A criminal U.S. act of military aggression against Cuba is looming larger and larger.

Last week, on May 20, a U.S. court indicted Raúl Castro on four counts of murder and conspiring to kill Americans for his alleged role in the 1996 shoot-down of two unarmed planes off the coast of Cuba. 

The 94-year-old Raúl Castro is one of Cuba’s top leaders. In 1959, he was part of the group of revolutionaries, led by his brother Fidel Castro, that overthrew the hated U.S. puppet regime of Fulgencio Batista. They then tried to move Cuba out of the orbit of U.S. domination—a point to which we’ll return after dealing with the immediate threat of war.

Truly Blood-Soaked Criminals Pose As Justice-Seekers

The New York Times calls Raul Castro’s indictment “an extraordinary escalation of the Trump administration’s multifaceted pressure campaign” against Cuba’s government, one that could be paving the way for a U.S. attempt to kidnap him like it did Nicolás Maduro, the former leader of Venezuela, after his indictment. 

But let’s stop right there! 

It turns out that these planes were being flown by a Cuban exile group led by one José Basulto, an admitted CIA operative who bragged about being trained as a terrorist. The group’s flights had violated Cuban airspace over 25 times, and Cuba had repeatedly warned the U.S. that they would be shot down if they continued.¹ So it’s quite conceivable that Cuba was acting in self-defense. 

But step back: if taking down airplanes or wanton acts of terror and murder were the standard for criminal indictments and imprisonment, then the U.S. rulers would go to the front of the line! To take a very few of hundreds of examples:

• Since September 2025, the Trump regime has murdered close to 200 fishermen and destroyed 57 boats in international waters in the Caribbean and the Pacific, claiming—with no evidence—they were drug traffickers.
• In 1976, a group of Cuban exiles living in the U.S. carried out the bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455, killing all 73 people aboard. Yet despite being well known and living mostly openly in the U.S., they were never charged with any crime. 
• The U.S. Senate's 1975 Church Committee investigation officially confirmed eight different attempts by the CIA and Cuban exile groups to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro between 1960 and 1965 alone.²

So it’s abundantly clear who the biggest terrorists, criminals and mass murderers are in this situation!

The Drums of War… Beating More Loudly

For months, Trump has been threatening to take over Cuba, as the U.S. is waging intense U.S. economic warfare against the Cuban people. 

All fuel shipments have been blocked, crippling hospitals, forcing the sick to delay treatment, and leading to widespread food shortages and malnutrition. “Cuban Patients Are Dying Because of U.S. Blockade,” the New York Times reports. All this has been deliberately designed to make life literally impossible for the Cuban masses in the hopes of either causing upheaval and/or passivity in the face of a U.S. invasion.

On May 14, CIA head John Ratcliffe traveled to Cuba to issue a mafia-like ultimatum to Cuba’s government: restructure your economy and society to U.S. imperialist liking, or else.  Meanwhile the U.S. has escalated its military buildup including stationing the aircraft carrier Nimitz near Cuba’s shores.

The day after the charges against Castro were handed down, Trump said he would likely order military strikes on Cuba:  “Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years...And it looks like I’ll be the one that does it.” ³

And the Democrats?  As all this warmongering is going on, leading Democrats say they agree with Trump in punishing Cuba… they just don’t want it to turn into war for fear that would harm U.S. imperialist interests overall!⁴ 

“Freeing” Cuba from “Communist Tyranny”?  Hell No (On Both Counts) 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other Trump officials claim that the U.S. aims to bring Cuba “humanitarian aid” and to “free” its people from Cuba’s “communist tyranny.”

This are big lies on two counts. 

First, for 128 years and counting, U.S. imperialist domination has been the main cause of the suffering and oppression of the Cuban people. The U.S. first invaded and seized control of Cuba in 1898 and for decades afterward plundered its natural resources, exploited its labor and imposed one brutal dictator after another to rule over the people. After the 1959 revolution, the U.S. continued to assault Cuba, attempting to assassinate and overthrow its leaders, strangle it with crippling sanctions and isolate it diplomatically.

(For more, see the American Crime series at revcom.us, in particular American Crime Case #59: The U.S. Invasion, Occupation, Domination, and Plunder of Cuba: 1898 to 1959 and American Crime Case #45: The Bay of Pigs Invasion, 1961.)

