Cuba: There will be no possible neutrality at this time. It will be either organized resistance or cowardly complicity.
If Donald Trump's language has one valuable quality, it's its starkness. He doesn't hide behind euphemisms or linger in diplomatic circumlocutions. His threat to send an aircraft carrier to take over Cuba once the job in Iran is done isn't campaign hyperbole, nor just another element of his chaotic negotiating style, nor a joke from some unlikely imperial dinner party. It's the explicit confession of a policy that was never anything other than the preparation for the final blow.
For decades, large sectors have been anachronistically debating between reforms yes and reforms no, between tactical concessions and gestures of goodwill, between the hope of a reasonable negotiation and the calculation of how much to give up so that the beast would calm its rhetoric.
Trump has instantly shattered all faith in that supposed scenario, and, it must be acknowledged, has helped us to unveil that absurd nonsense. All those who naively believed in recent months that any reasonable negotiation scenario was possible have been sorely disappointed. Trump was never interested in negotiating; only in buying time. His blunt language has saved us the trouble of interpretation: there's no need to read between the lines anymore; now we can read the deck of a warship.
The less time we waste trying to unravel the chaotic dynamics of their back-and-forth, attempting to separate their rhetoric from our actual capacity for dialogue, or obsessively debating what we can concede to alter the enemy's policy toward Cuba, the less time we are giving to those who have already made up their minds. The only possible and realistic scenario today is to prepare without delay and with absolute responsibility for a comprehensive asymmetric war.
Cuba has made every possible effort to avoid war, without achieving the silence of the cannons implying sinking into the mire of shame.
II
But the nakedness of imperial language reveals something even deeper and more definitive. It's not that the current president despises the international order; it's that the order that supposedly guaranteed minimum security conditions for countries and peoples is dead. And some—even within our own ranks—insist on continuing to test the vital signs of a corpse that has been rotting for some time.
Cuba is a member of the BRICS, a signatory to the vast majority of agreements that place it within the United Nations' global architecture, and has provided decades of selfless humanitarian aid to the Global South, making it morally deserving of any order that claims to be civilized. And yet, the announced deployment of an aircraft carrier to Havana does not provoke an urgent meeting of the Security Council, nor preemptive sanctions, nor even a credible threat of multilateral diplomatic isolation. It provokes silence. It provokes petty calculations from powers that believe themselves safe. At best, it provokes lukewarm statements that no one fears and that no one will heed.
We should go further: what Trump is doing is not declaring the system dead, but rather exposing the shamelessness of its actual functioning. What has died is not the system itself, but the precarious harmony between its powerful elements. Along with the usual expendable lives, the classic hegemon has also sacrificed the system's supporting players and that scaffolding called the "international order," because they now hinder his geopolitical offensive against competitors who are no longer external to capitalism but emerge from its own cultural, rational, and ideological framework.
When competition arose against what was perceived as "anti-systemic"—even if such opposition was more imagined than real, as ultimately happened in the case of the USSR—the system needed counterweights, checks and balances, a backdrop for its hegemony. Today, when the challenge is framed in openly inter-capitalist terms and comes from powers that have undermined the Bretton Woods Pact—through which Washington emerged unchallenged worldwide —that international order has become an obstacle.
The same thing is happening with the international order as with classical liberalism: when the flexibility of the state ceased to be useful for absorbing the energy of popular struggles and demands, capital gave rise to the Washington Consensus and the neoliberal restructuring of Latin American dictatorships. This creation is now sacrificing the very framework it designed, deeming it insufficient.
Let us, then, spend less time summoning the reaction of an already dead order and instead employ all possible forces to build a new one at gunpoint. An order where the guarantee of security is not a piece of paper deposited in Geneva, but the certainty that every inch of land will be defended, and that this defense will be the founding act of an insurgent international legality, born from the cannons of dignity and not from the notarial deeds of empire or the delirious weekly jokes of a madman. But madness is not Trump's fundamental trait; rather, it is a capitalist order that needed to construct such a delusional architecture to sustain itself at all costs.
