has never set foot in Cuba, plans for a return to a time when wealthy business owners tied to US corporate interests, decadent socialites, and criminal mobsters prospered within a society marked by sharp economic disparity and political corruption.