Written on March 28, 2026. Published on limesonline.com

Cuba After Iran

Cuba is not a simple foreign-policy dossier. For the United States, it is an obsessive memory, a geographic threshold, and an unresolved trauma in its imperial history. For Trump – and even more so for the ideological apparatus that has gathered around his second mandate – the island is not merely a hostile regime. It is the perfect symbol of a rear area to be brought back into line, a backyard to be retaken, and a restoration of American sovereignty that must become visible again precisely where, by definition, it should not be contested. Here, foreign policy coincides with domestic politics; the hemispheric question overlaps with border anxiety; security doctrine becomes domestic liturgy. Cuba, in short, is not only a residue of the twentieth century. It is one of the theaters where the new American right is trying to redefine the relationship among empire, identity, and public opinion.

But Cuba can no longer be read as it was only a few months ago. Iran has happened. The war against Tehran has cracked the Trumpian camp, neither a sudden pacifism nor a neoconservative conversion of the MAGA electorate. It has produced something more interesting and more dangerous: the suspicion that the leader is not breaking the cycle of American wars but reformulating it; not closing it but translating it into another grammar. If, after Iran, Trump were to push toward a new aggression against Cuba, part of his base would not read that move as an isolated gesture. It would read it as the second act of a betrayal. Not the betrayal of a pacifism that never existed, but the betrayal of a material pact: no new opaque wars, no new theaters that dump costs, fear, disorder, and sacrifices – presented as higher necessities – onto America’s middle and working classes. This is the point of departure, because this is where the Cuban dossier stops being only geopolitics and becomes the political psychology of American society.

The Long Shadow of Cuba

To understand why Cuba continues to exert such a grip on the American imagination, one must look to its long history. After the Spanish-American War of 1898, Washington did not simply drive Spain out. It occupied the island, conditioned its independence, reserved for itself a substantive right of intervention through the Platt Amendment, consolidated its hold on Guantanamo, and turned Cuba into one of the fundamental hinges of its Caribbean belt. Before Castro was a problem, Cuba had already been conceived as a security space for the United States. The 1959 revolution, therefore, did not invent the Cuban question; it inverted it. It turned a quasi-dependency into a challenge and made a territory considered part of America’s rear area into an antagonistic vanguard. From there came the Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose, and the missile crisis: not three separate episodes but three stations of a single trauma – that of seeing the enemy inside the zone considered the most intimate part of the southern front.

For this reason, in the American strategic mind, Cuba weighs more than its material capabilities would suggest. Its weight is not only military or economic; it is psychological. It concentrates broader fears: the porosity of command, the infiltration of rival powers, the possibility that the near abroad may cease to be docile, and the fear that the great power may no longer be able to impose itself even in the space it regards as naturally its own. The question, then, is not whether Cuba today constitutes a real threat in the classical sense of the term. The point is that, for American grand strategy, the mere possibility that a hostile or competing actor could find a foothold on the island is enough to reactivate a historical reflex. Nor is that reflex entirely irrational. Geography still matters. Cuba sits astride the passages between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic; potentially, it dominates corridors that touch the logistical, maritime, and commercial heart of the United States. If the Mississippi Delta is one lung of American power, the sea corridors around Cuba remain among its strategic valves. The old obsession, therefore, is not merely ideological. It is the mental translation of a geographic vulnerability that Washington has never truly forgotten.

The New Monroe Doctrine

Trump’s second mandate has already redefined the hierarchy of priorities. The America First of 2025-2026 is not the pure isolationism some imagined, but something more ambiguous and more classically American: an updated Monroe Doctrine, a claim of reinforced sovereignty over the Western Hemisphere, and a selective reduction of global ambitions, offset by greater harshness toward the rear area. Border, cartels, flows, ports, logistics, raw materials, friendly governments, the exclusion of extra-hemispheric powers: all this composes the new agenda. Within it, Cuba is not an exception but a condenser. It is where the new right sees the external threat, the internal weakness of the United States, the historical trauma, and the opportunity for command converge.

Yet Iran changes how this agenda is perceived. Before the raids against Tehran, the renewed centrality of the Western Hemisphere could still be framed for the Trumpian base as a course correction: fewer universalistic missions, greater focus on immediate interests; less democratic ideology, more national security; less imperial dispersion, more discipline in the nearby space. After Iran, that narrative cracks. Part of the electorate has already seen the leader cross a threshold he had promised not to cross. When a leader crosses a threshold for the first time, his followers begin to wonder where the next one lies. In this sense, Cuba would become much more than a Caribbean dossier. It would become the test of whether Trumpian interventionism was an exceptional deviation or the real face, finally revealed, of America First. This is where the theme of “betrayal” takes shape. Not as an ideological accusation from the left or the liberal camp, but as a visceral suspicion among the constituencies that believed they were voting against permanent war and now fear finding themselves inside an updated version of it – closer, more emotional, more hemispheric.

