Will Trump invade Cuba?

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1:08Does Donald Trump have a plan for Cuba? And if he does, what might it be? We've already seen a big escalation this week because the US has charged Raul Castro, the 94-year-old former leader with four counts of murder in a case that dates all the way back to 1996. Add to that Trump's economic blockade of the island, which is causing a really dire humanitarian situation in Cuba. Does this all add up to the United States trying to force a change of government in Havana? Well, we will go through all the various political maneuverings and get a sense of what's actually going on behind the headlines and try and work out if Donald Trump is close to a Cuban takeover.

1:46Welcome to AmeriCast.

1:50AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. You hear that sound? Oh, I think when I hear that sound, it reminds me of money. We didn't start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it. This is a big cover-up, and this administration is engaged in it. This guy has Trump arrangement syndrome. I have four words for you. Turn the volume up!

2:17Hello, it's Sarah here in the BBC's Washington Bureau. And it's Anthony, right next to Sarah here in Washington, D.C. And we're going to be joined a little bit later in the podcast by Carlos Curbelo, who you're going to be talking to, Anthony, aren't you? Former Republican congressman from Florida, who is the son of Cuban exiles. Yeah, he's going to be able to shed some light on how the Cuban exile community in South Florida views the latest developments in Cuba. And he has some connections on the island as well. So it'll be an interesting look into what's going on in the politics of the Cuban community.

2:46Yeah. And let's dive first into what's been happening here with U.S.-Cuban relations. It was a very big day yesterday when the U.S. Justice Department announced that it was charging Raul Castro, 94 years old, former leader of Cuba, with four counts of murder. And the charges relate to two planes that were shot down in 1996, humanitarian flights that were flying from the U.S. to Cuba. And this was a very big moment. It came on Cuban Independence Day. It was announced with great fanfare in Miami, where most of the American Cuban community lives. And it was a pretty big symbol, wasn't it, of where the Trump administration stands on Cuba?

3:28Right. If you remember Nicolas Maduro, he had criminal charges facing him, and they used that as justification to go into Caracas, Venezuela, and detain him and bring him back to the United States. So a lot of people view this indictment as perhaps setting the stage for some sort of similar military action. Now, I have to remember Raul Castro, he was not the head of Cuba back then. His brother Fidel was, but he was the head of the Cuban Armed Services. And now, after the death of Fidel, has been elevated to be the supreme leader of Cuba, although he is, as we've mentioned, 94 years old. So he is getting on in years.

4:05There's a question about how much he actually is involved in the day-to-day operations of the state. Well, the Trump administration went out of its way, I think, to draw attention to this. Instead of just having a normal announcement in the Justice Department, they were down in Miami at Freedom Tower, which was the kind of Ellis Island for Cubans, wasn't it, Anthony? Coming in to America looking for political asylum. And that's where the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, went to make the announcement. This is what he had to say. My message today is clear. The United States and President Trump does not and will not forget its citizens.

4:43For the first time in nearly 70 years, senior leadership of the Cuban regime has been charged in this country, in the United States of America, for acts of violence resulting in the deaths of American citizens. nations and their leaders cannot be permitted to target Americans, kill them and not face accountability. President Trump is committed to restoring a very simple but important principle. If you kill Americans, we will pursue you, no matter who you are, no matter what title you hold. And in this case, no matter how much time has passed. And then Todd Blanche was asked on NBC News whether Raul Castro will ever actually stand trial in the United States.

5:26That's the goal. I mean, there's an arrest warrant. And we indict people, as I said earlier today, we indict people outside the United States all the time. And there's a lot of ways that we can get them. And I certainly hope that any defendant that's indicted in this country stands trial for what they've been charged with doing. So an arrest warrant set out for him. As we mentioned, Nicolas Maduro had one, and they actually did arrest him. And he's in New York right now awaiting trial. Do we think that Raul Castro might actually be arrested, that the United States might go in and grab him like they did Maduro?

5:57Well, that's the message they want to send, clearly, is, you know, we did this in Venezuela and we could do this if we want to in Cuba. I don't think there's any sign that they're ready for it now, not least because a lot of the special forces who would be required to do that are in the Gulf. They're not in the right part of the world at the moment. Although if they were rehearsing for it and staging it exactly as they did before the Maduro raid, we wouldn't necessarily know about it. that came as a complete surprise what happened in Venezuela at the beginning of the year. But I think that Venezuelan playbook is very much what Donald Trump wants us and wants the Cuban administration to be thinking about.

