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us imperialism
Tens of Thousands Rally in Havana Against US Aggression as Cuba Prepares Citizens for War
“Here we are prepared to fight imperialism," said Cuban lawmaker Mariela Castro, daughter of Raúl Castro. "Cuba is a small and poor country, but one with experience confronting US imperialism."
May 22, 2026
Tens of thousands of Cubans rallied Friday in Havana to denounce the Trump administration's indictment of former President Raúl Castro and threats to attack the island nation, whose socialist government has been preparing its citizens to defend their homeland and revolution against US aggression.
“No disrespect is shown to the heroes of the homeland!" Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said as people flooded the streets outside the US Embassy in Havana. "History and traditions are not insulted without a response! That does not happen in Cuba!"
The massive rally followed Wednesday's US Department of Justice indictment of revolutionary hero Raúl Castro, who served as president for a decade after his older brother, Fidel Castro, stepped down in 2008. The DOJ indicted Castro for his alleged role in the 1996 shoot-down of planes operated by the counterrevolutionary group Brothers to the Rescue after repeated warnings that they had violated Cuban airspace.
Rallying under the slogan "Raúl is Raúl"—originally popularized during the transitional period of rule between the Castros to highlight the younger brother's reforms—Cubans vowed to defend their revolution in the face of the latest US threats.
“This new aggression has united us more and elevated the honor, dignity, and anti-imperialist spirit of a people already recognized around the world for their brave resistance to any form of subordination to the empire,” Díaz-Canel said.
Cuban legislator Mariela Castro, Raúl's granddaughter, told rallygoers that “we are prepared for combat."
"No one is going to kidnap him. I can assure you of that," she said, alluding to the US invasion and abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on dubious narco-terrorism charges earlier this year. "Neither him nor anyone else."
"My father is very calm, watching and smiling,” Castro added. "Here, we are prepared to fight imperialism. Cuba is a small and poor country, but one with experience confronting US imperialism. We know that as long as there is an anti-imperialist revolution, there will be a gigantic and ruthless enemy."
Critics noted the hypocrisy of the Castro indictment, given the ongoing illegal US bombing of boats that the Trump administration claims—without providing evidence—were smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean.
“Washington has no moral authority to judge anyone,” Gerardo Hernández, coordinator of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, said, referring to the boat-bombing campaign, which has killed nearly 200 people in close to 60 reported attacks. “Cuba is a people of peace and reaffirms its legitimate right to self-defense."
"Cuba does not constitute a threat to US security," he continued. "On the contrary, Cuba is a state under attack by the United States."
Observers have pointed to the decadeslong US-backed campaign of anti-Castro terrorism against the Cuban people, including the 1976 bombing of Cubana Flight 455, a commercial airliner with 73 people aboard, including 11 Guyanese nationals and 24 teenage members of Cuba's junior Olympic fencing team. Perpetrators of the attack enjoyed safe haven in the United States, mainly in Miami, where the city celebrated a day in honor of one of the bombing's alleged masterminds.
“The Cuban people reaffirm the unwavering decision to defend their homeland and revolution," Hernández added. "With the greatest determination, they reaffirm their absolute and firm support for Army General Raúl Castro."
Mariela Castro said that "my family, like all Cuban families, is waiting for instructions to know where we need to go" in the event of a US attack.
As US Secretary of State Marco Rubio—whose parents immigrated to the United States from Cuba during the US-backed dictatorship that preceded the Castro-led revolution—said Thursday that the chances of a "negotiated and peaceful agreement" with Havana are "not high," Deputy Cuban Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío acknowledged that his country is preparing for war, asserting that "we would be naive not to."
Cuban officials have been circulating a pamphlet titled a “Family Guide for Protection Against Military Aggression." The publication warns that the US is preparing "to launch a military assault and destroy our society with the aim of perpetuating capitalism... and annihilating the dream of our Commander-in-Chief, Fidel Castro.”
The pamphlet instructs Cubans to pack survival kits and seek shelter in the event of air-raid alerts. It also contains life-saving first aid instructions.
“Should the enemy attack, our Revolution will defend itself until victory is achieved and the aggressor is expelled," the pamphlet states.
US President Donald Trump recently tightened the internationally condemned 65-year US economic embargo on Cuba, imposing a fuel blockade that has exacerbated an energy emergency characterized by blackouts and deadly suffering among the most vulnerable Cubans, including sick people and children.
Last month, Trump said that “we may stop by Cuba after we’re finished" with the illegal US-Israeli war of choice against Iran. The president has also stated he believes he’ll “be having the honor of taking Cuba,” language echoing the 19th-century US imperialists who conquered the island along with Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain in another war waged on dubious pretense.
