WASHINGTON — The United States is not moving toward imminent military action against Cuba, U.S. officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday. The disclosure came even as President Donald Trump renewed threats that American warships returning from the Middle East could be deployed off the island, with Trump musing that a carrier could “come in, stop about 100 yards offshore, and they’ll say: ‘Thank you very much. We give up.’”
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to detail private discussions, said the administration’s immediate goal is not to topple Cuba’s government, but rather to compel changes in its policies by coupling a generous aid package with stiff sanctions. The carrot-and-stick approach has so far yielded little: Cuba has not outright refused the offer, the officials said, but they are not optimistic that the government will accept the conditions.
Central to the U.S. proposal are the release of political prisoners, an end to political and religious repression, and an opening to American private-sector investment. Cuban U.N. Ambassador Ernesto Soberón Guzmán last week declared that “negotiations on issues like regime change or removing the president are out of the question. No internal affairs of Cuba are on the table.”
The administration tightened the economic vise Thursday by sanctioning GAESA, a sprawling business conglomerate run by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces. The move followed an executive order Trump signed last week that broadened his authority to target the island. Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez called the measures “collective punishment” and, in a post on X, accused the U.S. government of “genocidal intent against Cuba.” He wrote that the sanctions “rely on the assumption that the United States can impose its will on the world while threatening foreign citizens and businesses with illegitimate coercion.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants and a longtime hardliner on Cuba, told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that Cuba’s economic model is broken and that its leadership cannot fix it. “And the reason that they can’t fix it is not just because they’re communist. That’s bad enough,” Rubio said. “But they’re incompetent communists. The only thing worse than a communist is an incompetent one.” Rubio met Pope Leo XIV in Rome on Thursday, in part to discuss Cuba, where the Catholic Church retains significant influence.
Diplomatic contact between Washington and Havana has intensified in recent months. Earlier this year, Rubio met in St. Kitts and Nevis with Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, the grandson of former Cuban leader Raúl Castro and a figure believed to hold sway in Havana. Then, on April 10, two senior State Department officials — Jeremy Lewin, who oversees all U.S. foreign assistance, and Michael Kozak, the top U.S. diplomat for Latin America — led a delegation to Havana and met with Rodríguez Castro again, a U.S. official familiar with the meetings confirmed. It was the first U.S. government flight to land in Cuba outside Guantanamo Bay since 2016, during the Obama administration’s rapprochement. The session was “professional and cordial” but left the U.S. side unconvinced that Cuban leaders would entertain even modest reforms as their humanitarian situation worsens.
Cuban officials, meanwhile, have lambasted the outreach as hypocritical given the ongoing U.S. embargo and the Trump administration’s energy blockade, which deepened Cuba’s crisis after the U.S. removed Nicolás Maduro as Venezuela’s leader in January. Guzmán said Thursday that “traveling 4,500 miles to meet with the Pope, supposedly to request his ‘good offices’ in delivering U.S. humanitarian assistance to the Cuban people through the Church, while at the same time claiming that the blockade does not exist, is a blatant insult to human intelligence.”