"The Trump administration has been dancing around the question of whether it will carry out military strikes against Cuba. I am told it is increasingly willing to take such a step.
That's a significant escalation from a few months ago, when officials were primarily focused on using economic and diplomatic pressure to squeeze the communist regime in Havana.
A U.S. official and a person familiar with the administration's discussions on Cuba told me that President Donald Trump and his aides have grown frustrated that the U.S. pressure campaign, which includes starving the island of fuel, has not led Cuba's leaders to agree to significant economic and political reforms. So they're taking the military option more seriously than previously.
"The mood has definitely changed," said the person familiar with discussions, whom, like others, I granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue. "The initial idea on Cuba was that the leadership was weak and that the combination of stepped-up sanctions enforcement, really an oil blockade, and clear U.S. military wins in Venezuela and Iran would scare the Cubans into making a deal. Now Iran has gone sideways, and the Cubans are proving much tougher than originally thought. So now military action is on the table in a way that it wasn't before."
Last week, news broke that the U.S. is moving toward indicting former Cuban President Raul Castro, the 94-year-old brother of late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. This has led to some speculation that the U.S. could carry out a military extraction operation against Castro, the same way it did against Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in January.
But U.S. military planners are weighing an array of options beyond grabbing one or two individuals, I'm told. The military action could range from a single airstrike meant to scare the regime into concessions to a ground invasion meant to uproot it.
U.S. Southern Command has in the past few weeks "convened a planning series" — in other words, started drafting plans for potential military action — the U.S. official and the person familiar with the talks told me…"
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Armand
snapped some photos of games he didn't get a chance to play in at Council of Five Nations.
