What Could US Military Action Against Cuba Look Like?

Cuba has accused the United States of building a “fraudulent case” to justify military action against the communist government in Havana, as President Donald Trump refuses to take potential U.S. operations off the table.

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez said on Sunday that the U.S. was piecing together a pretext for “eventual military aggression,” and Cuba was prepared to defend itself. The statement came shortly after Axios reported that Cuba had bought more than 300 military drones and started drawing up plans to target the U.S.’s Guantánamo Bay base in southeastern Cuba, as well as major U.S. installations in Florida.

The report, citing classified intelligence, said the information could become grounds for U.S. military action against Havana.

Havana’s embassy in the U.S. alleged the Cuban government’s opponents in Washington were “fabricating” reasons for armed intervention, although it did not directly reference purchases of attack drones.

Some observers questioned the timing of the apparent intelligence leak, pointing to plans the Pentagon drew up in the early 1960s to bolster support for U.S. military intervention in Cuba, including looking at how to stage attacks that would then be blamed on Havana. The plans were never approved by then-President John F. Kennedy and only became public decades later.

U.S. media had reported last week the U.S. plans to criminally indict former Cuban leader Raúl Castro over the shooting down of two aircraft 30 years ago, prompting experts to speculate the U.S. government could be trying to create a legal basis for military intervention in Cuba.

Relations between the two countries have been poor for decades, but the Trump administration has ramped up economic and diplomatic pressure on the island since January.

The U.S. has cut Cuba’s access to vital fuel imports while squeezing the island’s fragile economy with new sanctions designed to hack at the regime’s sources of hard cash. Blackouts have rippled through Havana for up to 22 hours a day, rubbish piling up on the streets and health services stumbling as the island’s tourist trade dried up.

Trump officials have called Cuba a “failed state” and suggested the government could crumble without a U.S. invasion of the island. U.S. officials have said there are no imminent plans for invading Cuba.

But Trump has also suggested thousands of U.S. troops, dozens of jets and vast caches of weapons aboard the world’s largest aircraft carrier could approach Cuban shores and force officials to “give up” after the U.S. ends its war against Iran. Cuba decried these remarks as a “clear and direct threat of military aggression.”

The U.S. is sending a message to the Cuban government, the U.S. public and to the international community that it is at least starting to make the case for military intervention on the island, even if it’s not yet clear whether the White House will follow through on its threats, Brian Fonseca, the director of the Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy at Florida International University, told Newsweek.

Could the U.S. Actually Invade Cuba?

The possible Castro indictment will likely home in on the Cuban military shootdown of two civilian planes operated by an anti-Castro exile group in early 1996, killing four people.

The Cuban government said at the time the aircraft were inside Cuban airspace, while the U.S. insisted the planes were in international airspace. A later probe by United Nations aviation authorities concluded the aircraft were outside Havana’s jurisdiction but acknowledged the Brothers to the Rescue group operating the planes had previously violated Cuban airspace.

As preparation for an indictment became public, the CIA confirmed that the agency’s director, John Ratcliffe, traveled to Havana to meet with top Cuban officials. The indictment is expected to be announced on Wednesday, and it’s not clear whether Castro will be the only person named by U.S. authorities.

Before U.S. forces swept into Venezuela to capture then-leader Nicolás Maduro, the former president and a string of his top officials were indicted in U.S. federal court. U.S. troops then brought Maduro to New York to face narco-terrorism and drug-trafficking charges. He pleaded not guilty.

The CIA was authorized to carry out covert operations in Venezuela before U.S. forces entered Caracas, and Ratcliffe was one of the first visitors to the city after Maduro’s removal.

“It's very possible that this sequence of actions could be a repeat of the Venezuela playbook to lay the groundwork for an escalation in Cuba,” said Connor Pfeiffer, who advises Congress on foreign policy and intelligence in the Western Hemisphere with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies Action, an activist and lobbying group.

A Venezuela Encore?

But there are several key differences between Venezuela and Cuba that would affect U.S. military planning for how operations could play out.

