Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel warned that any U.S. attempt to seize the island would be met with “unbreakable resistance,” responding to remarks by former U.S. president Donald Trump suggesting he might “take” Cuba. Díaz-Canel wrote on X that Washington threatens almost daily to overturn Cuba’s constitutional order by force, using Cuba’s weakened economy — weakened in part, he says, by long-standing U.S. policies — as a pretext.
Díaz-Canel called U.S. measures a “ferocious economic war” amounting to collective punishment of the Cuban people and said that, in a worst-case scenario, any external aggressor would encounter determined opposition. His comments framed the situation as a standoff between an island under prolonged external pressure and a population prepared to defend its government.
Trump told reporters he believed he would have “the honor of taking Cuba,” adding that he could do “anything” with it and that the island was a “very weakened nation” with little money or oil. He said the United States would be “doing something with Cuba very soon.” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio criticized recent Cuban changes allowing exiles to invest and own businesses as inadequate, saying they fall short of the free-market reforms the Trump administration seeks.
Those statements fit into broader signals from the current U.S. administration about reasserting influence in the region. After strikes in Venezuela in 2026 that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro, Trump said American dominance in the Western Hemisphere would “never be questioned again.”
Cuba is facing one of its most severe economic crises since the 1959 revolution. A long-running U.S. trade embargo has taken a heavy toll, and recent U.S. actions have aimed to tighten pressure further by restricting access to foreign currency and oil. The island recently suffered a blackout that lasted more than 29 hours — the first such prolonged outage since Venezuela’s oil shipments to Cuba were cut off — though authorities have not publicly identified the cause.
Havana and Washington have begun talks intended to defuse the crisis, but neither side has disclosed details. Trump has portrayed Cuba as desperate to negotiate. Meanwhile, shortages and growing public discontent tied to the energy crisis and economic strain are putting further pressure on the Cuban government as it warns against any military attempt to alter its leadership.