It’s red alert: the US is preparing the pieces for an invasion of Cuba.

On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a message — in Spanish, on Cuban Independence Day, over the heads of the Cuban government, and “directly” to the Cuban people.

His speech delivered on a familiar formula in US-Cuban relations. First, to paraphrase former president Nixon, make the island ‘scream.’ Then, speak softly through the din — with a lofty promise of its imminent ‘freedom’.

Across the island, the US energy blockade continues to force rolling blackouts and acute shortages. Last week, Cuba’s energy minister Vicente de la O Levy said the country had “absolutely no” diesel and “absolutely no” fuel oil. “We have no reserves,” he said.

One hundred million dollars in food and medicine, Rubio said, could be delivered directly to the Cuban people through the Catholic Church and US-selected charities. He claimed the true reason Cubans had no electricity, fuel or food, was not Washington’s blockade, but the greed of their own rulers.

In January, Trump declared the Cuban government an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States. The executive order reheated familiar accusations: Cuba was aligned with Russia, China, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah; it allegedly hosted hostile intelligence capabilities; it spread communist ideas across the hemisphere. To meet the supposed threat, the order created a secondary tariff system against any country that directly or indirectly sold or provided oil to Cuba.

Since then, just one tanker, the Russian Anatoly Kolodkin, has delivered fuel. The result can be measured in darkness. Fuel becomes electricity. Electricity becomes water, refrigeration, transport, medicine, sleep. A tariff order in Washington becomes a failed pump in Havana, a spoiled fridge in Santiago de Cuba, a hospital generator in Camagüey running down its last reserve. The blockade does not need to announce itself as violence. It works through grids, ports, insurers, banks, shipping routes, spare parts and fear.

For Rubio, the culprit is GAESA, Cuba’s state-owned conglomerate that runs large parts of Cuba’s economy. The following day in Miami, ICE arrested Adys Lastres Morera, sister of GAESA’s executive president, calling her a “a deportable lawful permanent resident.”

On 20 May, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against Raúl Castro, 94, and five co-defendants over the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shootdown. The indictment came with a warrant. Asked whether the U.S. military would arrest Castro, Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche did not rule it out. “We expect that he will show up here by his own will or by another way,” he said, to applause in Miami. The charges appear to be part of a new imperial modus operandi, coming months after the abduction of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro.

The following day, the Supreme Court revived claims brought under the Helms-Burton Act by Havana Docks, a US company seeking compensation for property confiscated after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The justices set aside a lower court decision that had thrown out $440 million in judgments against cruise companies that docked in Havana during the Obama-era thaw.

Two legal tracks of counter-revolution now run together. One charges the revolutionary generation with murder. The other reanimates the property claims of the expropriated. The old leadership must be punished. The old owners must be restored.

And offshore, the naval carrier strike group arrived.

On 20 May, U.S. Southern Command described the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group’s deployment to the Caribbean as “readiness and presence, unmatched reach and lethality, and strategic advantage.” The announcement landed the same day Washington unveiled the Castro indictment.

A few days earlier, a story placed in Axios cited classified U.S. intelligence — which the outlet admits “could become a pretext for U.S. military action” — claiming that Cuba had acquired more than 300 military drones and discussed possible counter-attacks on Guantánamo Bay, U.S. military vessels and Florida. Cuba’s foreign minister Bruno Rodríguez accused Washington of fabricating a “fraudulent case” to justify sanctions and potential military intervention. “Cuba neither threatens nor desires war,” he said.

That is why the Cabinet of the Progressive International issued its warning this week: “Trump is manufacturing consent for the invasion of Cuba.” The statement condemned the Raúl Castro indictment as another step in Washington’s regime-change campaign, linking the Miami political theatre, new sanctions and drone allegations to a wider effort to recolonise Cuba and the hemisphere.

The script is too tired even for Hollywood: a peaceful, sovereign neighbour recast as a platform for foreign adversaries, a country under siege recast as a threat, a people denied fuel recast as proof of government failure. The speech, the sanctions, the indictment, the carrier group and the leaks are parts of the same machinery.

Hondurasgate reveals that machinery from the inside.

On 30 April, the investigative platform Hondurasgate began releasing 37 audio recordings extracted from WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram exchanges between powerful political figures in the region. The full collection appeared to expose a transnational operation involving Honduras, the United States, Israel and Argentina: electoral manipulation, media warfare, diverted public funds, presidential pardons, military expansion, charter cities and a plan to turn Honduras into a strategic US-Israeli asset in Latin America.

