This is the first article in a two-part series on US interventions in island nations across the Caribbean Sea.Port of Spain: In a realistic Bond or Mission Impossible film, 007 or Ethan Hunt would be the villain. As White House memes attest, either agent would be assisting the likes of 2025 Operations Southern Spear and Absolute Force that involved months of missile strikes on fishing boats and stealing of oil tankers in the Caribbean Sea leading up to the January 3, 2026 aerial invasion of Venezuela and abduction of President Nicolas Maduro. On March 30, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth might as well have unfurled his Greater North America map that depicted all North and South American nations north of the equator as vassals while picking his teeth with his pinky like Dr. Evil.Adding to the hundreds of casualties US belligerence has racked up in the region in this second Trump term is the conception of the Caribbean as a “Zone of Peace”. Formally adopted as a policy at the Second Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in 2014 in Havana, Cuba, “Zone of Peace” is an eight-point agreement, to which CELAC as well as Caribbean Community (CARICOM) member states have renewed commitments in 2025, pledging among other things to abide by international law, respect national sovereignty, practice non-intervention, and make a “permanent commitment to solve disputes through peaceful means with the aim of uprooting forever threat or use of force”.The Caribbean as a Zone of PeaceWith its “Cuba next” posture after the Caribbean fishing boat strikes and Venezuela regime change invasion, the US has ended the decade that the region has served as a Zone of Peace. In fact, as David Abdulah, trade unionist and leader of the political party Movement for Social Justice in Trinidad and Tobago points out, the Zone of Peace agreement was crucial in deterring Maduro himself from laying claim to Guyana’s Essequibo River in 2023. As tensions mounted, then St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister and CELAC President Ralph Gonsalves mediated a meeting between Guyanese Prime Minister Irfaan Ali and the Venezuelan president, along with leaders of Bahamas, Barbados, Brazil, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, and Trinidad and Tobago.“So, the Zone of Peace actually was important in getting Maduro to not proceed with any military intervention in Essequibo,” says Abdulah, speaking also as executive member of the civil society organisation Assembly of Caribbean People. “This is the Zone of Peace that Ms Persad Bissessar declared in the United Nations General Assembly as a falsehood by falsely conflating murders within a country and an imperial power coming into our space and using force to achieve their interests.”Kamla Persad Bissessar. Photo: Facebook/Kamla Persad BissessarAbdulah is referring to Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Kamla Persad Bissessar departing from predecessor Dr Keith Rowley by declaring in September 2025 that “the notion that the Caribbean is a ‘zone of peace’ has become a false ideal” due to violent domestic crime, adding in a subsequent press release that US military intervention “aimed at combatting narco and human trafficking and other forms of transnational crime are ultimately aimed at allowing the Region to be a true Zone of Peace”.Persad Bissessar’s Trumpian posture of “peace through strength” is unsurprising, as Abdulah tells me the then-opposition leader supported the “right-wing neofascist movement in 2018-19 to oust President Maduro, recognised Juan Guaido as the president of Venezuela, and in 2020 called on the US to sanction PM Dr Rowley for flying in Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez’s delegation on a sanctioned jet.” In office now, Prime Minister Persad Bissessar has gone on to praise US airstrikes that have killed Trinidadian civilians; joined Trump’s Shield of the Americas military coalition that Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela boycotted; and last but not least, lent US military access to Trinidad and Tobago’s airports to aid Maduro’s abduction.Devil’s bargain“The Caribbean has always functioned as a site of authoritarian democracies,” York University political scientist Dr Tamanisha J. John tells The Wire, “meaning, the US has funded and uplifted right wing institutions in the Caribbean, even to the detriment of strong political institutions in too many of these states.” Citing Persad Bissessar, Guyanese Prime Minister Irfaan Ali and Jamaica’s Andrew Holness as examples, the Caribbean scholar flags “right wing leaders” increasingly refusing to oppose US militarism and thus emboldening Washington aggression. “Because in each historical period, there are always Caribbean leaders collaborating with US imperialist designs since it enriches them and foreign corporations,” she laments, “regional unity and solidarity are constantly placed under threat by their neocolonial governments themselves.”Tamanisha J. John.Observing that a small number of leaders’ refusal to condemn US missile strikes in the region prevented an organisation such as CELAC from voicing opposition in September 2025, John says the outcome was a strike on a fishing boat sailing from Venezuela to Trinidad and Tobago, days later. “Not talked about enough,” she adds, “is how since then the US has extrajudicially murdered over 150 people in the region, and you have Caribbean leaders cheering it on.”Also not talked about enough, according to John, is election interference in the Caribbean. Firms linked to Cambridge Analytica of Brexit and Trump 2016 fame have facilitated the elections of Persad Bissessar, Ali and Holness, as well as Barbados’ Mia Mottley, John says, recommending 2019 Netflix documentary The Great Hack – based on Christopher Wylie’s book Mindf*ck: inside Cambridge Analytica’s plot to break the world – for its coverage of the