By Aunt America
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinions on ScoonTV
From the outside, MAGA’s appreciation for guns, explosions, and star-spangled banners might lead to the supposition that it wants a war before the NFL season is out, and that’s understandable. It is also understandable to think of Cuba as a nice, fat 90-mile-away target for said war. Why not?
Hand-wringing over Cuba has marked every living American. The Greatest Generation saw it in prime Latin American form– a thriving tourist area in the cities and abject poverty in rural areas, unsettled every decade or so by government overthrows and a revolving door of dictators. It was rife with the usual remnants of colonialism, slavery, Hemingway, corruption, and foreign investments.
But Boomers most closely identify Cuba with the terror of the 1962 Missile Crisis, an island nation best known for its role as a Soviet satellite. Somewhere between diving under desks in nuclear Armageddon drills and absorbing the stark reality of the botched Bay of Pigs, Cuba in the minds of many Boomers never really existed as an independent nation. It was a movie set, a lovely and harsh one, a place where all-powerful politicos sandboxed World War III.
This they handed down to Generation X, who mostly regard Cuba with bewilderment. What’s going on down there? How did Castro just… outlive President after President, and what were we supposed to do with it in a post-Soviet Union world?
The American foreign policy stance has mostly been: Not much. Cuba is an island in stasis, a communist nation that missed the anti-communist breakup of the USSR. Fidel simply hung around and hung around, and when he finally died of old age, oh look, there’s his brother, Raul. That Cuba is now technically led by a non-Castro is beside the point; the structure of the Communist party continues to hold, and it seems we’ll just stay in this floating form of 1963 forever.
That MAGA seems to have recently turned its eyes to Cuba doesn’t necessarily indicate a desire to blow it off the map. MAGA doesn’t want a war, in Cuba or elsewhere; the movement is deeply contemptuous of the neocon-led Middle Eastern conflicts, all of which seemed to repeat Vietnam’s error of putting politicians in the chairs of generals. Bureaucratic creation of rules of engagement meant dead and wounded soldiers, a horrific epidemic of veteran suicide, and unacceptably high occurrences of PTSD.
Bush 41 and 43 voters might have supported Desert Storm and the initial invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but the “War on Terror” did not quite go the way of the Iraq-Kuwait war. It lasted more than a month and a half, for one thing, and sank the US into nation-building. All of this is right out for modern MAGA; Zoomers, especially young men who turned out hard for Trump in 2024, aren’t against the military. They’re just against the military being in a war. Peace through strength is fashionable again.
Which returns us to the shores of Cuba, which is, and always has been, far more than an unwilling star on the international stage by dint of its location. The fate of modern Cuba is intrinsically united to that of Venezuela’s, and the two nations share more than a few similarities. Both are rich in natural resources; like Venezuela, Cuba possesses massive potential as an oil-rich nation, and it also offers a wealth of natural gas, arable land, and minerals, including tech-dependent copper, cobalt, and nickel. Political instability and economy-strangling policies, however, have left both nations’ resource capitalization only partially developed.
What has long been necessary to prod Cuba out of the Kennedy administration is a shift in what seems possible within it. The Communist stalemate has seemed to dominate its destiny, but that was before Delta Force brought sonic weapons and an unleashed military to Caracas.
The Nicolás Maduro raid revealed a new way of thinking in American military action and foreign policy. Rather than sidling up to government opposition and making a large racket in the UN, the Trump administration shifted the world’s idea about what was possible– and when. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio think in terms of days, not weeks, and weeks, not months. But that’s not how Americans have traditionally understood how military action works. And the generations now stepping into leadership roles– Millennials on down– don’t have a very long attention span anyway.
The situations between Venezuela and the Middle East are not exactly comparable, and that is where Cuba enters the party. Troops in Afghanistan and Iraq were hampered by fanatically loyal local soldiers and a culture that wasn’t exactly pro-American. Venezuela, on the other hand, housed a despot whose security staff was from… Cuba.
What happened on the night of January 3rd was not a war. It was the targeted removal of a problem that tipped over dominoes worldwide– dominoes including Iran, Russia, China, and, yes, Cuba. It was over in less time than a James Cameron movie. Thrilled Venezuelians, scattered over the world by the Maduro regime, were more than happy to provide Trump with free PR about their approval of his work.
It was a few awesome seconds of helicopter footage and memes about the current state of Hugo Chavez’s remains (several million molecules of rubble, according to reports). This was the kind of war that MAGA could get behind– zero American casualties, zero botched removals, and highly shareable content for TikTok.
All the left had in its defense, domestically, was sputtering about Trump reposting a video of the choppers accompanied by the strains of “Fortunate Son” (“THAT’S AN ANTI-WAR SONG!!” Yes. Exactly.) It was a daring capture, both exciting and dangerous– exciting because this was possible, and dangerous because nights filled with gunfire and air support don’t always turn out that way.
At some point and by some high-ranking person, Maduro was probably given this speech, direct from Marlowe in The Big Sleep:
“You’re going to cop a plea, brother, don’t ever think you’re not. And you’re going to say just what we want you to say and nothing we don’t want you to say.”
Maduro’s first instinct was probably to reply something like Marlowe’s arrestee (“Go f–k yourself”), but instead he found himself surprised that he got rights when he was read them. In a federal court, he pronounced himself kidnapped and still the rightful leader of Venezuela, but it’s difficult to imagine he might hope for a rescue after what he just saw in the middle of the night, just after New Year’s.
The aftermath of the Venezuela adventure showed another difference between MAGA and the Bush wing of the Republican Party. When usual cries were raised that “we’re just in it for the oil,” the general response from the Trump base was, “You’re damned right we’re in it for the oil, and we’re splitting the goods with Venezuelas, and the second we’re energy independent with our own pipelines and nuclear power, we won’t need to indulge in even that much mucking about.” It is not the season for apologetic news conferences and playing defense.
It is also not the season to hang around South America. What MAGA loved most about the Maduro’s snatch-and-go was not its speed, but its finality. No one set up camp. Trump did not go on television to instruct the Venezuelan people about how to conduct an election. We’re in, we’re out, we’re staying out.
Whether the Venezuelan situation is repeatable in Cuba is debatable. Whether MAGA will support a military decade in the tropics, however, is not.
Curtis Scoon is the founder of ScoonTv.com Download the ScoonTv App to join our weekly livestream every Tuesday @ 8pm EST! Support true independent media. Become a VIP member www.scoontv.com/vip-signup/ and download the ScoonTv App from your App Store.
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