6:32Yeah, there was a huge military buildup around Venezuela. And we were remarking on it at the latter part of last year. There hasn't been a similar sort of buildup around Cuba. But then again, Cuba is at its closest point, only 90 miles from Florida. So it doesn't take that much for the United States to be able to project its military there. Now, Cuba has been subject to this embargo, the Venezuelan oil after that raid to capture Maduro. It has been cut off the shipments that were subsidizing essentially Cuban economy, the oil shipments from Venezuela have ended. So it has created a massive humanitarian crisis in that country.

7:13And there may be the hopes among the Americans that the pressure, the financial pressure, the economic hardship, the humanitarian hardship that Cuba is going through will force Cuba to make concessions short of having to send the United States military in. Yeah, because the oil embargo means that, for instance, they're only getting a couple of hours of electricity a day, and that has huge economic consequences, as well as being extremely difficult for the people who live there. This idea that by strangling a country's economy, you can persuade the population to overthrow an authoritarian regime, I think optimistic to say the best?

7:51I think what we're finding in Iran is that the regime doesn't care that much about the suffering of its people. I mean, it's an authoritarian dictatorial regime that has been perfectly willing to kill its own citizens when they express dissent or attempt to demonstrate against the government. And Cuba certainly could be a similar sort of situation. But the United States has made clear what it wants. John Ratcliffe, who is the head of the CIA, said that there needs to be fundamental change in the Cuban government. So essentially, the United States is saying, you've got to get rid of Raul Castro.

8:25You have to get rid of the whole regime. You have to start democratizing, start opening the country up to American economic investment and trade. And in exchange, all of this, the blockade that is preventing Cuba from trading with other countries, the economic sanctions, all of it would go away. We have offered, in fact,$100 billion in economic aid in the lifting of the oil blockade if Cuba relents and starts moving towards a more open, free market type of economy. Which may well be what a lot of the citizenry want, but we're faced with the same issue that Donald Trump has with Iran here. It's one thing to economically punish a country and say, we want you to change in some way, and maybe that would be enough pressure to do it.

9:16fundamental change or the kind of regime change that Donald Trump initially said he wanted in Iran, asking a government to put itself out of power, basically, for people to say, you can no longer have any role in governing this. Why would anybody negotiate on that basis? They're asking for too much, fundamentally. Right. And same with Iran, an existential threat to a regime. You put a regime's back up against the wall and say you have to leave. they will do almost anything to hold on to power. But that's exactly what Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has been asking, the American government has asked.

9:53And here's Rubio talking to Fox News on Air Force One when they were en route to China last week about what he wants from Cuba. There is no economy in Cuba. To the extent there's any wealth in Cuba, it doesn't go, it doesn't, forget about it doesn't go to the people, it doesn't even go to the government. The wealth is controlled by a private, by a company owned by military generals. They take all the money. They're sitting on billions of dollars. This is a country where people are literally now eating garbage from the streets, but they have a company that controls all of the money making there that's sitting on 15, 16 billion dollars.

10:26So it's a broken, non-functional economy, and it's impossible to change it. I wish it were different, but I believe, it's my personal opinion, you cannot change the economic trajectory of Cuba as long as the people who are in charge of it now are in charge of it. That's what's going to have to change, because these people are proven incapable. I hope I'm wrong. We'll give them a chance. But I don't think it's going to happen. I don't think we're going to be able to change the trajectory of Cuba as long as these people are in charge in that regime. And we should talk about Marco Rubio here because I think he is instrumental in driving U.S.

10:57foreign policy with regards to Cuba. He is the child of Cuban immigrants. He represented Florida in the United States Senate, obviously representing a lot of the Cuban expatriate community in South Florida. He is very aware of this issue, has cared about this issue for a long time. I think one of his ultimate goals would be to see what, in his view, would be the liberation of Cuba. I think that if he could accomplish that, I think he would be able to feel like his life had had some sort of crowning achievement. And so you can hear it in what he's saying here. You can also hear it in the message he delivered to the people of Cuba in Spanish, which he speaks fluently just earlier this week.

11:44What he was saying was, I know that today you, who call the island home, are going through unimaginable hardships. Today, I want to share with you the truth about the reason for your suffering. And I want to tell you that we in the United States offer to help you not only alleviate the current crisis, but also to build a better future. This is really interesting to try and pick apart, isn't it? So we had Marco Rubio there talking about unimaginable hardships in Cuba at the moment. And in the previous clip, he was talking about people literally now eating garbage. People he has a great affinity with, people, you know, who his parents came from there.

12:23Yet the reason for all of this hardship is what's being imposed by the United States. I mean, obviously, the communist Cuban government wasn't sitting on top of a thriving economy that people were enjoying freedoms with. But it's so bad now because of what the U.S. is doing, not because of the mismanagement of the Cubans. Right. And Cuba, you know, it's one of the last standing communist regimes. Obviously, it was a focus of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis. people can go back and look at their history books about how close the United States and the Soviet Union came to nuclear war over putting nuclear missiles in Cuba.