firm’s operation in Trinidad and Tobago. While the US denies involvement, elections in Guyana were interfered with in 2018 and 2020, she says, since “the US saw that they could negotiate better oil contracts with Irfaan Ali’s government”, and even Holness’s longevity in Jamaica would not be possible without “trickery done by the US and IMF” leveraging investments coming into the country to justify right-wing governance.Ultimately, John warns, “if history is our guide, a lot of the times these governments that collaborate with the US don’t actually get any of the benefits that they think they’d get.” She draws a direct line from former Dominica Prime Minister Eugenia Charles’s hand in the US’s 1983 invasion of Grenada and execution of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, to Trinidad and Tobago’s Persad Bissessar losing Venezuelan oil supply after aiding the US’s 2026 abduction of President Maduro. Trinidad and Tobago was arguably trapped in this deal, as US sanctioning of Venezuela required the small island state to obtain a license for importing oil from the latter. Conditioning this license on providing support for its Venezuelan regime change operation, the Trump administration cornered Persad Bissessar into betraying their neighbour in order to get to trade with them.“At the time, it was VP Delcy Rodriguez herself who said Trinidad and Tobago will not see one drop of oil because of what they are doing,” John says. “Now, the US has invaded, kidnapped Maduro with the help of Trinidad, yet Trump is recognising Delcy as president, and Trinidad still has not seen one drop of oil from Venezuela.”Cost of defianceWhile being the US’s friend is thus fatal, being its enemy might be a little worse than merely dangerous, as the saying goes. Seizing Venezuelan oil after abducting its president has enabled the US to dictate the terms of its trade since this January, leading to a suspension of shipments to the imperialist power’s other revolutionary adversary in the region: the island of Cuba. Blocking oil supply has been slowly starving Cuba’s 11 million, causing national blackouts disrupting life, death and all in between, and threatening to deal a final blow to the communist government whom the US has sanctioned since 1960, the year the Cuban Revolution overthrew Fulgencio Batista’s feudal regime and took office.Map of Cuba. Photo: Wikimedia commonsIn 1963, US President Kennedy tightened the sanctions to a full embargo, in line with the 1960 State Department memo calling for a line of action that “makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”. Despite the US’s best efforts, Castro-led Cuba not only survived but also led the world in literacy and healthcare bolstered by trade with the Soviet Union, even as the 1991 dissolution of its communist counterpart across the pond caused a decade-long economic crisis that became known as the “Special Period”.“But now, life expectancy is getting lower,” says Cuban journalist Liz Oliva Fernandez. “Infant mortality is getting higher, so that means the situation is getting worse.” The Belly of the Beast reporter recalls growing up hearing about food shortages during the Special Period but admits she’s not used to the new reality of “people asking for money on the streets” though shelves are full. Talking to The Wire amid massive layoffs of airport workers in the US due to a temporary government shutdown, Fernandez draws a parallel, highlighting that Cuba’s agriculture, energy, transportation, water, healthcare and other important sectors are funded by a government that “the US has been trying to shut down for over 60 years”. With the government now “completely defunded”, she says, Cubans are entirely reliant on a private sector that’s “not subsidising anything” despite being beneficiaries of US oil and other imports.Asked if defunding a centrally-planned economy while increasing investment into its private sector is a regime-change strategy, Fernandez laughs, pointing to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitting to it on the Senate floor earlier this year. Rubio later tried downplaying his culpability in inflicting collective punishment, telling Al Jazeera at the end of March that US actions against Cuba are “nothing punitive” and that “the only thing that’s changed for the Cuban regime is they’re not getting free Venezuelan oil anymore”. In the same breath, however, Rubio also maintains he wants the Cuban Revolution under President Miguel Diaz-Canel gone, as he says “their system doesn’t work… and you can’t change it unless you change the government”.“If we lose Cuba, it’s a loss for the world,” Fernandez counters, saying “what the Medical missions alone mean not just for Cuba but also for the global south is huge.” Indeed Cuba’s “doctors not bombs” internationalism has earned the island nation goodwill not only of its Caribbean neighbours but also over 50 countries worldwide, which has ostensibly led to their targeting. Upon US weaponising the doctors’ salary caps as “forced labour”, Honduras, Jamaica and Guatemala have already sent their Cuban doctors back home. Yes, ending the missions denies Cuba an important source of income, Fernandez concedes, but the bigger question is: what happens to the poor people in underserved areas who need affordable treatment?“They’re trying to turn Cuba into a new Haiti,” the presenter of the award-winning documentary series The War on Cuba concludes, finding France collecting an “independence debt” for over a hundred years from its former colony analogous with the US embargoing Cuba for nationalising industries away from the reach of its multinational corporations.Karthik Puru is a writer and musician from Chennai, India, now based in New Jersey. His writing has been in Dropsite News, LA Review of Books, The New Republic, The Baffler, and The Wire among other places. You can keep up with his work on Substack, Bandcamp and YouTube.