Contributor: Why Trump is manufacturing a new crisis in Cuba

With the United States’ attention fixed on Iran, Venezuela and other crises, the Trump administration’s increasing pressure campaign against Cuba has largely unfolded in the background. That may be why it has drawn less attention than other major foreign policy efforts. But the pieces add up to something larger than routine sanctions policy.

In January, President Trump declared Cuba an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security and foreign policy, accusing Havana of hosting adversary intelligence capabilities, aligning with Russia, China, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, supporting terrorism, destabilizing the hemisphere through migration and violence, and spreading communism throughout the region.

Since then, the administration has tightened sanctions, disrupted shipping, amplified warnings about drones and connections to Iran, expanded the U.S. naval presence in the region and recently indicted former Cuban president Raúl Castro. Trump sent CIA Director John Ratcliffe to Havana to warn Cuban officials against hostilities while urging political change as a path to relief from U.S. sanctions.

This all looks less like a response to a sudden crisis than the construction of one. Recent reporting that the Pentagon has positioned forces in the Caribbean capable of supporting strikes against Cuba reinforces the concern. No one on Trump’s team has answered the immediate question of what this pressure is meant to accomplish. The harder question is whether the administration is creating the very crisis it may later claim to be managing.

Maybe White House officials believe this pressure will force Havana to capitulate. But to what? Regime change? Democratization? Deterrence? Negotiation? No one has clearly said. And while Trump’s team searches for a theory of success, ordinary Cubans are the ones absorbing the cost.

Questioning these efforts is not a defense of the Cuban regime. Cuba remains authoritarian and economically mismanaged. Its leaders have denied their people political freedom and presided over decades of hardship. But a government can be repressive without posing an imminent threat to the United States. No one has made the case that Cuba does.

Reporting about Cuban drones illustrates the problem. According to Axios, U.S. officials said Cuba has acquired more than 300 military drones “of varying capabilities,” discussed possible attacks on Guantánamo Bay, U.S. vessels and possibly Key West, Fla. and studied how Iran resisted the United States militarily. But the same reporting explicitly notes that U.S. officials do not believe Cuba is an imminent threat or actively planning attacks.

Cuba’s efforts to harden itself against U.S. pressure are not proof of hostile intent. They are evidence that Havana can read the strategic environment. After watching Iran impose costs on the United States, any weak government facing sustained pressure would study how to survive U.S. coercion. The danger is that the Trump administration will weaponize predictable defensive preparation as evidence of Cuban aggression and use it to justify a confrontation it has not explained.

Trump has not earned the benefit of the doubt when it comes to strategy or justification. In Iran, his administration claimed an imminent threat even as officials with access to intelligence disputed that basis. In Venezuela, it described the capture of President Nicolás Maduro as an act of self-defense and law enforcement even as the operation blurred into military force and regime change in ways legal experts continue to contest. Cuba now shows similar warning signs: extraordinary pressure, expansive threat claims and no clear explanation of success.

This is not subtle pressure. Earlier this year, Foreign Policy reported that administration officials viewed energy as the regime’s “chokehold.” But fuel restrictions and disrupted shipping do not fall first on governments. They fall on families. For ordinary Cubans, the pressure shows up in darkened homes, stalled hospitals and empty store shelves. Reuters reported in March that nearly 100,000 Cubans were awaiting surgery, including 11,000 children, as shortages and blackouts strained the country’s health system.

Pressure is an instrument of state power. It is not a strategy by itself. Serious statecraft does not begin with pressure and hope the objective appears later. It defines a political end, chooses instruments suited to that end and considers who will bear the cost.

For more than 60 years, the United States has tried to pressure Cuba’s leadership into breaking or disappearing. It did not happen. The regime has endured. The people of Cuba absorbed the cost.

If the objective now is to help Cubans build a freer society, the administration should explain how cutting off fuel and deepening scarcity strengthens them. Hunger and blackouts do not build democratic institutions. Scarcity won’t facilitate the transfer of power from the regime to its people.

There is also a question of democratic accountability. This is not a Cuba policy debate in the abstract. American power is being used to deepen scarcity in a nearby country already facing severe hardship. If that is being done in the name of the American people, the public deserves more than vague warnings about drones and Iran. It deserves to know what humanitarian cost the administration is willing to impose, what political outcome is supposed to follow and who will answer if the pressure produces suffering without change.

If the goal of this effort is deterrence, what exactly are we deterring? If the goal is regime change, why should Americans believe another round of coercion will succeed where decades of pressure have failed? If the goal is democratization, how does making life harder for ordinary Cubans strengthen their political power?

Congress should not wait for a crisis to ask these questions. If sanctions, intelligence claims and criminal charges are being used to build toward military action or regime change, lawmakers should force that debate into the open now. If the policy is something short of that, the administration should be able to say what it is.

Before Americans accept another emergency narrative, this time about Cuba, the administration should have to explain why ordinary Cubans are being asked to suffer for a strategy it has not bothered to define.

Jon Duffy is a retired naval officer. He writes about leadership and democracy.