In a small, humid kitchen in Little Havana, the radio hums with the static of a thousand different futures. An old man named Ernesto stirs a pot of black beans, the steam rising like a ghost from a past he left behind forty years ago. He is not looking at a map of geopolitical strategies or a chart of military expenditures. He is looking at a photograph of his grandson in Havana, a boy who has never seen a supermarket shelf full of milk.
The news breaks through the static.
The rhetoric coming from Washington is no longer a whisper. It is a shout. For decades, the Florida Straits have served as a blue, shark-infested moat between two worlds, but the air is changing. When the leadership in the United States begins to tout "successes" in places like Iran and Venezuela, the vibration is felt most keenly in the floorboards of houses like Ernesto’s. The word is out. Cuba is next.
To a policy analyst in a windowless room in D.C., Cuba is a data point—a Cold War relic that refused to crumble when the Berlin Wall fell. To them, the island is a square on a chessboard. But to the people living within the splash zone of American foreign policy, these words are not just headlines. They are the sound of a hammer hitting a nail.
The Mirror of Caracas
To understand why the gaze has shifted back to Havana, you have to look at the shadow cast by Caracas. For years, the narrative of "maximum pressure" has been the primary tool in the American shed. We saw it with the crushing sanctions on Iran, designed to bring a nuclear-ambitious regime to its knees. We saw it more recently in Venezuela, where the recognition of opposition leaders and the tightening of the economic noose were meant to trigger a sudden, dramatic collapse.
The administration points to these as victories. They see a Venezuelan government isolated, an Iranian economy gasping for air, and they see a pattern that works. Success, in this context, is measured by the degree of discomfort an adversary feels. If the walls are closing in on Nicolas Maduro, the logic follows that Miguel Díaz-Canel should be looking at the exits.
But the "success" touted in press briefings looks different on the ground. In Venezuela, the result wasn't a clean transition to democracy. It was a mass exodus. Six million people walking across borders, carrying their lives in nylon bags. When we talk about "targeting" a nation, we often forget that nations are made of skin and bone, not just ideology.
Ernesto knows this. He remembers the Special Period in the nineties after the Soviets pulled out. He remembers eating grapefruits for dinner because that was all there was. When he hears that Cuba is the next target, he doesn't think about the fall of communism. He thinks about the lights going out.
The Ghost of the 1960s
The fascination with Cuba is an American inheritance. It is a multi-generational obsession. Every president since Eisenhower has had to contend with the ninety-mile problem. For some, it was a matter of containment. For others, a matter of legacy.
Current policy moves are leaning into a specific kind of nostalgia—the idea that one final, decisive push can finish the job started at the Bay of Pigs. The rhetoric suggests a cleanup operation. We handled the Middle East tensions; we’ve boxed in the Venezuelan threat; now, we circle back to the original thorn in the side.
There is a psychological weight to this. By framing Cuba as the "next" logical step, the administration is building a narrative of inevitability. It’s a classic sales technique applied to war and diplomacy: "Look at our track record. Look at how we’ve cleared the field. You’re the last one left."
But history is a stubborn teacher.
Cuba has survived ten American presidents. It has survived the collapse of its primary benefactor. It has survived an embargo that has lasted longer than most of the people currently serving in the Pentagon have been alive. The island has a peculiar kind of scar tissue. It is a society built on the art of resolver—the ability to fix the unfixable and endure the unendurable.
When you apply "maximum pressure" to a place that has been under high pressure for sixty years, you aren't necessarily breaking it. You might just be reinforcing the concrete.
The Invisible Stakes
What happens when a superpower decides a small island is its next project?
The stakes aren't just about who sits in the Palace of the Revolution. The stakes are found in the remittance lines in Miami, where daughters try to send fifty dollars to their mothers for medicine. The stakes are in the rafters being built in secret in the mangroves of Matanzas.
If the goal is "success" modeled after Venezuela, we have to ask what that looks like. In Venezuela, the pressure didn't result in a new government; it resulted in a stalemate that broke the back of the middle class. It turned a wealthy nation into a cautionary tale.
Consider the hypothetical situation of Maria, a teacher in Cienfuegos. She doesn't care about the Monroe Doctrine. She cares that the price of a carton of eggs has tripled because the supply lines are choked. She cares that her son is talking about buying a compass and a GPS. When Washington touts "success" in Iran, Maria sees only the rising cost of staying alive.
The narrative of "Cuba is next" creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of instability. Investors flee. The youth, seeing no light at the end of the tunnel, begin to plan their departure. The very pressure meant to liberate a people often ends up emptying the country of the people who would be needed to build a new one.
The Architecture of a Target
The shift toward Cuba isn't happening in a vacuum. It is part of a broader "Tough on the Tropics" branding. By grouping Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua together as a "Troika of Tyranny," policy makers have created a brand of villainy that plays well in domestic politics, particularly in the swing state of Florida.
There is an undeniable political gravity here. To "win" in Cuba is to win the hearts of a vital voting bloc. It is a move that balances geopolitical strategy with the raw math of an electoral college.
But the "successes" being touted in the Middle East and South America are, at best, unfinished symphonies. Iran is still a regional powerhouse with a burgeoning nuclear program. Venezuela's Maduro remains in power, despite a bounty on his head and a decimated economy. Touting these as finished successes to justify opening a new front in Cuba is a gamble with other people's lives.
The logic is a straight line, but the reality is a labyrinth.
You cannot simply "do" Cuba after "doing" Venezuela. Each is a unique ecosystem of defiance and survival. Cuba's military is not Venezuela's military. Its history of revolution is ingrained in the education system from the time a child is six years old. You aren't just fighting a government; you are fighting a narrative that has had six decades to harden into a religion.
The Human Cost of Policy
We often speak of foreign policy as if it were a game of Risk, where we move plastic pieces across a board. We forget the friction. We forget that every "fresh target" involves a human being who has to figure out how to explain to their children why the water doesn't run today.
The American strategy of isolation and pressure is a blunt instrument. It is a sledgehammer in a room full of porcelain. While the intent might be to shatter the regime, the first things to break are always the smallest. The grandmother who can't get her blood pressure medication. The student whose dreams are postponed indefinitely. The family split across a narrow stretch of ocean, waiting for a phone call that might never come.
If Cuba is truly next, we are looking at a collision course that has been decades in the making. It is a story of two neighbors who have forgotten how to speak to one another, choosing instead to communicate through the language of threats and hunger.
Ernesto finishes his beans. He sits at his small table and eats alone, listening to the radio. He hears the talk of military successes, the talk of targets, the talk of "next." He wonders if the people speaking those words have ever felt the sun in Havana, or if they’ve ever seen the way the light hits the Malecón just before a storm.
He knows the storm is coming. He’s seen it before.
The tragedy of the "Cuba is next" narrative is that it treats a nation as a task to be completed. It ignores the reality that for the eleven million people on that island, it isn't a task. It is a life. And when superpowers play their games of dominoes, it’s the people on the ground who get knocked over first.
The beans are saltier than usual today. Or perhaps it’s just the taste of the future. A future where "success" is measured by how much a neighbor can be made to suffer before they finally break.
Ernesto turns off the radio. The silence in the kitchen is louder than the static. He looks at the photo of his grandson one more time, then walks to the window to look toward the sea, wondering if the horizon is getting closer.