“Whether I free it, take it—I think I can do anything I want,” Trump said of the island and its 11 million inhabitants.
BreakThrough News interviewed Havana residents earlier this week about the specter of US attack.
"We Cubans have to protect ourselves," elderly Havana resident Juan Hernández said. "We're not going to hand any Cuban over to a foreigner, because that would be immoral. It would be treason."
Hernández accused the US of "provocation" in order to "justify invading the country," adding "that would only lead to bloodshed on both sides."
"Besides," he added, "Cuba isn't a threat to them at all. What does Cuba have? Do we have atomic bombs? Do we have anything? We have nothing."
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The US Fails Young People by Mobilizing for War, Not Jobs
A country is not secure simply because it can strike targets, protect bases, or surge forces across oceans. It is secure when its people can see a future worth defending.
May 22, 2026
Washington usually measures American decline in external terms: China’s rise, Russia’s revisionism, strained alliances, and military crises in the Middle East. But one of the clearest warnings is coming from inside the United States. In 2025, only 43% of Americans ages 15 to 34 said it was a good time to find a job where they lived, 21 points below Americans 55 and older. In no other surveyed country was the generational gap this wide.
That finding should unsettle a country that is still speaking the language of primacy. Young Americans are not turning gloomy because they have forgotten how to be optimistic. They are reading the economy in front of them. Youth unemployment stood at 9.5% in April. Renter cost burdens hit a record 22.7 million households in 2024. The share of first-time home buyers fell to a record-low 21%, while the median first-time buyer’s age rose to 40. For a generation told that education, discipline, and work would translate into stability, the bargain looks broken.
This is not only a domestic story. It is also a foreign policy failure, because budgets reveal what a government treats as urgent. The Defense Department’s 2026 request totaled $961 billion, among the largest inflation-adjusted requests of the past half century. Additional military-related funding has pushed “national defense” spending beyond $1 trillion. The point is not that every dollar spent on the Pentagon could be mechanically converted into a job, an apartment, or a mortgage. The point is that Washington still knows how to mobilize at scale—but most reliably when the beneficiaries are weapons programs, contractors, and permanent military infrastructure.
The war with Iran has made that imbalance harder to ignore. By May, the US campaign had cost an estimated $29 billion, including operations and equipment repair or replacement. The conflict has also disrupted energy flows through one of the world’s most important corridors, raising the risk that households already squeezed by rent, debt, insurance, and food costs will face still more pressure. For young workers, “foreign policy” is not abstract when it comes back as higher prices, lower confidence, and another delay in leaving home.
If Washington continues to protect an empire more energetically than it protects the next generation’s prospects, the damage will not remain hidden in surveys.
Washington often treats these costs as unfortunate side effects of leadership. They are better understood as evidence of an outdated model of security. A country is not secure simply because it can strike targets, protect bases, or surge forces across oceans. It is secure when its people can see a future worth defending. A state that can finance escalation faster than housing, debt relief, or public investment teaches its younger citizens a bleak lesson: Their insecurity is manageable, but imperial credibility is an emergency.
A serious foreign policy would start from that recognition. It would pursue diplomacy with Iran rather than convert each crisis into a test of dominance. It would restore the congressional role in decisions of war and peace. It would subject military spending to the same moral and fiscal scrutiny imposed on social programs. And it would treat economic security at home as part of national security, not as an afterthought to be discussed after the next supplemental defense bill.
This is not a call for withdrawal from the world. It is a call to abandon the habit of confusing militarization with responsibility. The United States can cooperate, mediate, trade, provide humanitarian assistance, and support climate resilience without treating armed escalation as the default proof of seriousness. In fact, a foreign policy built around restraint would be more credible abroad precisely because it would be more defensible at home.
The warning from young Americans is not just that the job market feels weak. It is that the future feels rationed. If Washington continues to protect an empire more energetically than it protects the next generation’s prospects, the damage will not remain hidden in surveys. It will appear in politics, institutions, and the country’s declining ability to persuade anyone—including its own citizens—that American power still serves a public purpose. The real measure of decline is not only what rivals do to the United States. It is what the United States keeps choosing to do to itself.
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The Indictment of Raúl Castro: A New Low in US Cuba Policy
This new indictment is simply a cynical escalation in the long US effort to force regime change in Cuba.