Unlike in Caracas, Havana isn’t ruled by a single, dominant figure. A network of top officials runs the regime in the capital, making a Venezuela-style operation to snatch 94-year-old Castro or current President Miguel Díaz-Canel possible, but less impactful than publishing footage of tracksuit-clad Maduro’s perp walk.

The geography is different, too. Venezuelan officials watched as the U.S. military amassed nearly a dozen warships, including the Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, squadrons of fighter jets and more than 15,000 troops near its coastline.

But Cuba sits just 90 miles from Florida. The state is home to a litany of U.S. military facilities, including the headquarters for U.S. Southern Command, which oversees U.S. activity in Latin America and the Caribbean, and U.S. Central Command, responsible for American military operations in the Middle East.

While this puts significant military bases in close reach of Cuba, it also means the U.S. wouldn’t need to deploy large numbers of warships and aircraft carriers overseas to attack, unlike in Venezuela and Iran.

But the U.S. would likely still need to move jets and personnel toward southern Florida in preparation for an attack on Cuba, and there’s so far been no sign of this, Fonseca told Newsweek.

How Could an Attack Go?

Before an attack or an invasion, militaries will increase their monitoring of the area they plan to target, scoping out where the most strategically important and dangerous assets are stored or deployed.

This includes air defense systems that could target U.S. aircraft swooping in as part of military operations, as well as depots filled with ammunition, missiles and drones.

The U.S. has increased its intelligence-gathering operations near Cuba, CNN reported earlier in May.

Cuba has looked to buy more drones and military equipment from Russia in the past month, an unnamed senior U.S. official told Axios. Havana has reportedly spent years stockpiling different types of drones from Russia and Iran, both of which have extensively used drones in combat since 2022.

But Cuba’s forces are not as well-equipped as Venezuela’s military was by late 2025, mostly made up of aging, Soviet-era equipment. Most of its air-defense systems are short-range or shoulder-launched missiles, rather than large, advanced surface-to-air missile systems, according to experts.

It’s hard to see what initial long-range American strikes would hope to take out on the island, beyond airfields for Cuba’s sparse air force, Fonseca said. Cuba has a total of eight fighter jets in operation, all of which are Soviet-made, according to the British defense think tank, the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

But the U.S. could prioritize homing in on intelligence facilities in Cuba linked to China and Russia, Pfeiffer said.

Russian officials said in 2014 that they would reopen the Soviet-era Lourdes electronic intelligence base near Havana, which had been closed in 2001. Russian investigative journalists reported in 2023 that multiple children of Russian intelligence officers had enrolled in schools in Cuba, their parents with specialist knowledge in electronic warfare, posing as diplomats.

Chinese and Cuban officials agreed that Beijing would build an electronic spy site on the island to pick up signals intelligence (SIGINT) from the southeastern U.S. military bases, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2023. SIGINT can refer to radio transmissions, the signals emitted by military radar systems that detect incoming threats, phone calls and other types of military communications.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a congressional hearing last week that the U.S. had “long been concerned that a foreign adversary using that kind of location that close to our shores is highly problematic.”

But striking these sites would risk retaliation from Beijing or Moscow, and destroying spy facilities would waste an opportunity to get an inside look at Chinese or Russian technology, Fonseca said.

U.S. military forces could be deployed in Cuba if the Cuban government fell, helping to distribute humanitarian aid rather than fighting the Cuban military or seizing Havana’s leaders, Fonseca added.

U.S. troops have repeatedly deployed to Latin America and the Caribbean to help with relief efforts. Thousands of soldiers stayed in Panama to offer humanitarian assistance after roughly 27,000 troops invaded the country and captured dictator Manuel Noriega in 1989.

But the U.S. might also face resistance from the Cuban population, despite protests breaking out on the island over fuel shortages, said Stephen Wilkinson, a senior lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of Buckingham.

“The U.S. should be very wary of trying to put boots on the ground there,” Wilkinson said.

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This story was originally published May 18, 2026 at 12:14 PM.