Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s Alex Main about the potential war on Cuba for the May 22, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: “Whether I free it, take it, I think I can do anything I want with it.” That is, of course, Donald Trump talking about Cuba in March.
Trump is indeed threatening Cuba with military intervention, but media coverage isn’t exactly ringing alarm bells. A Washington Post column got several grafs in before noting that Cuba is a sovereign nation. Rather than ground us in the reality that Cuba poses no imminent threat to the US that could possibly justify war, most outlets seem to go with headlines based on Trump’s hairbrained statement: “I do believe I’ll be having the honor of taking Cuba. That is a big honor.”
Here to help us think more seriously about what the US is doing to Cuba and Cubans is Alex Main, director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Alex Main.
Alex Main: Thank you. Great to be with you again.
JJ: First of all, talk of threats of takeover suggests to a casual reader that the Trump administration is considering starting to intervene in Cuba. But that’s very much the wrong frame, isn’t it?
Alex Main: “You have so many media outlets in the US that just don’t provide the basic context of what US/Cuba policy has been for decades.”
AM: Yeah, absolutely. The US has been, of course, intervening very heavily in Cuba since 1960, thereabouts, first of all with a very sweeping embargo that has had a massive impact on the island’s economy and on its people.
And of course, over the years, sanctions targeting Cuba have hardened at certain times. They were eased rather briefly under Obama before they were hardened more than ever again under Trump during his first administration. And now under his second administration, he’s hardening them even more. In fact, he’s even carrying out an outright fuel blockade against the island that’s been in place since the beginning of January, when the US invaded Venezuela and removed the president of Venezuela and then proceeded to take over Venezuela’s oil sector.
One of the measures that they took immediately was to stop all Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba, and, of course, Venezuela was the biggest source of oil to Cuba, which is very reliant on oil for its entire energy sector. The second-biggest source was Mexico; Mexico was threatened with tariffs, and so they ceased to send shipments of oil.
And then you had the Coast Guard that essentially intercepted other boats that were trying to get fuel to Cuba, and the only vessel that’s gotten through over these last few months, since the beginning of the year, has been a Russian ship that delivered 100,000 barrels of oil, but that’s really only enough for about 10 days of very low levels of consumption in Cuba.
Of course, this is a situation that the Trump administration, starting with secretary of state/national security advisor/archivist Marco Rubio, says is entirely the fault of the Venezuelan government and their flawed economic socialist policies, when of course it’s quite obvious that any island that is reliant on outside fuel for its energy sector would be suffering in the way that Cuba is now, with these massive blackouts that, of course, have a huge impact on the population, and on basic services in the country. So that’s one window on the human cost of these sanctions.
And, again, you have Marco Rubio, among other US administration officials, that deny that all of these measures, that are clearly designed to asphyxiate the economy of Cuba, have anything to do with the economic situation there, that US policy is completely divorced from what Cubans are experiencing today in Cuba. And I think they can get away with that, to a certain extent, because you have so many media outlets in the US that just don’t provide the basic context of what US/Cuba policy has been for decades.
JJ: Yeah. And yet people, it seems like, are buying it less and less. I mean, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, CEPR—you sponsored a YouGov poll on the idea of going to war with Cuba. What did that find?
AM: Well, sure. I think most people in the US don’t really have Cuba on their radar, probably as they didn’t have Iran on their radar until sometime back in February, when the US attacked Iran, and it might be that way again. But it’s clear that when you ask people, “Should the US carry out military operation against Cuba?” most people, the vast majority, really, think that that’s a crazy idea. What has Cuba done to the US?
And that really, again, raises this issue of how the narrative that you have from the State Department, that’s so divorced from reality, and in this case, that Cuba somehow poses a national security threat to the US, that should just be believed because they say it.
They don’t only say it, but that is the pretext, including in these emergency powers that Trump has deployed for the latest series of sanctions against Cuba, targeting all foreign companies and individuals, US or from any other country, that engage in any way with, essentially, anyone in Cuba. It’s very broad, broad language, but they do this by declaring Cuba a national security threat. It just is crazy that they can actually get away with that, when there’s absolutely no evidence. You hear talk of things recently, there was an article published in Axios saying that Cuba is equipping itself with drones to potentially attack the US.
JJ: From Iran, not just any drones, Iranian drones!
AM: From Iran, and, yeah, they somehow represent a threat, as if they could close something equivalent to the Strait of Hormuz in the Caribbean. But in any case, that is quite possible that Cuba is equipping itself with drones. I mean, what country that’s being threatened militarily by the greatest military power on the planet on a regular basis wouldn’t take some measures?
But there’s zero, zero evidence of any kind that they’re preparing any kind of military offensive against the US. That would be, very obviously, suicidal, and entirely counterproductive, and yet that is what is implied in some of the media coverage around these drones. And, of course, that is exactly what these unnamed State Department sources are trying to imply, and, amazingly, the media seems to go along with it, that this could actually be possible, that Cuba is preparing to engage in an offensive drone war against the US.
JJ: All right. We’ll be following this story, of course, going forward for now.
We’ve been speaking with Alex Main; he’s director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. You can find the studies, the poll and the study on infant mortality that we’ve been talking about online at CEPR.net Alex Main, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
AM: Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure.
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