How and why would the US invade Cuba?

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This is the script for my video posted on May 28, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

In January 2026, the US conducted targeted strikes on Venezuela that ultimately decapitated the country’s government, placing President Nicolas Maduro in US custody and providing an avenue for US businesses to expand their operations into a country that has been a key US adversary for decades. Just weeks later, the US launched an even larger operation in Iran to kill the country’s Supreme Leader and degrade its military and nuclear infrastructure. And now reports indicate that the US may be preparing to conduct military operations against Cuba. These events have many similarities that can give us tremendous insight into the current administration’s priorities and strategy, but the question is, knowing what we know now, how and why would the US invade Cuba?

The pattern of US attacks on other countries is real and deliberate. The National Security Strategy issued in November 2025 explicitly declares a new corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, a foundational US foreign policy position that opposes European colonialism and foreign interference in the Western Hemisphere. The current administration aims to deny competitors in other parts of the world the ability to position military forces or threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets. Basically, the US’s public doctrine is attempting to mitigate perceived threats in general, with an emphasis on the parts of the world geographically closest to it.

You might be asking why Cuba would be the next target. The obvious answer is that Cuba has been adversarial to the US since the Castros took power in the 1960s. But the country is also notoriously poor, so it’s natural to ask what the US stands to gain. Well, the short answer is that Cuba may be facing a deep economic crisis, but its government is far more of a problem than it appears at first glance, and the country has far more to offer than you might think.

For one, Cuba and Venezuela have been incredibly close allies. A 2019 Reuters investigation and an official UN fact-finding mission documented that in 2008, confidential agreements gave Cuba a formal role in restructuring Venezuela’s military counterintelligence agency. Separately, the defected former chief of Venezuela’s national intelligence service testified that Cuban operatives are embedded across that agency, as well as the Venezuelan national ID service, ports, airports, and other organizations. According to the Cuban government, 32 Cuban personnel were killing while defending Maduro during the January 2026 attacks in Caracas. In many ways, if the US wants a new Venezuela to consolidate, it needs to neutralize the Cuban intelligence services operating there.

Then there’s the fact that at least two different US adversaries are demonstrably collaborating with Cuba right now. China is believed to operate at least four signals intelligence collection sites there. Russia has also been collaborating with Cuba, having signed a strategic military cooperation agreement in 2025, as I discussed in a video on the topic last week.

Beyond this, there are other reasons the current US administration is doing what they’re doing more broadly. For one, there is a general sentiment that the US has failed to take decisive action against its adversaries for decades in places like Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba. There is a tremendous potential financial upside to attacking these places, because they all have tremendous resources that US corporations would happily capitalize on if that were an option.

Cuba sits on roughly 6% of the world’s nickel reserves and 7% of the world’s cobalt, a critical strategic mineral that would reduce the US’s reliance on Chinese sources. There’s also this fantasy of transforming Cuba into a thriving island paradise accessible to US tourists, and there are currently about 9b USD in certified property claims made by the US against Cuba by mostly blue-chip companies like Exxon, Marriott, and Coca-Cola.

Interestingly, about 68% of likely Cuban-American voters in Miami-Dade county, which has the highest population of Cuban-Americans in the country, backed the current US President. This phenomenon largely stems from the fact that the Cubans who fled their country when Fidel Castro took power left because they were opposed to the regime. This means that Cuban-Americans would be likely to support US intervention in the country on average, though military action is more contentious, and roughly 64% of Americans in general would oppose a war with Cuba.

The hardest constraints for an invasion are political, not military. A war with Cuba would look very different from a war with Iran, much closer to what happened in Venezuela. The difference is that Cuba is just 90 miles from Florida, and if a war were to break out, the wave of mass migration to the US and its territories would directly contradict the administration’s anti-immigration brand ahead of the November 2026 midterm elections. Not to mention, US Senate Democrats continue to work on a War Powers Resolution to restrict the administration’s use of military force and energy blockades against Cuba, despite their previous attempt being blocked in April 2026.

So how likely is an actual invasion? Well, there really hasn’t been a better time for one. Cuba’s GDP has contracted substantially since 2019, and this collapse has filtered down into daily life in the form of shortages, blackouts, and a genuinely brittle regime. On 20 May 2026, the US Department of Justice indicted Raul Castro, and on 17 May, Axios cited a US official who claimed that Iranian military advisors are operating in Cuba, and Iran has purportedly been providing material support as well, though many analysts view this as a likely manufactured pretext for conflict. The president has explicitly stated he thinks he’ll have the honor of taking Cuba, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Havana on 14 May. Still, it is unlikely that a conflict would take the form of a true invasion.

The reality is that a military operation coming directly out of the mainland US would be extremely unpopular, and ignoring resource constraints entirely there is really no reason to conduct large-scale attacks or put traditional forces on the ground. The more likely option would be stand-off missile strikes on key targets to change the Cuban government’s decision calculus, or a Maduro-style extraction of current president Miguel Diaz-Canel and/or former president Raul Castro. Neither of these would constitute an actual invasion.

The current US administration is following in the footsteps of countries like Russia in its willingness to be brazenly aggressive and driven by financial benefit. Outside observers have characterized it as corrupt and inclined toward the broader pro-autocratic environment exemplified by Russia, but it is also incredibly self-centered. It has no interest in allowing China or Russia or Iran to operate freely on its doorstep and capitalize on Cuba when the US itself could be doing that. The concern is that, as the American public grows numb to conflict, the tangible political impact and relevance of public outrage might trend downward.

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