By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on July 3, 2025.
Cuba is once again presented as a “strategic threat,” not because of what it does, but because of who it associates with. photo: X @NPR
A déjà vu. That is what we are experiencing. More than 20 years after the United States invaded Iraq under false pretenses, we are witnessing the same warmongering operetta in South Florida, where maneuvers are once again underway to push Washington toward a new chapter of military aggression against Cuba.
During the spring of 2003, as missiles rained down on Baghdad, the ultra-right wing of the Cuban exile community took to the streets of Miami with a disturbing slogan: “Iraq now; Cuba later.” The demonstration, held on 8th Street, was not an isolated act or a marginal expression. It represented concrete pressure on the George W. Bush administration to extend its military crusade to the Caribbean island, under the same lies of “liberation,” “terrorism,” and “weapons of mass destruction” that had already been used to launch the invasion of Iraq.
At the same time, think tanks such as the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami—with close ties to the federal apparatus—received funding to design a post-revolutionary future for the island. One of its panels, unabashedly titled “The Transition in Failed States: Iraq, Palestine, and Cuba,” equated the island with theaters of war. The message was clear: neither Cuba nor Palestine were exceptions, but rather pending targets in Washington’s global “regime change” strategy.
The most influential voices of the moment did not hide this possibility either. In March 2003, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked on the program Meet the Press whether Cuba was “on the list” of countries to be invaded. In his response, he ruled out an immediate operation but left the door open with a disturbing “unless they possess weapons of mass destruction.” A few months later, Deputy Secretary of State John Bolton—known for his warmongering record—invented the lie that the Caribbean nation was producing biological weapons and sharing biotechnology with “despicable states.” The demonization was underway.
This narrative, which served to tighten the economic blockade and restrict travel and remittances, was then backed by hardline Cuban-American congressmen. “Castro’s days are numbered,” Mario Diaz-Balart told reporters in 2004, and 20 years later he continues to repeat that phrase without blushing.
Today, as the US and Israel have escalated their military offensive in Iran, the Miami propaganda machine is once again waving the flag of armed intervention. On social media, Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar makes no secret of her enthusiasm: “This is how you deal with tyrants, not only in Iran, but also with despots in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Peace through strength. That’s the American way.”
Her colleague Carlos Giménez, for his part, threatens in a messianic tone: “With Trump there are no stories, no excuses. Their time is up.” Cuba is once again presented as a “strategic threat,” not because of what it does, but because of who it associates with. Its alliance with China, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela is enough to justify a national security alert.
The rhetoric is dangerously reminiscent of the “axis of evil” discourse. The island is turned into an operational enemy not because of its actions, but because of its mere geopolitical existence, as if Cuban sovereignty were in itself a provocation.
For weeks, we have had the distressing feeling that we are living through one déjà vu after another. Trump invokes the sad memory of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where humanity discovered with horror the atomic hell of war, as a US military success. Immigrants are hunted like animals, just like communists and Jews before World War II. There is anger and despair at the images of Americans defending genocidal slogans that incite hatred, war between brothers, and destruction. And it is very difficult to believe Trump when he says that military action in Iran is over, because it is very difficult to believe anything he says.
This political and media climate reveals a dangerous surrender to the discursive matrices that preceded the Iraqi catastrophe. The logic is the same: misinform, isolate, demonize, justify sanctions and, if circumstances align, legitimize intervention in the “dark places of the planet.”
Although the lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq still echoes as an ethical and political failure of the West, the far right in Florida insists on repeating the cycle and is trying to drag the US into unjustifiable aggression against Cuba. This is happening in a volatile context, where the only certainty is that the “12-day war” has brought the world dangerously close to a cataclysm with unpredictable consequences. Nor does the lack of certainty about what did or did not happen in Iran, or what could happen in the Middle East in the coming days, help matters. Not to mention that the main aggressors in this conflict are as calm as Alka-Seltzer.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano English