November 3, 2026
Trump – “pretend you’re voting for me.”
“In these upcoming elections, when it comes time to vote, pretend that I’m running—that you’re voting for me,” said Donald Trump.
According to the latest polls, only between 31% and 34% of Americans still trust him, so if, when voting in the midterm elections tomorrow for members of Congress and senators, his supporters think they are voting for him, they will likely end up choosing… to vote for Democratic candidates.
Trump was confident that Flávio Bolsonaro’s victory—for which his administration and its tech-oligarch allies worked so hard—would allow him to consolidate control over Latin America and the Caribbean through submissive, like-minded far-right governments, with the sole exceptions of Sheinbaum in Mexico and Díaz Canel in Cuba.
With Bolsonaro in power, Brazil would also leave the BRIC group, thereby weakening that competing economic bloc—which also includes China, Russia, India, and South Africa—and which accounts for nearly 50% of the world’s population and GDP.
The U.S. will continue to harass Lula’s new government, which will have to govern as a minority and face great difficulties in advancing and deepening its economic and social reforms; however, Bolsonaro’s flight and his exile in the U.S. deal a severe blow to his party, his voters, and Trump.
But this is not the only concern the Republican tycoon has in the region as he seeks to reshape it at will into an updated version of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine.
Many months ago, he claimed he would take “control of Cuba”—a symbol of great significance for the U.S.—convinced that this would secure the votes of the powerful Cuban community and of American farmers, ranchers, and businesspeople eager to tap into that market.
Trump aims to turn the island into a massive resort controlled by his own family-owned real estate holding company and other major hotel and construction firms.
Dozens of hotels belonging to major European hotel chains—including Spain’s Meliá—have closed their doors in the face of threats of U.S. retaliation and could be replaced by American firms.
The global far-right wave and intense pressure from Trump led countries such as Germany, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, and Montenegro to stop voting in favor of the resolution against the blockade of Cuba this year—as they had done in 2025—and instead decide to abstain, while Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina voted against it.
“Once we’re done with Iran, we’ll deal with Cuba,” the Republican tycoon continues to say, convinced that on the rebellious island—which none of the presidents who preceded him in the White House since 1959 could subdue—he can replicate the “Venezuelan model.”
Last Wednesday, the 28th, the UN General Assembly once again voted on a draft resolution presented by Cuba condemning the blockade it has endured since 1962, which has intensified to the extreme during Trump’s second term.
Although the resolution was once again passed by a large majority—130 countries voted in favor—Trump pressured numerous countries and managed to get 17 of them to vote against it and 21 to abstain.
In 2025, 165 countries voted in favor of Cuba’s proposal, only seven voted against it, and 12 abstained. The global wave of right-wing and far-right politics, along with pressure from Trump, were key factors in this shift.
In Europe, Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina shifted from voting in favor of Cuba in 2025 to voting against it now, while Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Greece, Croatia, and Montenegro all shifted from supporting Cuba last year to abstaining in 2026.
In any case, the resolution is not binding without the approval of the Security Council, where the U.S. vetoes it every year, so it will have no effect whatsoever; however, it serves as a testament to the fact that Cuba—the most supportive country in the world—is more isolated than ever at a time when it needs solidarity the most.
Following Maduro’s abduction, Trump succeeded in imposing a humiliating colonial protectorate on Venezuela in the 21st century and is attempting to replicate that model in Cuba
With a fierce economic and financial blockade and a single surgical military operation—the abduction of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores—the Trump administration has managed, since January 3 and in the face of the passivity of the entire misnamed “international community,” to impose on Venezuela a sort of colonial protectorate like those that, a century ago, at the height of its imperial expansion, the U.S. forcibly imposed on Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua.
But the “Iran turnaround” is slow in coming. The extremely risky military adventure into which Benjamin Netanyahu dragged the U.S. threatens to become yet another strategic defeat among the many suffered by the U.S. since the Vietnam War—defeats that have played no small part in the growing decline of U.S. global hegemony.
The consequences of this disaster are already having a direct impact on the wallets of millions of Americans as they fill up their cars’ gas tanks or farmers’ tractors, and across all modes of land, sea, and air transportation—a situation that has caused great discontent even within the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement itself, that large and diverse social movement that Trump launched during his first term in 2016.
His voters see inflation rising just as it did under Biden’s administration—one of the factors that fueled social unrest and his electoral defeat—while the major U.S. oil companies are making a killing off the war in Iran and the plundering of Venezuelan oil.
A Miami judge has ordered the arrest of General Raúl Castro for the 1996 shoot-down of two small planes that were flying over Cuba for the umpteenth time, dropping leaflets calling for rebellion despite numerous warnings from Cuban authorities.
The election season is pressing, and successes like those in Venezuela or Greenland—Denmark agreed to allow the U.S. to expand its bases and exercise military control over the island—have no impact on the streets or on voters.
Trump insists on seeking through dramatic foreign policy moves what he cannot achieve domestically. Cuba is the perfect stage for this, the obsession of every occupant of the White House.
The U.S. has always felt humiliated by its failure to prevent a group of poorly armed revolutionaries from overthrowing its loyal dictator, Fulgencio Batista, in 1959—at the height of the Cold War—and from expropriating U.S. companies; from aiding liberation movements in Latin America and Africa; and from ensuring that, despite the imposition of a strict and cruel six-decade blockade, that Revolution remains standing.
Fidel forever
Fidel Castro’s head was always the most coveted prize for the U.S. In the absence of Fidel—whom they failed to kill in any of the 638 attempts over so many years—his brother Raúl will do; he shared the struggle with him from the very beginning and shouldered the Revolution’s primary political and military responsibilities for decades.
It is no longer enough for Trump and Marco Rubio—his Cuban-born Secretary of State—to suffocate the island’s entire population to the utmost, turning it into a silent and slow-moving variant of the genocide in Gaza, in the hope that the people will blame their leaders for their hardships, rise up violently against them, and, in true Corina Machado style, ask the U.S. for military intervention.
Following the same tactics that Trump and his Justice Department used against Maduro to kidnap him (and in 1989 against Manuel Noriega), a Miami judge has ordered his arrest after reopening an old case against him.
She accuses him of being ultimately responsible for the downing by two Cuban Air Force MiG fighters of two Cessna 337 Skymaster light aircraft belonging to the far-right Miami-based exile organization Brothers to the Rescue in international airspace on February 24, 1996, during the Bill Clinton administration.
In the absence of Fidel—whom they failed to kill in any of the 638 attempts over so many years—his brother Raúl will have to do.
The small planes took off from Opa Locka Airport in Florida. Raúl Castro was at that time the minister in charge of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR).
Cuba maintains that the attack, which left four people dead—all four Cubans, three of whom also held U.S. citizenship and the fourth of whom was a Miami resident—took place in Cuban airspace, after that organization—which had been repeatedly prohibited from conducting low-altitude flights to drop thousands of leaflets calling for rebellion—once again disregarded the warning. Basulto, who was piloting a third light aircraft, managed to flee the area.
Brothers to the Rescue was founded in 1991 with funding from the powerful Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF) by Cuban exile José Basulto, a member of Operation 40, a paramilitary organization of the Cuban exile community trained by the CIA in the 1960s.
In the 1990s, Brothers to the Rescue claimed to be a humanitarian organization that helped Cubans seeking to flee Cuba for the U.S. in fragile boats, an effort that led to the Rafters Crisis.
The Clinton administration withdrew its support in 1995 when it reached an immigration agreement with the Cuban government under which it would allow the more than 30,000 “rafters”—who were being housed in appalling conditions at the Guantanamo Bay naval base, alongside Haitians—to enter the U.S., and would return to Cuba anyone who attempted to do so from that point on.
Basulto and the group of far-right Cubans in Miami that he led decided to shift their focus and launch an aggressive propaganda campaign from Cuban airspace, which Havana repeatedly denounced to the U.S. Interests Section in Havana to no avail.
At the same time, the Cuban Intelligence Directorate (DI)—also known as G2—infiltrated several of its agents into Brothers to the Rescue and learned that the leaflet drops were only part of a much broader and more violent plan.
It was no coincidence that Basulto boasted about his violent actions in 2005 on the program *A Mano Limpia* on Miami’s Channel 41: “In 1962, I fired a cannon from a speedboat at a hotel in Cuba, and to this day, the FBI hasn’t come to question me.” It was the Hotel Rosita de Hornedo, in the Miramar neighborhood of Havana.
The Ministry of the Interior was aware of the violent plans of Brothers to the Rescue, Alpha66, and other paramilitary organizations within the Cuban exile community in Miami. The espionage operation was called Red Avispa (recreated on screen by Olivier Assayas’s film of the same name), which was ultimately uncovered and dismantled by the FBI in 1998.
Its main protagonists received harsh prison sentences but were ultimately exchanged during the Obama administration for Americans imprisoned in Cuba.
Donald Trump failed to bring down Cuba or capture Raúl Castro before the midterm elections, as he had intended.
Under pressure from the Cuban exile community and the Republican Party, which controlled both chambers of Congress, the Clinton administration radically changed its relations with Havana following this incident.
Just three weeks after the downing of the light aircraft, the Democratic president signed the Helms-Burton Act, which drastically tightened the embargo against Cuba by extending sanctions extraterritorially.
Trump failed to bring Cuba to its knees or capture Raúl Castro before the midterm elections, as he had intended, and although he still has two years left until the presidential election on November 7, 2028, he fears that a potential defeat in the House of Representatives and/or the Senate—as predicted by most polls—will prevent him from fulfilling his imperial dreams.
That is why Tuesday’s elections are particularly important, and uncertainty is growing about how Trump will react if—despite gerrymandering (redrawing electoral districts to favor his candidates) and the Justice Department’s blatant bias—a resounding defeat for the Republican Party is confirmed.
Source: Cubadebate with information from El Salto, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English