The American Working Class and Middle Class

To understand how Cuba might be perceived, one must look at the mood of America’s working and middle classes not as an ideological bloc but as a set of concrete expectations. The average Trump voter has not become anti-military. He does not dream of the American empire’s surrender. He does not sympathize with the Cuban regime. But he has become intensely selective about the use of force. He accepts the punitive gesture and distrusts the quagmire. He tolerates the raid and rejects the occupation. He may even applaud a bombing, provided it does not result in American deaths, prolonged disorder, energy inflation, new taxes on daily life, new consequences for gasoline, work, food prices, and the stability of the peripheries. This political psychology is shaped by Afghanistan, Iraq, the years of diffuse war, and, more recently, the suffocating weight of the cost of living. For these classes, sovereignty is acceptable as spectacle; it ceases to be acceptable when it presents the bill.

Here, individual stories matter more than formulas. Jon Webber, a Walmart employee in Indiana, captures well the voter willing to tolerate even a temporary rise in gasoline prices, provided the blow is swift and legible, in the reactions gathered after the aggression against Iran. Loretta Torres, a mother of three in the Houston suburbs, says the opposite and the same thing at once: she trusts the posture of strength but fears the conflict may spin out of control and strike American soil again. Chad Hill, a supervisor in Ohio, admits the possibility of limited action but regards anything that smells of nation-building as a red line. Herman Sims, who works in transportation, does not reason in terms of strategic theory but in terms of wallet and fuel: every war, for him, begins when the price at the pump rises. Will Brown, a student, tolerates toughness but not the idea of American deaths for a cause perceived as opaque. These biographies do not speak directly about Cuba, but they tell us how Cuba would be filtered through deep America: not through grand strategy but through the memory of what wars do to ordinary life. Punishment, yes; swamp, no. Command, yes; invoice, no. [1]

For this reason, after Iran, Cuba would become an explosive dossier. On paper, it looks perfect for the America First voter: it is close, hemispheric, intelligible, tied to the border, socialism, Florida, and the internal culture war. But precisely because it is close, its side effects would be perceived as more immediate and concrete. New flows toward Florida, tension at Guantanamo, humanitarian crises to manage, further pressure on the immigration debate, indirect energy-price increases, and demands for new security postures: all this would make Cuba not a distant theater but a multiplier of domestic anxiety. The question running through the base would therefore not be “whether to strike a hostile regime,” but “how much does it cost us this time, and where does it end?” This is where the suspicion of betrayal within MAGA could turn from a murmur into a real political fissure.

The New Right

Speaking only of MAGA is misleading. The new right is a constellation with different thresholds. There is a hard, identitarian, emotional, movement-based core that views politics as a moral war and regards Cuba as the intolerable residue of Caribbean socialism to be overthrown. There is an anti-woke right that reads almost everything, including geopolitics, as the external projection of the internal battle against liberalism, elites, universities, the media, and multiculturalism. There is then a more traditional conservatism, less eschatological, more bourgeois-establishment, interested in order but not in leaps into the void. Finally, there is a contractual right composed of white and nonwhite working-class and lower-middle-class people, small entrepreneurs, employees, truck drivers, logistics workers, and families suffocated by housing, health care, schooling, mortgages, and fuel. This segment does not love imperial disorder; it loves the leader as long as he reduces chaos. If he amplifies it, loyalty weakens.

The possible Cuban conflict would therefore not divide the right between hawks and doves in the classical sense. It would divide advocates of the gesture from those afraid of the price. One part wants to see the president threaten, strike, and humiliate the enemy to restore visible sovereignty. Another accepts that theatricality only as long as it does not have to pay for it with inflation, disorder, and strategic confusion. This is a decisive distinction. Trumpism holds together precisely because of the ambiguity that allows it to satisfy both the desire for force and the desire for truce. Cuba, more than Iran, would risk breaking that ambiguity. If the game remained confined to sanctions, economic pressure, intelligence, and the scenic threat, the coalition could hold. If instead it slid toward a more invasive or destabilizing dynamic, the contradiction between sovereignty as spectacle and empire as cost could suddenly open.

Florida

Naturally, everything changes when viewed from Florida. There, Cuba is not a concept: it is a genealogy. It is the memory of exile, civic identity, broken families, flights, and anti-Castroism, all sedimented into everyday language. The Cuban, Venezuelan, and Nicaraguan diasporas have made the anti-socialist lexicon one of the mother tongues of Floridian conservatism. It is in this laboratory that the Republican Party learned to dismantle the idea of an automatically Democratic Hispanic electorate; it is here that America First fused with diasporic memory and a harder hemispheric projection. Florida is, in this sense, the crucible of a powerful ideological synthesis: familial anti-communism, a demand for order, historical revenge, border control, punishment of Latin American regimes, and the claim to the Monroe Doctrine as a natural right of the United States.

