First it was Greenland. Then the Panama Canal. Then Canada — which, let’s be honest, nobody took seriously until Trump kept saying it with a straight face.
Now Cuba.
President Trump floated the idea of a “friendly takeover” of Cuba this week, and before you roll your eyes, take a breath. Because here’s the thing about Trump’s so-called crazy ideas — they have a way of not being so crazy once you look at the map.
Cuba sits 90 miles off the coast of Florida. For over 60 years, it’s been a communist dictatorship and a perpetual thorn in America’s side — a base for Soviet missiles in 1962, a haven for fugitives and criminals, and more recently, a staging ground for foreign adversaries who very much enjoy being 90 miles from Miami.
The Cuban people, meanwhile, have lived under the boot of the Castro regime and its successors for generations. Poverty. Oppression. No free press, no free elections, no freedom of any meaningful kind. The ones who could leave, left. The ones who stayed have been grinding it out under a system that has failed them completely and utterly for six decades.
Trump’s framing of “friendly takeover” is deliberate. He’s not talking about invasion. He’s talking about leverage — economic, diplomatic, and strategic. The Cuban regime is broke. Tourism collapsed. Venezuela, their sugar daddy, is itself a basket case. Russia is stretched thin. China is sniffing around, and that’s precisely the problem.
Because here’s what this is really about: China has been quietly expanding its footprint in the Western Hemisphere for years. Cuba is one of the pieces on that board. A Chinese intelligence base on Cuban soil — 90 miles from Florida — is not a hypothetical. It’s a documented concern that U.S. intelligence has been raising for years.
Trump sees it. And he’s not waiting around for it to get worse.
Whether you think AI is the future or the beginning of the end, the idea that a hostile foreign power should be operating military infrastructure 90 miles from American shores is a genuinely bad one. Trump is saying so, loudly.
The foreign policy establishment will howl, of course. They always do. They howled when Trump pressured NATO. They howled when he moved the embassy to Jerusalem. They howled about the Abraham Accords until they stopped howling and started calling them a success.
If there’s one thing we know about Trump’s opening positions, they rarely end up where they started. “Friendly takeover” today is a negotiating posture. It tells Cuba’s ruling class — and Beijing — that the old comfortable arrangement is over. America is paying attention again. And it has a president who means what he says.
The Cuban people deserve better than what they’ve had. A pathway to something resembling freedom and prosperity, with American investment flowing in instead of Chinese surveillance equipment, is not a fantasy. It’s happened before with countries that seemed just as locked in.
History moves fast when the right pressure is applied. Trump knows this.
Cuba is watching. So is everyone in the hemisphere. And for once, so is Beijing — with a lot less comfort than they had last week.