.III
Let no one expect, however, a seventeenth state to come and rescue us. Bitter reality has confirmed that Russian energy aid was a temporary, collegial, and pre-negotiated window of opportunity with the empire itself. Today, no geopolitical bloc exists with the genuine will and structural capacity to disobey Washington and modify the exceptional architecture imposed on Cuba. This is the stark reality of our tactical isolation, and acknowledging it is not defeatism: it is the first step in a true strategy.
But there is one fact that the United States, Trump, and his select group of fascists in power try to ignore with the arrogance of those who only know how to read kilotons and nuclear warheads: the enormous lesson of Iran and the Axis of Resistance, of the mobilized Iraqi forces, of the Yemenis who overcame Saudi logistics, of Hezbollah resisting the persistent attacks of Israeli troops in southern Lebanon, even amidst—let us avoid laughing at such dramatic events—a "ceasefire" that, as always, only the victims complied with.
These peoples had no aircraft carriers, no Security Council to protect them, no geopolitical bloc to save them. They have a doctrine. A genuine and authentic pedagogy of resistance that the empire has never been able to decipher.
Imperialism can capitalize on "surgical" strikes, assassinate generals, destroy infrastructure, and orchestrate the spectacle of its air power. But there is one variable that eludes all its algorithms: attrition. Prolonged asymmetric warfare drains budgets, shatters domestic consensus, devours parliamentary majorities, and transforms every tactical victory into a political defeat.
Resistance is certainly more costly in lives and infinitely more politically effective than submitting to preserve a life that, without sovereignty, is no longer truly a life or has minimal guarantees of being one. Choosing resistance is not an act of suicidal heroism; it is the rational calculation of those who understand that life under occupation is a deferred death, and that the only currency the empire respects is the unacceptable cost a people is willing to inflict and bear. We did not arrive at this point in history through poets; time and again, by force and coercion, we have been compelled to write with blood in order to dream and have a homeland, a flag, a people, "the land, the water, the air… the fire."
IV
The recent executive order signed by Trump is the tangible expression of this new state of affairs. It is not simply another tightening of the embargo: it is the written formalization of a total state of exception regarding Cuba. Any gesture toward the island, even one of solidarity or humanitarian aid, is completely prohibited under its provisions.
They seek to precipitate internal collapse through suffocation, without inconvenient witnesses, without aid workers, without food, without medicine. It is war by other means, codified in the language of decrees.
To justify this, the empire maintains a constant double narrative that urgently and precisely needs to be dismantled. On the one hand, "Cuba is about to fall," "it's next," "it's a failed state" that requires only a final push. On the other, Cuba is an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security of the United States," to the point that an aircraft carrier is being assigned to it.
So what's the truth? If we're a threat capable of inflicting damage of this magnitude, how come we're on the verge of collapse? If we're on the verge of collapse, why do they need a total state of emergency and the deployment of their naval power?
The answer is simple: neither statement is true. They are interchangeable parts of a propaganda machine designed to justify the unjustifiable. And what will we do? Become specialists in subtle, hidden, and subtle discourses?
Everything is on the surface; those who do not wish to see it should not expect to cure their presbyopia with an aircraft carrier a hundred yards off the coast of Cuba.
But let's take the adversary's logic seriously for a moment. If Cuba, this May Day, compelled 500,000 people to march in front of the U.S. embassy in Havana amidst this crisis, if it forced more than six million Cubans to sign a declaration against the empire's policies, then we are facing a regime with superhuman coercive power, capable of mobilizing wills on a scale that the empire itself cannot match. If that power is real, they should think twice before attacking: how can they deal with a country that controls its population in such a way?
But if, on the contrary, those marches and signatures were not the product of any coercion, if they arose from a genuine desire to defend Cuba beyond any threat, if they were the free gesture of a nation that does not need to be forced to defend what is its own, then they should think about it even more. Because what they face is not a failed state nor a population that will welcome them with open arms, but a cohesive people, willing to resist at any cost and by any means.