But it would be a mistake to interpret this reality too linearly. The experience of exile does not automatically entail adherence to every U.S. policy toward Cuba. Often, it produces an internal fracture instead. Luis Boulart, who arrived in the United States at an advanced age and naturalized only recently, entrusts Trump with the task of protecting the economy, immigration, and foreign policy: in him, the desire for order, anti-communism, the cult of command, and trust in the leader as guarantor converge. Julian Padron, a former political prisoner, comes from the same universe of suffering and rejection of Castroism, but regards Trump as a dangerous figure and fears that his politics may end up turning against the very Hispanics he claims to represent. Two biographies born of a common matrix thus produce opposite outcomes. Geopolitics does not pass over lives; it passes through them. This shows that the anti-Castro bloc is less homogeneous than propaganda suggests. [2]

In Florida, moreover, anti-Castroism no longer automatically aligns with trust in the traditional instruments of American coercion. A significant part of the diaspora still desires the regime’s end, but no longer fully believes that the embargo, strangulation, and the permanent threat have produced the promised results. This introduces an ambiguity that weighs heavily. One can be radically hostile to the Cuban government and, at the same time, doubt that Washington truly knows how to proceed with the island if the crisis accelerates. The memory of exile pushes toward harshness; the memory of broken American promises pushes toward skepticism. Trump’s second mandate, after Iran, risks reactivating both impulses: the desire to strike and the fear of being used once again as a symbolic community, useful to American politics but expendable in its concrete consequences.

Hispanic Immigrants

If one then leaves the Cuban-American microcosm of South Florida, the picture becomes even more jagged. Speaking of “Hispanics” as if they were a compact bloc is conceptually flawed and politically dangerous. The Cuban-Americans of Miami-Dade are not the same as Puerto Ricans in Central Florida, nor as Mexican-Americans in the Southwest, nor as a younger, more urban, more socially mixed Latino world for whom the priorities are work, wages, housing, health care, the cost of living, schooling, and the migration status of relatives. Here, Cuba ceases to be the pure symbol of anti-communism and returns to what it also is materially: a possible source of new flows, new crackdowns, and new administrative uncertainty. For many Hispanic immigrants, especially those who have personally experienced the labyrinth of permits, applications, revocations, and fears, the Cuban question does not translate into an abstract hemispheric strategy. It translates into the question of whether a new crisis will produce another tightening, another suspicion, or another form of legal precarity.

And here, stories again become decisive. Naydin Hernandez, on the Malecon, weeps as the United States’ tightening pushes her daughter even farther away. Darío Mendez, a young student, experiences migration not as theory but as a biographical horizon continually deferred. They are figures far from Miami and its talk shows, yet very close to the real point of the question: every further hardening on Cuba does not strike only the regime; it deforms families, suspends lives, and politicizes hunger and waiting. [3] When those lives move north, they enter the American debate not as people but as a problem. In this passage, the internal Latino archipelago of the United States fractures further. The hemispheric right works as long as the migrant remains an anti-communist symbol. It begins to creak when that migrant – close, real, frightened, administratively fragile – risks being treated as an illegal alien to be expelled.

The Cuban Crisis

The Cuban crisis did not arise overnight, nor can it be explained solely by the latest American tightening or the decline in Venezuelan oil production. Its roots are structural. The island’s electrical grid is old, worn down, and partly inherited from the Soviet era; its plants are deteriorating; demand has exceeded supply for decades; reliance on more corrosive domestic crude has further damaged infrastructure; post-pandemic tourism has drained resources from other sectors; and investments have been concentrated elsewhere, leaving utilities in critical condition. In other words, the Cuban system has been consuming itself for years, and the new geopolitical phase acts as an accelerator rather than the sole cause. This matters because it also changes which scenarios are plausible. We are not facing a strong but besieged regime. We are facing an exhausted state that persists, but at an increasing social cost and with ever-narrower margins.

In this situation, collapse does not automatically entail revolution. More often, it produces emigration, adaptation, flight, demographic emptying, intermittent protests, and selective repression. The romantic idea of a linear uprising that overthrows the regime belongs more to the desiderata of some American circles than to the concrete dynamics of Cuban society. Many Cubans, when pressure rises, choose exit over insurrection. This further complicates Washington’s dossier. A policy of strangulation might accelerate not the island’s orderly liberation but its human emptying and slow decomposition. And so the Trumpian “Donroe,” born to lock down the rear area, would find itself importing into the rear area what it fears most: further instability, further flows, and further administrative and political pressure inside the United States itself.

