This Thursday, the Trump administration significantly escalated pressure on Cuba, appealing to "arguments" without any public empirical evidence or entirely false to declare that the Island constitutes "an unusual and extraordinary threat ... to the national security and foreign policy of the United States", and, consequently, threatening to impose "an additional ad valorem duty (...) on imports of goods that are products of a foreign country that directly or indirectly sells or otherwise provides any oil to Cuba." Among the nonsense included in the executive order is that "Cuba hosts Russia's largest overseas signals intelligence facility, which tries to steal sensitive national security information of the United States."
I graduated as a Computer Science Engineer from a university built on the very grounds that, until the end of 2001, housed the so-called "Lourdes SIGINT station" on the outskirts of the Cuban capital. George W. Bush himself acknowledged, on October 17, 2001, the closure of the facility, a Cold War-born irritant in bilateral relations between Moscow/Havana and Washington. In testimony before the House Homeland Security's Subcommittee on Transportation and Maritime Security regarding alleged China's intelligence operations here, the director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Americas Program stressed that after the Lourdes base was shuttered in early 2002 the place was turned into the University of Informatic Sciences. In the last 10 years, many reports have emerged talking about a potential reactivation, but I can assure you that at this university there is no installed capacity, not to mention that there has been no Russian military personnel here since they abandoned the place 24 years back.
But Trump doesn't need the truth. On the contrary, he has proven beyond a doubt that, past the first quarter of the 21st century, the lie works well enough to advance his interests. Then, it must be remembered that Cuba is already sufficiently punished by the United States, due to the impact of the sanctions applied by the Departments of the Treasury and Commerce since the Eisenhower administration, and which the US authorities themselves have recognized as the most comprehensive around the world. In his first administration, Trump accepted the plan of hawks like John Bolton and then-Senator Marco Rubio to introduce a maximum pressure policy against the Island, in principle for its support of a Venezuela that now cannot send it even a drop of oil.
With this new step, and after having reissued in June 2025 his first term's National Security Presidential Memorandum 5, Trump confirms in practice what media like Politico had been reporting since the last week. The vile bet is on total asphyxiation given the strategic nature of oil for any economy, especially for Cuba's, which is in intensive care demanding artificial respiration. But vile because the idea, very connected to the infamous memorandum of Lester Mallory—a top official in the Kennedy administration—, does not so much seek to pressure the leadership but rather "to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government". It has always been about generating "disenchantment and disaffection" by intentionally creating shortages, "economic dissatisfaction". It is using ordinary and simple people as a key weapon for regime change.
Cuba's main problem is that no international actor seems interested or has the capacity—not to mention the courage—to contest the crude foreign policy of the Republican White House. The Cuban foreign minister branded the measure a "brutal act of aggression." But, without ever conceding sovereignty, I think Havana must act with great composure, and intelligently take any advantage of Mexico's offer to act as a potential bridge to ease tensions. In my opinion, the Cuban political position would have been stronger at this moment if the leadership had acted more proactively before, politically and economically, to avoid a context of urgency in which the measures adopted always seem to respond to it. "It seems that [Cuba] will not be able to survive," Trump said after signing his order. We will see if, this time, "might makes right". There is no stronger scenario to test the gunboat diplomacy than Cuba.
This is all for today’s report.
