The Pentagon has spent months positioning warships and weapons in place for an attack on Cuba and is ready to go if President Trump gives the order, POLITICO reported on Wednesday.
The report noted that the US doesn’t have quite the number of warships it had deployed in the Caribbean before the attack on Venezuela, but the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and its strike group just recently arrived in the region, and the US can also make use of fighter jets and other weapons based in Florida for a war with Cuba.
The US has also ramped up military surveillance flights around Cuba, something it did in the months leading up to the attack on Venezuela. The Trump administration has indicted Raul Castro, the 94-year-old former president, giving it a potential pretext for an attack, though US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has made clear the administration wants to topple the entire Cuban government.
“Cuba’s in a lot of trouble, because, unfortunately for them, it’s run by a bunch of incompetent communists,” Rubio said at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, adding that having a “failed state 90 miles from our shores is a threat to the national security of the United States.”
Cuba is currently facing a dire energy and humanitarian crisis brought on by a ramped-up US oil embargo that began after the US abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and began controlling Venezuela’s oil exports. President Trump has been threatening to “take” the country, though Republicans in Congress have been cautioning against the idea as long as the war in Iran continues.
The POLITICO report also noted that the US may not have a long window to attack Cuba due to the fact that many US warships are on extended deployments. “Many of the biggest warships deployed in the summer are approaching 10 months at sea, far beyond the usual six to seven months. This has caused defense officials to worry about overextending crews, and adds to the stress on a naval force that is also conducting a blockade of Iranian ships in the Arabian Gulf,” the report said.