May 21, 2026
So apparently the Trump administration has decided that what Cuba really needs right now—after decades of economic strangulation, CIA assassination attempts, sabotage campaigns, invasions, sanctions, blackouts, shortages, and more than half a century of failed regime-change policy—is the indictment of 94-year-old revolutionary icon Raúl Castro.
The United States and Cuba do not have to be enemies. In fact, just 10 years ago, the two countries were normalizing relations. I was in Panama City at the 2015 Summit of the Americas when, to the delight of everyone there, former US President Barack Obama and Raúl Castro famously shook hands, marking the first substantial public interaction between leaders of the two countries in decades. Obama said, “The United States is not interested in being prisoners of the past,” while Raúl Castro thanked Obama for taking steps toward normalization and called him “an honest man.” The opening was a win-win for both countries: an influx of US tourists, a flourishing of private businesses, and new openings for civil society. Then came Donald Trump, who sent relations spiraling downward once again.
Fast forward to today, with the indictment of Raúl Castro for allegedly ordering the 1996 shootdown of the Brothers to the Rescue planes that left four men dead. I was in Cuba at the time leading a group of US CEOs interested in investing on the island. The next day, we were supposed to meet with Fidel Castro. But after the planes were shot down, the meeting was canceled and the business executives rushed to take the next flight back to Miami.
It was a tragic and regrettable incident—not only because of the lives lost, but also because it hardened political attitudes toward Cuba for years to come, paving the way for the codification of the US blockade into law.
Despite unfounded allegations to the contrary, Cuba poses no threat to the United States. And the United States has absolutely no right—zero—to interfere in Cuba’s internal affairs.
But it’s critical to understand the context.
The group’s leader, José Basulto, was a veteran of the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion with a long history of anti-Cuban militancy. He openly admitted, “I was trained as a terrorist by the United States.” The group repeatedly violated Cuban airspace and dropped anti-government leaflets over Havana. Basulto himself declared after one such mission: “We want confrontation.” Between 1994 and February 1996, the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cuban civil aviation authorities documented more than 25 serious and systematic violations of Cuban airspace by aircraft associated with Brothers to the Rescue.
The Cuban government repeatedly warned Washington, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and international aviation authorities that these flights were illegal and dangerous. US officials knew the risks. The National Security Archive’s declassified records, published on May 19, 2026, reveal that high-level US officials understood that continued Cuban airspace violations could lead to disaster. An FAA email from January 22, 1996—one month before the shootdown—explicitly warned of the “worst case scenario” that “one of these days the Cubans will shoot down one of these planes.” The same document acknowledged that State Department officials understood the overflights could “only be seen as further taunting of the Cuban Government.”
On February 23, 1996, White House Cuba adviser Richard Nuccio warned National Security Adviser Sandy Berger that “tensions are sufficiently high within Cuba… that we fear this may finally tip the Cubans toward an attempt to shoot down or force down the plane.” Yet the FAA refused Nuccio’s request to ground the flights.
While there is disagreement over whether the planes were ultimately shot down in Cuban or international airspace, the pilots had reportedly filed a false flight plan and again approached Cuban airspace despite direct warnings from Cuban controllers.
The hypocrisy of indicting Raúl Castro nearly 30 years later is staggering, given the long history of anti-Cuban extremists operating from US soil to wreak havoc against the island with bombings, sabotage, and airline terrorism. In 1976, terrorists bombed Cubana Flight 455, killing all 73 people onboard, including the entire Cuban national fencing team. In 1997, a 32-year-old Italian tourist was killed in a hotel bombing aimed at destroying Cuba’s tourism industry. Yet men implicated in these horrific acts, including Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, were protected by US authorities and allowed to live freely in Miami.
And let’s remember: The same US government now pursuing charges against Raúl Castro has itself been carrying out deadly strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, strikes that have killed at least 193 people since September 2025, with no transparency or due process.
This new indictment is simply a cynical escalation in the long US effort to force regime change in Cuba. Will Washington try to use it as a pretext to invade the island and “extract” Raúl Castro, as it did with Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela? Will it once again send US troops to occupy Cuba, as it did in 1898, 1906, and 1912? Will it ignite a civil war? We have no idea.
But we do know this: Despite unfounded allegations to the contrary, Cuba poses no threat to the United States. And the United States has absolutely no right—zero—to interfere in Cuba’s internal affairs.
Raúl Castro is 94 years old. Let him live out his final years in the country where he was born and for which he fought his entire life. Instead of tightening the blockade and pushing Cuba toward greater poverty, instability, migration, and despair, the United States should finally abandon its failed policy of domination, lift the sanctions, and allow Cubans—not Washington politicians or Miami hardliners—to decide Cuba’s future.
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