Second, Cuba is not and never has been an actual socialist country on the road to communism. After the revolution, when Castro began to expropriate U.S. businesses and enact other reforms, the U.S. turned against him. Faced with growing U.S. subversion, Castro looked for another power to protect his regime and turned to the Soviet Union. 

Russia’s 1917 revolution was the first successful socialist revolution in the history of the world. It made remarkable advances socially, economically, culturally and more, and did so in the face of vicious assaults by forces of Russia’s old oppressive order and foreign imperialist powers. However, socialism was overthrown and capitalism restored by 1956, and the Soviet Union emerged as an imperialist power, rivaling and going up against the U.S. They used their previous reputation to draw in countries like Cuba, seeking a counterweight and sponsor against the U.S.  (For more on the history of the Soviet Union, see Bob Avakian, HUMANITY ON THE BRINK: A Forced March Into the Abyss, or Forging a Way Forward Out of the Madness?, pages 15 -18 online publication; for more on Cuba see On the Death of Fidel Castro, Four Points Of Orientation.) 

While Cuba did carry out many reforms that materially improved the situation of the Cuban people, this in itself does not constitute socialism. For the difference between what Bob Avakian called a “a social welfare kind of society in which fundamentally the role of the masses is no different than it is under the classical form of capitalism” on the one hand, and genuine socialism on the other, see “Three Alternative Worlds.”

Of course, the fact that Cuba is not a socialist country in no way justifies any U.S. intervention or attacks on Cuba, its people, or its government.

Trump’s New Monroe Doctrine

Why is the U.S. targeting Cuba, a small country of 10 million people some 92 miles from Florida?

In HUMANITY ON THE BRINK: A Forced March Into the Abyss, or Forging a Way Forward Out of the Madness?, the revolutionary leader and author of the new communism Bob Avakian lays out the fascist Trump regime’s strategy in the Western Hemisphere and the world, including toward states like Cuba: 

At the same time, Trump has proclaimed what many have called a new Monroe Doctrine: the insistence that the Americas are the “backyard” of the U.S. This goes along with his changing the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”—in his own mind at least, and all too much in how some others have responded to that. He has engaged in naked military aggression against Venezuela, with the declared intent of taking over and “running” that country, with its vast oil reserves. He has also threatened Cuba, and the president of Colombia as well as the president of Mexico, interfered in the affairs of Brazil, Argentina and Honduras—all with the aim of insisting on and re-enforcing the whole notion of the Americas as the backyard, and as the sphere of influence and province to be dominated by U.S. imperialism. 

Trump is aggressively reviving the role of classical Imperialist Bully, committing yet more acts of aggression and war crimes against less powerful countries, in line with the long, ugly tradition of Yankee military intervention in Central and South America in particular.

Yet this is not the world of the 19th or the early 20th century, and it remains to be seen what will result from Trump’s big power bullying and old-style colonialist military aggression.

In a larger dimension, Trump’s aggressive actions toward Latin America are part of strategic great-power imperialist contention with China in particular, which has become a major force in trade and relations with Latin American countries, including Venezuela: China has, for some time, been a major source for the export of Venezuelan oil. (Trump and his affiliated fascists regard China, not Russia, as the main challenger and threat to U.S. global dominance; even Trump’s approach to Russia and the war in Ukraine is aimed, at least in part, at severing, or at least weakening, Russia’s ties with China.)

Trump’s aggressive military posture and actions with regard to Latin America, and overall, are an expression of the monstrous system of capitalism-imperialism, which has given rise to fascism, as an extreme expression of the predatory, and moribund, nature of this system, in this country and as a broader phenomenon in the world.

What Is To Be Done In the Face of Naked U.S. Crimes and Aggression

First, full-throated condemnation and mass protest against Trump’s threats, bullying and attacks on Cuba!

Second, digging deeper into the actual way out of this world of horrors.  As we recently wrote at revcom.us:

The real choice facing everyone is whether to put up with and hope to find a place within this madness as it hurtles humanity toward the abyss… or to seriously look into and grapple with the real alternative that has been brought forward, crystallized in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, by Bob Avakian.