Cuba

The US Coast ⁠Guard has announced that it intercepted a large cargo ship carrying fuel bound for Cuba, as the ⁠Trump administration’s crippling ⁠oil embargo against ​the island nation continued.

The vessel named Grace was stopped on 5 September in the Caribbean Sea between Cuba ⁠and Mexico while using tactics to evade authorities, the Coast Guard said. The New York Times reported that the ship ⁠was 91 metres (300ft) long.

“Grace was transiting to Cuba, carrying fuel, ​and was believed to be employing ‌tactics common amongst the ‌dark fleet,” the Coast Guard said in a statement.

The United States military is reportedly looking at moves that could signal potential military movement regarding Cuba, according to a CBS News report on Friday morning.

The report said that a message in the U.S. Army Reserve discusses Southern Command’s resources in the coming months, and the outlet said official sources told them it had to do with Cuba preparedness.

Havana has been gearing up for the centenary of Fidel Castro’s birth on August 13, 2026. Fidel Castro died in 2016 after handing power over to his brother Raúl in 2006. Communists the world over claim him as one of their own, and international visitors are being hosted by the dictatorship to celebrate this anniversary. In 2006, Forbes magazine reported that Fidel Castro’s net worth was $900 million (€780 million). One of his bodyguards, Juan Reinaldo Sánchez, who defected, wrote a tell-all book, The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Lider Maximo, detailing Fidel’s 29 luxury homes, four yachts and private island (Cayo Piedra), not to mention other luxuries. This in a country where 89 per cent of the population lives in extreme poverty.

In the dark before dawn, Juan Victor Hernández Campo was cheerleading a 5,000-strong crowd in the outskirts of the Cuban provincial capital of Pinar del Rio. “Aquí, quien no salte es yanqui!” he roared. “If you don’t jump, you’re a Yankee!”

Those in front of him, in T-shirts commemorating Fidel and Raúl Castro’s 1953 attack on the Moncada military barracks, roared back and – as much as their age allowed – leapt to their feet.

When Hernández asked them for more, one woman pointed out he would struggle for lift-off himself given the size of his belly. He responded by pulling his T-shirt tight and proudly rotating like a courting turkey. “¡Abajo el bloqueo!” He shouted. “Down with the blockade!” The crowd laughed and waved small Cuban flags.

Last week, the State Department released a report detailing decades of Cuban espionage and its collaboration with far-left radical organizations in America. The report, which implicated dozens of groups and individuals, is just the latest in a push by the department to counteract Cuban influence.

MIAMI—Scattered across South Florida and tucked inside bank vaults, safes and family desk drawers are the yellowing deeds to sugar mills, oil refineries and family homes seized by Cuba’s Communist government more than six decades ago.

For generations, these documents were little more than family heirlooms that served as painful reminders of fortunes lost after the revolution led by Fidel Castro’s bearded guerrillas.

Now they suddenly have potential monetary value, as the Trump administration intensifies its squeeze on Cuba’s government.

As part of the Trump administration’s continuing attack on left-leaning groups, the US state department has listed several activists and organizations as “front groups and fellow travelers” for Cuba, including Hasan Piker and the Amazon Labor Union founder Chris Smalls.

In a 100-page report released on Monday, the state department denounces Cuba as the “capital of 21st-century communism”, accusing the Cuban government of carrying out a “campaign of subversion” that has “infiltrated the highest reaches of the US government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists [and] backed an unprecedented wave of leftwing terrorism on American soil”.

When Cuba’s national grid collapses, as it did for the third time in 10 days on Tuesday, a collective groan spreads across its cities and people wonder, again, whether the island’s antiquated electricity system may soon become unrecoverable.

The 777-mile Caribbean island of 9.5 million people has been sweltering under a six-month-long oil blockade imposed by the US, part of a pressure campaign to bring down its communist government. But the parlous state of Cuba’s infrastructure goes far further back.

“The backbone of the system is still the big power plants,’ said Jorge Piñon, a senior energy researcher at the University of Texas. “And they’re old, broken and tired.”

Every time I write one of these “Cuba Falling” articles, I feel like I need to end the “Cuba Falling” part with a question mark. I’m getting frustrated with the lack of movement, and I can’t help but wonder if we’re spread a little too thin with Iran. It’s time to finish that job and quit playing around with those animals. Cuba is becoming an even bigger hellhole than it already was. The people are starving. They have no power. It’s also clear at this point that the regime is a threat to our national security. It apparently has high-capability Iranian and/or Russian drones, and it is colluding with everyone on the radical left, from Democrat members of Congress to Code Pink, and I’d call all of that a very serious problem for the United States.