Havana, June 13 — Fulton Armstrong, a former U.S. intelligence official, told the Spanish newspaper El Mundo that “Trump and Rubio are crafting a narrative tailored to their needs to justify an escalation against Cuba.”
The former CIA member and one of the leading U.S. specialists on Latin America, who has spent nearly three decades analyzing Washington’s relationship with Havana, indicated that the White House is tightening sanctions and the economic blockade amid a regional escalation following the offensive against Venezuela and tensions with Iran.
In response to a question from El Mundo, Armstrong noted that after more than six decades of embargo, the United States has entered a much more aggressive phase against Cuba. “The blockade on oil reaching the island is, in practice, an act of economic warfare. The logic of Trump and Senator Marco Rubio is to increase pressure until it triggers an internal collapse, convinced that economic suffocation, fear, and psychological warfare will ultimately push the population against the regime,” he stated.
The analyst then noted: “But there is a fundamental mistake here: Cuba is not Venezuela. The Cuban revolution, with all its contradictions, continues to have very deep institutional, cultural, and historical roots, and that is something Washington often fails to fully understand.”
Armstrong emphasized that Trump is undoubtedly crafting a political narrative tailored to his own agenda to justify further escalation. We’ve already seen this with the accusations of drug trafficking, terrorism, alleged Chinese espionage bases, or the so-called sonic attacks against U.S. diplomats — a theory that later evolved into alleged microwave attacks because no one could prove the initial version.
The intelligence analyst indicated that he does not foresee U.S. troops directly entering Cuba, though he does anticipate a much more aggressive escalation on the economic and military fronts.
During the interview, Armstrong acknowledged that the case of Cuba is different from that of Venezuela, as there is an obsession in Washington with lumping everything into the same category: terrorism, drug trafficking, China, Iran, authoritarianism … And that oversimplifies completely different realities. “There is a structural inability in the United States to understand the historical, cultural, and social factors of Latin America, and the average American citizen knows practically nothing about the history of abuses and interventions by their country against Cuba.”
When analyzing why, after so many years, there has been no progress in the relationship between the two countries, Armstrong tore off the false mask used by the various White House administrations:
“The problem is no longer just Trump. There is something structural in U.S. policy toward Cuba. Joe Biden didn’t change anything significant either. He loosened the reins a bit on some economic aspects, but always with so many conditions and limitations that in the end, everything returned to square one. There is a historical inability in Washington to understand the Cuban reality beyond ideological confrontation. Every time the island tries to open its economy a little or seek new investments, the United States closes the doors again. This already happened during the normalization phase between Barack Obama and Raúl Castro.”
In this important assessment, the analyst emphasized that in the present and future, “we will see a mix of military pressure, sanctions, and negotiation. The United States will likely increase the pressure on Cuba even further before the midterm elections. But I also believe that in Washington they know the island is not going to collapse easily.”
Armstrong failed to mention that Cuba has withstood all U.S. attacks and aggression due to its history of struggle against Spanish colonialism, U.S. neocolonialism, the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship promoted and supported by Washington, and the close bond between the people and their leaders. For Cuba, the country’s sovereignty and independence are the fundamental foundations for any understanding with the United States.
Recently, in response to new extortion attempts by Washington against the Cuban Petroleum Company (Cupet), Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez stated on his X account: “They seek to justify their crime with absurd pretexts, which only aim to hide their main objective: to suffocate the Cuban people, to make them surrender through hunger, deprivation, and disease. We are witnessing the rebirth of fascism in its purest form.”
Díaz-Canel emphasized that “the United States cannot forgive itself that, at this point, despite all the maximum pressure they have exerted, the Revolution continues to exist and the country continues to function. And not even they themselves believe what they talk about and repeat so often — that we are a failed state.”
Source: Cuba en Resumen
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