EDITORIAL: Trump Announces the Takeover of Cuba — The Doctrine of Annexation Returns, Unmasked

The Greenland-Canada-Panama-Cuba Sequence

January 2025: Trump announces he wants to buy Greenland. People laugh. February 2025: He proposes that Canada become the 51st state. People laugh less. March 2025: He mentions taking over the Panama Canal. People start to take notice. May 2026: He announces Cuba. People aren’t laughing at all anymore.

This isn’t just a string of statements. It’s a strategy to wear down people’s sense of disbelief. Each announcement pushes the boundaries of what’s considered acceptable. Each subsequent statement seems less crazy because the previous one has already breached the dam. The human brain gets used to it. It’s been documented. It’s being exploited.

The blockade as a prelude

Politicalwire ran the headline that same weekend: “Trump’s Blockade Bet Hasn’t Paid Off.” The blockade gamble didn’t pay off. What blockade? The one the administration has been tightening on Cuba since 2025, further stifling an already bloodless economy. Power outages lasting 18 hours a day in Santiago. Drug shortages in Havana. One in three families skips a meal a day, according to 2025 FAO data.

First, you strangle them. Then you announce that you’re stepping in. This sequence has a name in diplomatic history: the fabrication of a humanitarian pretext. You create the crisis, then present yourself as the savior. And yet, the savior is precisely the one tightening the noose.

There is something chilling about this mechanism. You starve the people, you bring the system to its knees, you wait for images of despair to circulate, and at the precise moment when world opinion is ready to say, “Something must be done”—you intervene. It’s the 2003 Iraq playbook rewritten for the Caribbean in 2026.

Mariela, 38, a nurse at Calixto García Hospital

She had just finished her twelve-hour shift. She walked home because there were no buses. She lit a candle because the power was out. She heard about Trump’s statement from her sister in Miami, who called her in tears. Mariela didn’t cry. She said, “We’ve been through worse. We’ll see even worse.”

That sentence—“We’ve been through worse”—sums up what those in power have never understood about Cuba. The island has been invaded, isolated, strangled, ridiculed, courted, and betrayed. It’s still standing. With its contradictions, its political prisons, its lines outside bakeries, and its almost absurd stubbornness to exist. A nation is not a piece of land. It is a memory armed with patience.

The Pear Tree Nobody Mentions

On a balcony in Centro Habana, an old man is watering a plant. A potted lemon tree he planted in 1962, the year of the missile crisis. He was 14 then. Now he’s 78. He’s seen three generations of U.S. presidents promise the end of the Cuban regime. The lemon tree still bears fruit. It, too, is still there.

That’s what Trump doesn’t know. That’s what the officials at Mar-a-Lago, gathered around the table where maps are drawn, fail to grasp. Cuba isn’t a business deal. Cuba is a 78-year-old man who waters his lemon tree despite everything.

I’m not defending the Cuban regime. It has tortured, imprisoned, and censored. I know that. But there’s a moral chasm between denouncing a dictatorship and supporting its annexation by another power. To confuse the two is to betray both the freedom one claims to defend and the people one claims to liberate.

Brussels remained silent for 24 hours

May 4, 2026: Trump’s statement. May 5, 2026: European silence. No statement from the Commission. No reaction from the Élysée Palace. No firm words from the German chancellor. The silence of a democracy in the face of an announcement of annexation is a silence that weighs heavily.

This silence is not neutral. It tells the peoples of the world: sovereignty is negotiable depending on the size of the country in question. Ukraine—we are outraged, and rightly so. Cuba—we’ll wait and see. This double standard undermines the West’s moral credibility more surely than a thousand Russian disinformation campaigns.

Mexico City, Bogotá, Brasília: The Red Line Has Been Reaffirmed

Claudia Sheinbaum, President of Mexico, responded within four hours. Colombian President Gustavo Petro spoke of “the return of the Monroe Doctrine on steroids.” Lula da Silva called an emergency meeting of Latin American nations. They immediately understood what Europeans refused to name: if Cuba can be taken, any country on the subcontinent can be.

And yet, despite these reactions, not a single capital has mentioned sanctions. Not one has recalled its ambassador. The condemnation stopped at words. Words cannot hold a border.