In either case, the conclusion is the same: invading Cuba would be the most costly and prolonged mistake in American imperial history.
And as our Fernando Martínez Heredia said before he died: "Let the Americans think of it, even if it's with a lunatic for a president; we don't care, it's all the same to us whether he's a nice guy or a lunatic, we don't care about either of them."
V
But we didn't get here by spontaneous generation. The attack on the Twin Towers was the pretext for establishing a state of domestic exception, enacted with the Patriot Act within the United States, breaking the pact of non-interference in private lives that capitalism supposedly upholds. This state of exception was then transferred to the world with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: any legal framework ceased to matter. The internal needs of a world order defined and delimited by Washington became paramount.
Trump is not an anomaly or an accident; he is the product of the return of that neoconservative project that was left incomplete.
But let no one be mistaken, we would not have arrived at this point without the Gaza episode. There, in that genocide broadcast live, this new global order of exception was inaugurated. The international community accepted the commission of a genocide against expendable lives, lives that could be killed without legal or political consequence.
We failed to grasp at the time that what was happening in Gaza wasn't just a violation of international law; it was the establishment of a new order, one where barbarity is public, condoned, and televised. And that is the order under which an aircraft carrier threatens Cuba today.
Iran is in this era what the Soviet Army was in its time: the only power with a genuine will to stand firm and to alter the current balance of power against imperialism. But the burning question in Our America is different: where is the Axis of Resistance in Latin America? It is urgent to establish it, and for this, the logic of the state will be of little use. From it come only calls for dialogue, respect for a dead international order, and appeals to a multilateralism that reeks of death even before it has been born.
The war in the Persian Gulf has shown that in an asymmetric scenario, control over strategic routes and resources is crucial. Therefore, it is necessary to state unequivocally: all US bases in Latin America will become de facto legitimate targets. Every Caribbean country that lends its territory for troop movements against Cuba, or that leaves its waterways open for aircraft carrier transit, or its airspace open for US aircraft and drones, will place itself on the battlefield. All bases in Florida and along the US coast that can serve as supply routes will also be legitimate targets, as will the transit zones for goods used by the United States.
This is not a threat or trench warfare bravado. It is the technical description of what a prolonged asymmetric war against an empire logistically dependent on a hemispheric network of bases, sea lanes, and support points would mean. The enemy forces us to think in terms of total war. We must do so with the coldness and fervor of one who defends their existence, which, in reality, is not only their own.
All solidarity groups with Cuba, all movements committed to the highest possible level of internationalism, must prepare to unleash resistance within their own countries, including U.S. military bases as legitimate targets, both inside and outside the United States. Only organized, regional resistance can allow us to shift the balance of power. It is not simply a matter of defeating this new wave of aggression that the empire is imposing on Cuba and the entire region. It is about eliminating U.S. imperialism from Our America once and for all.
Trump, unwittingly, gives us a historic opportunity to unleash the true struggle for the independence of our peoples and close that nefarious chapter of our history that is the American empire. What he offers as a death threat, we receive as the long-awaited opportunity to complete our unfinished independence.
We do not ask permission to defend ourselves. We do not invoke an order that no longer exists. We do not seek the protection of institutions that validated genocide. We tell the empire, with the calm of those who risk things far more sacred than permits to receive investment, that every aircraft carrier deployed, every base used, every drone launched, every supply ship, will be met with a response in times, places, and ways that we will choose.
And we say to the people of the United States that there is still time to prevent them from being drawn into a confrontation, hatched in the comfortable halls of Washington, by the very same people who turn their backs on the serious social problems that afflict them as a nation. A confrontation they will know precisely the moment they enter, but they will not be able to say when they will get out, nor at what cost. To the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean, we say that the time to decide has arrived.
There will be no neutrality at this time. It will be either organized resistance or cowardly complicity. It will be either definitive independence or permanent servitude.
We have already chosen.
