by Jacob G. Hornberger

February 9, 2026

To justify his targeting the Cuban people with severe economic privation, including a high risk of death by starvation and illness, President Trump has declared a “national emergency.” What’s the “emergency”? He says that Cuba’s communist regime poses a grave threat to the United States because, he says, it is a supporter of terrorism and because it has aligned itself with America’s “adversaries.”

This “national-emergency” declaration is, of course, a sham and lie. Cuba has never been a threat to the United States. On the contrary, it’s actually the other way around. Ever since the Cuban revolution that ousted the brutal pro-U.S. dictator Fulgencio Batista, whose goons would capture underaged girls to serve as sexual perks for well-heeled gamblers in Havana’s Mafia-run casinos, it has been the U.S. government that has served as a grave threat to Cuba.

Communist Cuba has never invaded the United States. It has never tried to assassinate a U.S. president. It has never engaged in state-sponsored terrorism inside the United States.

Instead, it has been the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA that have done all of those things to Cuba.

Moreover, it has never been communist Cuba that has enacted and enforced a brutal economic embargo against the United States. Instead, it is the U.S. government, led by the U.S. national-security branch of the federal government, that has done that to the Cuban people, ensuring a permanent state of economic crisis in conjunction with Cuba’s socialist economic system.

The purpose of all this U.S. aggression and economic strangulation against the Cuban people? Regime change.

During the Cold War, the national-security establishment was convinced that the Reds were coming to get us and that Cuba was serving as a spearhead in that endeavor. But even after the Cold War was over, the U.S. national-security establishment has never been able to let go of its obsession with the Cuban communist regime, even while making nice with communist regimes in countries like Vietnam (where the Pentagon, CIA, and NSA sacrificed more than 58,000 American men for nothing) and Venezuela, where they are now maintaining and partnering with a socialist-communist, narco-terrorist regime.

Today, the Trump regime is doing its best to prevent oil from being sent into Cuba. After having taken control over Venezuela’s oil industry through a campaign of military aggression, violence, killing, and kidnapping, it is now preventing the country from assisting the Cuban people with oil.

The Trump regime is also pressuring Mexico, which has also long assisted the Cuban people with oil, to stop sending oil into Cuba.

The Trump regime is also now threatening to employ its dictatorial tariff policies to impose high tariffs on foreign countries that send oil into Cuba.

The goal of this brutal siege policy is to finally, after decades of failure, bring about a collapse of the Cuban communist regime and have it replaced with another pro-U.S. regime, even if it happens to be as dictatorial, corrupt, and brutal as the Batista regime or the Venezuelan regime with which U.S. officials are now partnering,

There is an important point in this that all Americans, including those who go to church every Sunday, should be aware of: In the process of attempting to achieve this goal of regime change, there is no upward limit on the suffering, including death toll, that will be inflicted on the Cuban people themselves. If they have to suffer even more economic privation than they already have suffered from the decades-old U.S. embargo or if hundreds or thousands have to die in the process, so be it. It will be considered “worth it,” which brings to mind what U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright said when asked whether the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq were worth regime-change efforts against that country. Expressing the official position of the U.S. government, she responded that yes, the deaths of those children were, in fact, “worth it.”

There is one good word to describe this sanctions policy: evil.

In fact, there is a good quote that expands on this concept of evil. It is from the statement that Ramzi Yousef, the bomber in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, made at his sentencing hearing. He told the federal judge:

“You were the first one who killed innocent people, and you are the first one who introduced this type of terrorism to the history of mankind when you dropped an atomic bomb which killed tens of thousands of women and children in Japan and when you killed over 100,000 people, most of them civilians, in Tokyo with fire-bombings. You killed them by burning them to death. And you killed civilians in Vietnam with chemicals as with the so-called Orange agent. You killed civilians and innocent people, not soldiers, in every single war you went to. You went to wars more than any other country in this century, and then you have the nerve to talk about killing innocent people. And now you have invented new ways to kill innocent people. You have so-called economic embargo, which kills nobody other than children and elderly people, and which, other than Iraq, you have been placing the economic embargo on Cuba and other countries for over thirty-five years. The government in its summations and opening statement said that I was a ‘terrorist.’ Yes, I am a terrorist and I am proud of it. And I support terrorism so long as it was against the United States government and Israel, because you are more than terrorists; you are the one who invented terrorism and [are] using it every day. You are butchers, liars and hypocrites.” (Italics added)

Notice that Yousef made reference to the deadly economic embargoes against the people of Iraq and Cuba. In fact, the deaths from the embargo against Iraq were a motivating factor for not only his 1993 attack but also the 9/11 attacks. As we pointed out here at FFF after the 9/11 attacks, the “they attacked us out of hatred for our freedom and values” rationale put out by U.S. officials was just another deliberate lie. It was the U.S. government’s policy of killing people over there that produced retaliatory terrorism over here, which then became the excuse for accelerating the destruction of the rights and liberties of the American people at the hands of their own government, under the guise of waging the “war on terrorism.”

Of course, American statists would say that a terrorist like Ramzi Yousef has no credibility and therefore shouldn’t be quoted. Are you kidding me? Sometimes it takes a terrorist to know a terrorist. And no one can rationally deny that Yousef is right — that U.S. officials are “butchers, liars, and hypocrites.” After all, wasn’t that what Martin Luther King, Jr., was also saying when he pointed out that the U.S. government, led by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, is the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”?