Russia, Mexico, China

In American public discourse, Cuba is often grouped en bloc with Russia, China, and other adversarial powers. But the concrete hierarchy is more nuanced. Russia remains essential, both strategically and symbolically: for Moscow, Cuba continues to represent a possible irritant against Washington, a hemispheric thorn, and a source of asymmetric pressure. The renewal of relations between Havana and the Kremlin inevitably reactivates American fears. Yet Russia itself has obvious limits: war, sanctions, resource scarcity, and difficulty in truly supporting a major operation to stabilize the island. More immediate, in this phase, is the role of Mexico, which has a direct interest in avoiding an uncontrolled Cuban collapse and has already shown that it regards Caribbean stability as a regional security problem. China, while strategically important over the long term, today appears less operational than many narratives suggest: difficult-to-recover credits, a reduced appetite for an exhausted partner, and internal economic priorities. This does not remove China from the picture, but it shifts it from the center of urgency to the field of future possibility.

From this follows another decisive correction. If Washington moved against Cuba, it would hardly do so in the name of pure and simple conquest. It is more plausible that it would try to force a threshold: intensify pressure, fuel the regime’s attrition, support or exploit unrest, encourage an internal split, and accompany a more or less controlled transition. In other words, the target would not be Cuba as a territory alone, but Cuba as a device for political reorientation. This path, less theatrical than an invasion but no less harsh in its consequences, is perhaps the most coherent for a White House that wants to display power without readily taking on the burden of a long occupation. After Iran, Cuba would be another test for Trump: to threaten, but to stop before turning the gesture into a quagmire, as in Iran.

Where Biography Becomes Geopolitics

Naydin Hernandez, Luis Boulart, Julian Padron, Jon Webber, and Herman Sims are not simple examples. They are points of condensation. In their lives, one sees geopolitics descend in altitude and become choice, fear, hope, waiting, fuel, a vote, a distant daughter, a border, a memory of prison, the price of gasoline, nostalgia for order, and suspicion of deception. A new aggression against Cuba, whether threatened or attempted, will not be endured by think tanks or strategists. It will be endured by a Cuban mother as the closing of an escape route; by an elderly exile as the promise of revenge; by a former prisoner as the risk of a new authoritarianism; by an Indiana worker as a possible increase in the cost of filling the tank; and by a transport manager as another war paid for by those who did not want it. This is the point at which foreign policy stops being “foreign.”

The Real Risk for Trump

The real political risk for Trump is not that his electorate suddenly becomes an anti-imperial base. That will not happen. The risk is subtler: that part of his coalition concludes that the president is not defending America from the cost of empire at all, but is simply bringing the empire home in hemispheric form. Cuba, because of its position, history, the weight of Florida, the immigration issue, the Russian ghost, the connection to the border, and the memory of Latin American socialism, is the perfect theater for Trumpism. But precisely for this reason, it is also the theater in which its contradiction may become most visible. To the hard-line right, it offers an ancient enemy. To Floridian sectors, it offers the possibility of historical revenge. To the White House, it offers a perfect symbol through which to stage command. But to the working class, the middle class under pressure, non-Cuban Hispanic immigrants, and even part of the anti-Castro diaspora, it also offers the possibility of seeing the reverse side of the promise: not sovereignty as protection, but sovereignty as cost.

This is why Cuba today is not simply the “next stop.” It is the place where the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine should finally clarify what it aims to be. Does it want to represent restoration? Then it must accept the internal cost of that restoration. Does it want to pursue coercion without occupation, blackmail without a long war, or a managed transition without a quagmire? Then it must prove it can control its own imperial automatisms. Does it want to remain faithful to the promise not to solicit new wars against American families? Then Cuba is the limit it cannot cross without denaturing itself. In other words, the island is not only a Cuban question. It is a mirror in which Trumpism risks, after Iran, seeing its real face. And it may not like what it sees.

Notes

[1] Julia Harte, “Airstrikes, not occupation: Where Trump voters draw red lines on Iran,” Reuters, March 8, 2026. The article reports the reactions of Trump voters to the attack on Iran, including those of Jon Webber, Loretta Torres, Chad Hill, Herman Sims, and Will Brown.

[2] Adriana Gomez Licon, “‘It’s not personal’: Trump’s deportation efforts find support among South Florida Latinos,” Associated Press / AP News, March 19, 2025. The piece contains testimony from Luis Boulart and Julian Padron on the relationship between the Cuban-American community, immigration, and support for Trump in South Florida.

[3] Anett Rios and Alien Fernandez, “Cubans lament end of American dream as Trump overhauls migration policy,” Reuters, March 24, 2025. The article reports, among other voices, those of Naydin Hernandez and the young student Dario Mendez on the closure of migration pathways to the United States.