The European silence haunts me. I feel it in my throat like a betrayal. We spent three years explaining to the Ukrainians that their sovereignty was sacred. And on May 4, 2026, we learned that its sacredness depended on the identity of the aggressor.

A 19th-century idea brought back into fashion

1823. James Monroe articulated his doctrine: the Americas are the exclusive domain of the United States. Any European intervention there would be considered a hostile act. For two centuries, this doctrine served to justify coups, invasions, and military occupations—in Guatemala, Chile, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua.

It was thought to have been laid to rest by Obama, who, in 2013, had officially declared that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.” It wasn’t. It was just dormant. Trump has just reawakened it in eight words and given it a modern twist: no longer the fear of communism, but the logic of the real estate developer—Cuba as an undervalued asset, to be taken over.

The Precedent That Changes Everything

If the announcement of the annexation of a sovereign country becomes a routine media event—classified as a “political controversy” rather than a “crisis of international law”—then a threshold has been crossed. Forever. The language of annexation is once again becoming acceptable. And what is acceptable in language becomes, sooner or later, acceptable in reality.

Authoritarian regimes around the world are watching. Beijing is watching. Moscow is watching. Tehran is watching. They’re taking notes. They’re archiving this moment. The day they decide to annex a neighbor, they’ll cite this statement by Trump as moral precedent. And they’ll be right.

I’m not writing this article solely against Donald Trump. I’m writing it against all of us. Against this habit we’ve developed of scrolling past, shrugging our shoulders, and filing every shocking statement away in the “he says that, but he won’t do it” box. That box is full. It’s overflowing. And the consequences are overflowing with it.

Three Scenarios—None Is Trivial

Scenario 1: Trump takes no military action. The statement remains a publicity stunt. But the phrase “take over” enters the American political lexicon as a viable option. The lexical Rubicon has been crossed. The military Rubicon becomes easier to cross next time.

Scenario 2: Maximum economic pressure. The blockade intensifies. Cuba collapses. A “humanitarian” intervention is negotiated, presented as a rescue mission. This is the most likely scenario. It is also the one that most closely resembles annexation without uniforms.

Scenario 3: Direct military operation. Unlikely, but less impossible than it was a week ago. And if it happens, it will have been publicly announced in advance by the very person who ordered it. Something unseen since 1939.

Yoandry is counting his eggs tonight

He has 47. He’ll have sold 32 by tomorrow morning. He’ll walk home because there’s no gas. He’ll sleep poorly because his 9-year-old daughter has been coughing for three nights and the pharmacy is empty. He doesn’t know if, in six months, he’ll be living in a country called Cuba or in a “U.S. zone of free administration.” No one will ask him for his opinion.

That is the moral debt a great power incurs when its president speaks of a neighboring people as if they were a commodity. This debt isn’t paid in dollars. It’s paid in respect, trust, and credibility. And once it’s lost, it takes fifty years to regain it—if we ever manage to do so.

Yoandry is not a character I invented for dramatic effect. Somewhere in Havana tonight, there is a man with a name roughly like that, living a life roughly like this, who has no idea that on the other side of the continent, his sovereignty has just been declared null and void. That he exists is a fact. That this carries no weight in the calculations of a billionaire at Mar-a-Lago is another fact. Together, these two facts define our era.

What this silence will say about us, in the future

Ten years from now, if Cuba has been annexed, occupied, or reshaped—we will look back on May 4, 2026, just as we look back today on the news reports from March 1938. We will search for the voices that warned us. We will count the newspaper pages that ran headlines stating the obvious. We will note, with the icy calm of historians, that most remained silent.

If nothing happens, if the statement remains just a statement, people will say, “See, you worried for nothing.” But the damage will have been done all the same. Because we will have accepted that a Western president spoke of annexing a neighboring country without any political, media, or diplomatic repercussions following. The threshold will have shifted. And thresholds, once they shift, almost never return to where they were.

On May 4, 2026, in Havana, an old man was watering his lemon tree. In Washington, a man was talking about taking his island. In between, eleven million Cubans were waiting for someone—someone powerful, someone who matters—to simply say: No, you don’t take a people the way you take a piece of property. No one said it loudly enough. As for the lemon tree, it will bear fruit again next year. The question is, on what soil?

By Maxime Marquette, columnist