12:58So it has been something that has dogged American presidents since the days of Dwight D. Eisenhower, essentially. And you have seen other countries that were communist regimes like Vietnam, for instance. I mean, China have been able to incorporate their economies into the globe, have been able to keep their regimes essentially in power despite the fact that they were once adversaries of the United States. Cuba has been different. And part of that, I think, is because of its proximity to the United States. The United States doesn't like this regime. They have a grudge against it, and they want to see it just totally overthrown.

13:35And the United States, prior to Castro and the Cuban Revolution, had very close economic ties with the military dictatorship that was running Cuba. So there's a lot of history there, Sarah, that has to be taken into account here. But I guess the question is, all right, now we put on this blockade. We are tightening the screws in ways that maybe we haven't even before. We've indicted the leader of their government. What happens next? What's Donald Trump's endgame here? Because if it is to put so much pressure on the population that they will overthrow the regime, you are going to have people like Marco Rubio and a lot of Cuban Americans who are pretty fundamental to Donald Trump's electoral support as well, having to watch things get worse and worse and worse for the Cuban population in the hope that if they are punished hard enough, they will eventually revolt.

14:30And that's a it's a pretty crude way of going about things, but it's a pretty cruel way of doing it, too. Yeah. So the question is, do they ultimately relent, which I think is what the United States hopes? Does it come to the point where, as we saw in Venezuela, as we saw in Iran, Donald Trump decides to use the U.S. military to invade Cuba or at least to try to capture Raul Castro and topple the regime? And if so, how does that play out? We've heard reports that Cuba is buying and constructing over 100 drones to defend their island. So there is clearly the thought on their side that there might be some sort of military action.

15:12But also those reports, the United States government has been advancing. That could be a justification. Oh, they're arming. We need to go in and disarm them. So this could also be something that escalates the situation to the point where military action is almost unavoidable. It doesn't seem sustainable at this point, I don't think. I mean, there's a few things the US particularly wants from Cuba, short of the total overthrow of the ruling elite. And that would be getting rid of some surveillance posts that China and Russia maintain there that are a real bugbear of America, because they can listen in to America, they can hear what the Southern Command of the United States military are saying, possibly even what central commander up to.

15:55So they're very worried about that. There's a couple of other things. I mean, they've talked for a long time about wanting to open up the economy, like, as you say, China and Vietnam integrated more into the world economy, business opportunities there would be for American businesses there. It's not clear to me at the moment whether if the Cuban government were to make concessions like that and push China and Russia a little further away, whether that would be enough for the Trump administration. All right, well, let's hear from Donald Trump himself. He was asked over the past week about what he saw with Cuba, whether escalation was possible.

16:29President, what's coming next for Cuba? Well, we're gonna see it's a failing nation. You see that it's falling apart. They have no oil. They have no money. It's a failing nation. So I just can't tell you that. But we're there to help. We're there to help the families, the people. And again, a lot of those people are related to me in the sense that I've had such a great relationship with Cuban Americans. They supported me at a 94 percent level. That's a pretty good level. And they're you know, they're their relatives are there. On the table here, Mr. President, should we expect any escalation here or should they expect anything?

17:07Yeah. No, no, you won't. There won't be escalation. I don't think there needs to be. Look, the place is falling apart. It's a mess. And they've sort of lost control. They've really lost control of Cuba. That seemed kind of definitive, didn't it? Yes, although, I mean, overlaid with the idea that there won't be escalation because there doesn't need to be because the government in Cuba has lost control. And it's not clear that that's the case. I mean, they are economically hobbled, but it's not at all clear to me that the government is therefore losing control and it's going to be easy for the population to topple them or whatever it is imagine Donald Trump hopes and imagines it's going to happen without him having to intervene militarily.

17:50Right. And the Cuban government, for their part, has said that there would be a blood bath if the United States got involved militarily in Cuba. We tried once with the Bay of Pigs, also during Kennedy's administration. And again, this is how far back this goes. And that was a bloodbath on the invading side. The United States, the CIA, had supported Cuban expats who came in trying to start their own revolution, and it all was just a disaster. I don't think that it would be a similar sort of operation this time around. I think we might see American military forces more decidedly committed. But still, there's no guarantee that it would work out the way the United States wants.

18:30We saw in Venezuela things going absolutely perfectly, although there were indications that things could have gone sideways. American helicopter was almost shot down. But in the end, it all worked out great. We have seen in Iran a military success, but the political ends have been far from achieved. So there is very real risk in whatever the United States try to do if they decide to opt for a military solution. And Donald Trump was pointing out there how much electoral support he gets from Cuban Americans here in the United States. A lot of them are in Florida, which is pretty solidly Trump country, how important are they electorally for him?

