The Trump administration has sharply intensified its pressure campaign against Cuba, with President Donald Trump repeatedly threatening military intervention, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio labelling the island a "national security risk," and a federal indictment filed against 94-year-old former Cuban leader Raúl Castro. The charges — conspiracy to kill US nationals, four counts of murder, and two counts of destruction of aircraft — stem from a 1996 incident in which Cuban MiG fighter jets shot down two small planes belonging to Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami-based Cuban exile organisation, killing four people. On Thursday, Trump described Cuba as "a failed country" and suggested he would be the president to finally act against it, saying: "Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years, doing something. And it looks like I'll be the one that does it."

The moves closely echo the US approach toward Venezuela earlier this year, when a prior indictment and a major naval buildup preceded the military capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who is now awaiting trial in New York. The US has also maintained an oil blockade on Cuba for nearly five months, blocking virtually all fuel shipments to the island, which recently declared it had exhausted its reserves. The energy crisis has left schools closed, hospitals struggling to treat patients, and citizens enduring prolonged blackouts. Thousands of Cubans rallied outside the US embassy in Havana in protest over the Castro indictment, while Cuba's ambassador to the Netherlands, Eva Yelina Silva Walker, warned that "everything points to a possible invasion" and described the situation as a "genocide against the Cuban people."

Experts caution, however, that Cuba is a fundamentally different case from Venezuela. Cuba's one-party system, entrenched since the 1959 revolution, has no significant unified internal opposition, and its military doctrine — in which all citizens are considered participants in territorial defence — would make any intervention prolonged and costly. "Cuba is militarily and ideologically much harder trained," said Patricio Silva, emeritus professor of Latin American history. "I expect a much stronger reaction if Cuba is attacked." Unlike Venezuela, where Washington had a ready interlocutor after Maduro's removal, Cuban officials note bluntly that "there is no Delcy in Cuba" — referring to Venezuela's US-approved successor government. US officials speaking anonymously have also stated they are "not looking at imminent military action against Havana."

The 1996 shootdown itself remains contested. Washington insists the planes were unarmed and in international airspace; Havana maintains it was acting in self-defence against repeated violations of its sovereignty. René González, a Cuban intelligence agent who was embedded within Brothers to the Rescue at the time, told AFP that the organisation concealed violent intentions behind its humanitarian image of rescuing rafters, while acknowledging that two of the men killed — Carlos Costa and Mario de la Peña — were simply young pilots seeking flight hours who "had nothing to do with the other plans." González described the current indictment as part of a broader US strategy driven by hardline exile groups: "This is not more than that sector trying to push the American government definitively against Cuba."

Why this matters: Cuba, a Caribbean island nation of roughly 11 million people located just 90 miles from Florida, has been under a US embargo since the early 1960s. The Trump administration appears to be pursuing a twin strategy — economically strangling the Cuban government while simultaneously constructing legal and political justifications for potential escalation. Analysts warn the pressure risks triggering a refugee crisis, as economic collapse could prompt mass migration toward Florida by sea, a scenario that occurred in the 1990s. Whether Washington ultimately seeks a Venezuela-style operation or uses the pressure to extract concessions remains, for now, deliberately ambiguous.