The assertion by U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth that Cuba represents a threat to his country's national security is nothing more than a smokescreen, a crude propaganda maneuver intended to justify the unjustifiable: the current administration's renewed interventionist zeal against a small nation, blockaded and harassed for almost seven decades.
What does this supposed "threat" consist of? According to Hegseth and his ally Mario Díaz-Balart—a recurring figure in the anti-Cuban hatred financed from South Florida—it consists of Russian ships, including a nuclear submarine, docking in Cuban ports. Let me point out the basics: the presence of ships from a friendly nation in sovereign ports is not a threat to anyone. It is a normal practice in international relations. Russia docks in Havana. The United States docks in Rota, Yokosuka, and Bahrain. Does that make Spain, Japan, or Bahrain "threats" to the rest of the world? Of course not. The hypocrisy is staggering.
Cuba has no foreign military bases on its territory, except for the one the U.S. itself maintains illegally at Guantánamo. It has no fleets deployed in the Gulf of Mexico. It does not threaten any neighboring state with invasion, blockade, or overthrow. Quite the contrary: it is precisely Cuba that has suffered invasions (the Bay of Pigs invasion), assassination attempts against its leaders (more than 600 documented attacks against Fidel Castro), a genocidal economic blockade still in effect, and now explicit threats to "take control" of the island. The real threat comes from the north, not the south.
Washington's selective designation of Cuba as a threat is even more grotesque when one remembers that the United States maintains more than 800 military bases around the world, that its naval fleet patrols all the oceans, that its nuclear submarines are routinely deployed off the coasts of dozens of countries, and that it has intervened militarily in more than thirty nations since the end of the Cold War. But if Cuba allows a symbolic visit by a Russian ship—a sovereign right of any country—that becomes a "national security crisis." Pure double standards.
The true backdrop to this farce is political and electoral, not strategic. The current occupant of the Oval Office needs an external enemy to rally his radicalized base in Florida. Díaz-Balart needs to justify decades of failed punitive policies. And Hegseth is simply following orders. The tactic is old and reeks of unfounded rhetoric: inventing an external threat to justify aggressions that would otherwise be illegitimate. They already did it with the "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. Now they're recycling the script with the "Russian spy ships" in Cuba.
The most pathetic thing about it is that they don't even try to hide it. The U.S. president himself has already threatened to take Cuba "almost immediately" once the war against Iran is over. In other words, they openly admit that there is no real danger, only an agenda of conquest. Meanwhile, the oil blockade is suffocating the Cuban population, sanctions are multiplying, and Havana continues to pose no danger to the security of Americans – it never has – beyond the paranoia fabricated by a handful of radicalized politicians and exiles.
Cuba is not a threat to the United States. It never was and it never will be. Instead, it is a constant victim of the systematic hostility of the most powerful empire in history. What Washington calls a "threat" is nothing more than Cuba's will to exercise its sovereignty, to engage with whomever it freely chooses, to refuse to kneel or sell out. And that, for those who see the world as their own private estate, is intolerable.
