Strip away the legal language around the Raúl Castro indictment, the ‘humanitarian’ packaging of Marco Rubio’s speeches, and the procedural formality of US sanctions policy, and what remains could be a simple proposition – a nation of 330 million, with the world’s largest military and a century of interventions behind it, has decided that a bankrupt island of ten million does not have the right to govern itself without US approval. Trump expressed this as personal destiny – he might be the president who finally ‘acts.’ The casualness of that design is beyond any formal doctrine.The immediate cause for this latest flareup could be the decision by US federal prosecutors to file criminal charges against Raúl Castro, Cuba’s 94-year-old former president, over the 1996 shooting down of aircraft belonging to the Miami exile group ‘Brothers to the Rescue.’ Four people were killed. But tragedy requires honest context, and honest context is precisely what Washington’s narrative chooses to leave out.‘Brothers to the Rescue’ was not simply a humanitarian organisation. It was founded by José Basulto, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs invasion who openly admitted to being trained by the United States for violent operations against Cuba. The group began by rescuing Cuban migrants at sea, but it gradually transformed into a vehicle of direct political provocation. Its aircraft repeatedly violated Cuban airspace. In 1995, it dropped anti-government leaflets over Havana. Basulto himself reportedly declared that “we want confrontation.” The Cuban government repeatedly and formally warned Washington that these flights could lead to catastrophe. Even officials inside the United States reportedly understood the danger. A Federal Aviation Administration official warned in January 1996 that Cuba would eventually shoot one of these planes down. Washington did nothing. The flights continued. On 24 February 1996, the confrontation that everyone had been warned about finally happened.Nearly thirty years later, this same event has been taken out of its storage in Cold War archives and handed to prosecutors primarily as a political and legal tool. The timing gives it away. Cuba today is more vulnerable than it has been in decades – battered by US sanctions, crippled by fuel shortages, losing its population to mass emigration, and facing the collapse of basic services including electricity. Washington appears to see this suffering as a clear strategic opening. The indictment of a 94-year-old former head of state is a pretext. It looks like preparation for something larger.The imperial playbookObservers of recent history will recognise the strategic design. Before Washington escalated its confrontation with Venezuela, it tightened sanctions, isolated the government diplomatically, indicted senior officials on drug trafficking charges, and declared the country a threat to US national security – all while backing opposition figures and tolerating anti-government violence. Before the maximum pressure campaign against Iran, it withdrew from a functioning diplomatic agreement, imposed devastating economic sanctions that most hurt ordinary people, and then presented every Iranian response to that pressure as fresh evidence of the danger Iran posed. In each case, the construction of justification came before the escalation of pressure, and the suffering of the civilian population was treated as leverage.Cuba is now entering the same cycle. US secretary of state Marco Rubio addressed the Cuban people in a carefully calibrated speech, criticising the government for electricity shortages and blackouts while offering 100 million dollars in US aid. This may sound as compassionate. But it clearly followed a precise imperial formula – amplify the suffering caused by your own sanctions, present yourself as the solution, and push the government that resists you as the cause of all misery. Rubio understands Cuban-American politics better than most. He also understands how hunger can be weaponised.Also read: While Pitching US-India Energy Ties, Rubio Reveals Visit by Venezuelan Interim PresidentThe military signals reinforce the message. Surveillance aircraft have reportedly been circling Cuba. The US aircraft carrier Nimitz entered the Caribbean. Intelligence accusations have surfaced about Cuban drone capabilities. The CIA director allegedly visited Havana to warn officials against strengthening ties with Russia and China. Reports have emerged that the Pentagon is preparing contingency plans for military action. Meanwhile, economic pressure is intensifying from another direction. A Canadian mining company reportedly may hand its controlling stake in Cuban operations to a former adviser of Donald Trump, a development critic have compared directly to the pre-revolutionary era of US corporate domination over the Cuban economy. One does not have to be a radical to recognise what this looks like. It resembles the conditions that produced the Cuban Revolution in the first place.The double standard at the heart of all this is breathtaking in its confidence. Washington is pursuing a criminal indictment for a 1996 shootdown while ignoring the 1976 bombing of Cubana Flight 455, which killed 73 people including Cuba’s national fencing team – one of the deadliest acts of aviation terrorism in the western hemisphere. The individuals linked to that atrocity, including Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, lived freely in Miami for years under US protection. More recently, in February 2026, a Florida-registered boat reportedly carrying ten armed men and loaded with sniper rifles, Molotov cocktails, and military ammunition exchanged fire with the Cuban coast guard. And beyond Cuba’s shores, the United States has reportedly carried out nearly 60 strikes against vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific since September 2025 under an operation called Southern Spear, killing at least 193 people according to some reports. These actions face no international indictment. They receive barely any scrutiny. Empire does not indict itself.What does this mean for the world?Cuba is a small island of roughly ten million people – or rather, of what remains of them, since the country has reportedly lost nearly 20% of its population to emigration since 2021. By any conventional measure of hard power, it is not a threat to the United States. It has no nuclear weapons. It has no meaningful offensive military capacity. It poses no danger to US national security. The ferocity of Washington’s focus on Cuba, therefore, has to be understood in political and geostrategic terms.For the domestic US audience, Cuba is a long-running morality play. The Florida exile community, politically influential far beyond its numbers, has kept the cause of regime change alive across generations. Trump understands this constituency intimately. His remark that he might be the president who finally acts against Cuba was directed as much at voters in Miami as at officials in Havana. But words spoken for domestic audiences have real consequences abroad, and the governments of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the wider Global South are listening carefully to what Washington is saying, and watching closely what it is doing.What they see is disturbing. They see an administration that has no consistent foreign policy doctrine except the assertion of US power and the punishment of governments that refuse alignment. They see the revival of legal instruments – indictments, sanctions, criminal charges against sitting or former heads of state – as tools of coercion rather than justice. They see military assets being moved into position around a small island nation as a reminder of who holds force and who must yield. And they see all of this happening at a moment when the international rules-based order is already under severe strain, when multilateral institutions are weakening, and when the idea of sovereign equality among nations is increasingly treated as inconvenient idea.History tenders a warning that Washington should heed. The Cuban Revolution did not emerge from nowhere. It emerged from decades of US domination – economic, political, and cultural – over the island. The United States backed the Batista dictatorship as long as it served US corporate and strategic interests. When Cubans overthrew that system, Washington punished them for it with an embargo that has lasted over sixty years, impoverishing generations and creating the very suffering it now claims to want to relieve. Any attempt to reimpose external control over Cuba, whether through legal theatre, economic strangulation, or military coercion, will not bring freedom to the Cuban people. It will intensify their crisis and confirm every argument the Cuban government has ever made about why it cannot trust the United States.The danger has wider implications, beyond Cuba. The world is witnessing the normalisation of an imperial reflex – the idea that powerful states can override the sovereignty of weaker ones whenever it suits their interests, dress the operation in the language of justice or humanitarianism, and face no consequences. After Venezuela, after Iran, after the plan is now being repeated with Cuba, and the world needs to ask what kind of international order we are sleepwalking into. K.M. Seethi is director, Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension and academic advisor to the International Centre for Polar Studies at the Mahatma Gandhi University (MGU) in Kerala. He also served as ICSSR senior fellow, senior professor of international relations and dean of social sciences at MGU.