The Reactionary International — PI’s research project tracking the global coordination of the far right — published its dossier on Hondurasgate. Drop Site News commissioned Earshot, an independent sonic investigation organisation, to analyse three of the leaked recordings. Earshot concluded that the files were authentic recordings of former and current Honduran presidents Juan Orlando Hernández and Nasry Asfura.

Hernández, the former Honduran president convicted in New York on drug-trafficking charges and later pardoned by Trump, is alleged to have discussed his return to power. The files describe a plan to expand ZEDEs — charter cities that dissolve national sovereignty into corporate zones — and to build a new US military base on Roatán. In one recording, Hernández reportedly says he has secured $350,000 from Javier Milei to set up a media outlet in the United States, with Republican support, to ”eradicate the cancer of the left” in Honduras and across Latin America. Colombia and Mexico are named as targets.

In another recording, Asfura reportedly discusses opening another airbase on the island of Roatán, near Próspera, one of the ZEDEs. He speaks of buying metals and materials from Argentina and the United States while avoiding China. “The Chinese were making offers,” he says, “but we’re not going to give in.”

Próspera, a libertarian enclave on Roatán, was meant to place territory, law and public authority beyond democratic control. When Honduras’ National Assembly unanimously voted to end the ZEDE framework, Próspera Inc. sued the Honduran state for more than $10 billion through the World Bank’s investor-state arbitration system — a claim so vast it amounted to a corporate ransom on popular sovereignty. That is why the Progressive International launched Honduras Resiste: to defend Honduras against corporate colonialism and the attempt to turn democratic self-government into an investment dispute.

Cuba shows the pressure from the outside. Hondurasgate shows the collaborators inside.

Imperial power rarely arrives alone. It finds local partners who can sign the contracts and police the streets. They speak the language of the nation and order while selling the national territory in pieces. Their role is to translate foreign domination into domestic administration.

That is why Hondurasgate matters beyond Honduras. It gives the Reactionary International something rare and incriminating: operational texture. The conspiracy is money, voice notes, call logs, campaign consultants, military plans, evangelical mobilisation, Israeli lobbying, and U.S. strategic doctrine.

Across the hemisphere, the pattern is tightening. Cuba is placed under energy siege and then offered relief on Washington’s terms. Venezuela’s president is captured and flown north. Honduras is retooled as a platform for U.S. and Israeli power. Colombia and Mexico are named as targets for media warfare. China is invoked to justify renewed domination. The old backyard has been reopened as a theatre of American recovery.

But Nuestra América is not empty terrain. It is a continent of organised peoples, sovereign projects and living memories. It remembers the coups, juntas, debt traps, contras, blockades, disappeared. It also remembers every act of resistance and construction.

The task now is to expose the machinery before it moves further. The Progressive International stands with the forces across the hemisphere working to break the machinery of domination — from Cuba resisting siege, to Honduras exposing conspiracy, to every movement fighting to make Nuestra América ungovernable for empire.

In solidarity,

The Progressive International Secretariat

Latest from the Movement

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Cuban doctors from Havana to Calabria

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Free the Sumud Flotilla detainees

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Italian dockers strike for Gaza

Across Italy, workers led by the Unione Sindacale di Base took nationwide strike action on 18 May under the slogan “We block everything,” joining unions, students and civil society against rearmament, rising living costs and the Meloni government’s complicity with Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Italy’s workers are showing where the struggle must move next: to organised disruption of the supply chains that keep the war machine in motion.

Our History

22 May - The Truman Doctrine

US President Harry S. Truman signed a bill authorising $400 million of military and economic assistance for Greece and Turkey on 22 May 1947, inaugurating an age of destabilising US interventions around the globe.

Learn more about this history with this beautifully designed Instagram carousel.

Art of the Week

Motyko is a Honduran Cuban American multidisciplinary artist from Tequesta-Seminole land, Miami, working in collage, film and poetry to “fight for a world where our people are free, where community care exists above profit, and where we’ve shattered colonial restrictions on what’s possible.”

This work was created to highlight those fighting against the extractive industry in Honduras, asking: “What remains of a land after its people are forced to abandon it? After commodification and exploitation…? Motyko’s multimedia works have also covered issues including gentrification, immigration, workers’ rights, and the Palestinian liberation and BDS movements. Motyko encourages us to “support environmental defenders and lean into your cultural sustainability practices.”