19:09Would Donald Trump need to rethink things if Cuban American exiles here started squealing that it was too painful what was happening on the island? Yeah, they are the key to Florida. And when Florida was on a knife's edge politically back in the early 2000s, I think that there would have been a very real sensitivity to how they felt about US-Cuba policy. Now, there are a lot of Venezuelans in Florida who are very happy with Donald Trump and the way that he has handled Nicolas Maduro and the regime there. So I think that the Cuban vote in Florida isn't quite as essential to Republicans. It isn't quite as much of an issue that will be dwelling in Donald Trump's head, although he brought it up.

19:52So clearly he does think about it. But if Florida weren't so solidly in the Republican column, then I think it would be a much bigger concern. Yeah, and another electoral consideration, of course, that might be on Donald Trump's mind, is depending on what happens with the war on Iran and increased public opposition to that, the idea of getting embroiled in or even firmly threatening any other kind of armed conflict might not be the wisest electoral move in a midterm year. All right, Sarah, now we've set the stage. Let's talk to someone who knows a great deal about Cuba and the Cuban-American community in Florida.

20:26It's Carlos Covelo, who is a former congressman from Florida and the child of Cuban immigrants. And he could shed some light on what's going on in Cuba right now. What's going on among the Cuban American community in Florida? Hello. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you. All right. So we've talked about everything the United States has done recently with regard to Cuba. It feels like things are really starting to move. What's your take? What's Donald Trump's goal here? Well, it's very clear that the goal is either regime change or just some meaningful structural change in the government of Cuba.

20:58You know, it's been 67 years that Cuba has been ruled by a communist dictatorship, a government that's been not a friend of the United States and has collaborated with American enemies throughout the decades going back to the Cuban Missile Crisis. So this has been a long time coming. And of course, there was a big indictment yesterday of Raul Castro, which will serve as an instrument to further pressure the Cuban regime in this effort by the administration to force change on that island nation. Now, you mentioned Raul Castro being indicted. And when I saw that come down, I instantly thought of Nicolas Maduro and what the United States did with him going into Caracas and capturing him and bringing him back to the United States.

21:45Is that something you'd like to see with Raul Castro? Do you think he should stand trial? Why now? Raul Castro is 94 years old. What changed that made Trump decide? I mean, he'd been president for a full term prior to this, and he's been president for a year and a half almost now. Why now? I suppose an equally fair question is why not, right? There's no statute of limitations on murder in the United States. And these were for three American citizens and one legal resident who were murdered over international waters. I would say that in addition to that, the fact that there is no statute of limitations, obviously there's this effort by the Trump administration to force changes in Cuba.

22:27And clearly, this is part of that effort. And as you said, this indictment reminded you of the seizure of Nicolás Maduro earlier this year. I think that's exactly the message that the Trump administration wants to send to the Cuban dictatorship. Let them know that they're serious about provoking some meaningful change in Cuba and that the United States has the means and the will, importantly, to seize Raul Castro if they decide that that is the best course of action. Now, how's the Cuban-American community in Florida, in the United States, responding to this? Obviously, they see progress being made and pressure being applied, but it's also creating a real humanitarian situation in Cuba where they have family and relatives.

23:16Is there some concern, or are they celebrating what the administration has been doing? Well, there's definitely concern for what the Cuban people are going through. And without a question, this American pressure campaign has certainly aggravated the situation in Cuba. But let's be very clear. The Cuban people have been suffering through these blackouts on the island for many years. Of course, there's concern for the Cuban people. Many in the Cuban-American community have family members on the island. But there's also a great deal of hope because what people really want here is a meaningful change in Cuba.

23:54What people really want here is for Cuba to be a prosperous nation, a nation where people have basic human rights, where they can dissent from the government, where there can be a free press, freedom of assembly, full freedom of religion. That's what people want for their relatives more than anything else. So there's a lot of hope here. There's enthusiasm at the fact that this administration is committed to a free and prosperous Cuba more than any other administration. And by the way, George W. Bush was a very popular president in the Cuban-American community. He was elected in 2000, barely, right, with almost 80 percent of the Cuban-American vote.

24:39Yet his government was not willing to go as far as the Trump administration has demonstrated. And a good example of that is this indictment of Raul Castro at the beginning of the Bush administration, just some four years after this shoot down of the Brothers to the Rescue planes. There was a campaign here in the Cuban-American community to encourage the administration to indict Raul Castro. It never happened. Now it has happened. So the Trump administration has upped its rhetoric. Has it really done more than any other administration? We've seen positions and maneuvering, but is it going to result in any kind of substantive change?