World
The ghost that haunts the Caribbean
The sea does not forget. Sixty-four years ago, Soviet missiles pointed at the heart of an American empire from a sliver of a Caribbean island, and the world held its breath at the edge of annihilation.
The crisis passed. The missiles were removed.
However, the punishment never ended. What Washington called an embargo, what Havana has always called by its true name, a blockade, began on February 3, 1962, and has never stopped.
It is the longest sustained campaign of economic strangulation in modern history, outlasting the Cold War, outlasting the Soviet Union, outlasting every justification ever offered for it, and now, in the spring of 2026, it has metastasized into something that should terrify anyone still capable of being terrified.
US Southern Command framed the move as a demonstration of operational readiness, citing the carrier’s prior combat operations from the Taiwan Strait to the Persian Gulf to underscore its capabilities and reach.
READ: Cuba will be failing pretty soon: Trump
“Welcome to the Caribbean, Nimitz Carrier Strike Group!” the command posted on social media, with the casual menace of a man pressing a boot to a throat.
The empire always needs a pretext.
In 1962, it was Soviet missiles. In 1996, it was a civilian aircraft.
Today, for the Trump administration, which has declared Cuba “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to national security, the pretext is a 94-year-old man.
Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío described the indictment as “fraudulent”, lacking any legal, political, or moral foundation, and warned that the US has a “well-known, dark practice” of using accusations like this to take military action against sovereign states.
He is not wrong. The playbook is familiar. First the dossier, then the carrier group, then the rubble.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel accused Washington of using the island’s economic weakness as an “outrageous pretext” to seize it, promising that “any external aggressor will clash with an impregnable resistance”.
These are not empty words from a government that has survived sixty years of siege, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination plots, the sabotage campaigns, the tourist boycotts, and now a fuel blockade that has plunged 10 million people into recurring darkness.
