The sea does not forget. Sixty-four years ago, Soviet missiles pointed at the heart of an American empire from a sliver of a Caribbean island, and the world held its breath at the edge of annihilation.The crisis passed. The missiles were removed.However, the punishment never ended. What Washington called an embargo, what Havana has always called by its true name, a blockade, began on February 3, 1962, and has never stopped.It is the longest sustained campaign of economic strangulation in modern history, outlasting the Cold War, outlasting the Soviet Union, outlasting every justification ever offered for it, and now, in the spring of 2026, it has metastasized into something that should terrify anyone still capable of being terrified.In what appears to be a carefully calibrated show of force, the United States has deployed the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and its strike group into Caribbean waters, a move that coincided with the unsealing of murder charges against former Cuban leader Raúl Castro for a 1996 incident in which Cuban forces shot down planes operated by the Miami exile group Brothers to the Rescue.US Southern Command framed the move as a demonstration of operational readiness, citing the carrier’s prior combat operations from the Taiwan Strait to the Persian Gulf to underscore its capabilities and reach.“Welcome to the Caribbean, Nimitz Carrier Strike Group!” the command posted on social media, with the casual menace of a man pressing a boot to a throat.This is the Imperial Theatre. It is the language of domination dressed in legal costume.The empire always needs a pretext.In 1962, it was Soviet missiles. In 1996, it was a civilian aircraft.Today, for the Trump administration, which has declared Cuba “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to national security, the pretext is a 94-year-old man.Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío described the indictment as “fraudulent”, lacking any legal, political, or moral foundation, and warned that the US has a “well-known, dark practice” of using accusations like this to take military action against sovereign states.He is not wrong. The playbook is familiar. First the dossier, then the carrier group, then the rubble.Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel accused Washington of using the island’s economic weakness as an “outrageous pretext” to seize it, promising that “any external aggressor will clash with an impregnable resistance”.These are not empty words from a government that has survived sixty years of siege, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination plots, the sabotage campaigns, the tourist boycotts, and now a fuel blockade that has plunged 10mn people into recurring darkness.The Trump administration’s attempts, in the words of Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, to “tighten the sanctions noose around Cuba, combined with a decades-long trade, economic, financial, humanitarian and now energy blockade, directly reflect Washington’s intolerance for dissent”.“It is,” she said, “a cynical embodiment of a revived Monroe Doctrine.”The Monroe Doctrine. That 19th-century declaration of hemispheric ownership, that proclamation that Latin America belongs to Washington as a private estate.It never died. It merely slept. And now it walks again.Enter Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, son of Cuban exiles, the man who has waited his whole political life for this moment.Rubio has been unsparing: Cuba needs “new people in charge”, he said.“Their economy doesn’t work... they’re in a lot of trouble, and the people in charge don’t know how to fix it, so they have to get new people in charge.”It is the logic of the conqueror, packaged as the counsel of a friend.And Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez did not hesitate to label Rubio a “spokesperson for corrupt and vengeful interests”.However, here is what distinguishes 2026 from every previous chapter of this long war: Cuba is no longer alone in ways that matter.Russia has pledged the “most active support” to Cuba, with foreign ministry spokesperson Zakharova declaring full solidarity and vowing to “strongly condemn any attempts at gross interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state, intimidation and the use of unilateral restrictive measures, threats and blackmail”.In March, Russia sent an oil tanker to the island, which Moscow called “humanitarian assistance”, a direct and deliberate defiance of the American blockade.China added its voice separately, demanding that the US stop wielding the “big sticks” of judicial proceedings and sanctions and cease its threats of force against Cuba.This is the architecture of the new world.The United States is simultaneously running pressure campaigns against Iran, backed by China, and Cuba, backed by Russia.The targets are no longer isolated. They are networked. They are backed.And as the empire extends itself across three simultaneous confrontations, from the Taiwan Strait to the Persian Gulf to the Caribbean, the question is no longer whether American power is formidable. It is whether it is wise.Cuba’s deputy foreign minister reminded the world that those charged in the 1996 incident “were fulfilling a duty, the duty to protect the airspace, the homeland, and the peace of the Cuban people”, and concluded with a warning that must be heard: “Any attempt to use this excuse for action against these comrades within Cuba will be met with fierce resistance from the Cuban people.”The USS Nimitz, the oldest carrier in the American fleet, commissioned in 1975, is now prowling waters it has not patrolled with such intent since the height of the Cold War.History does not repeat. But it returns. It rises from the water.And the ghost that haunts the Caribbean in May 2026 is the same ghost that haunted it in October 1962: the arrogance of a superpower that cannot conceive of a world in which it does not own every shore it surveys.The Cuban people know what that ghost wants. They have always known.And for 64 years, they have answered it with the only word that the empire never learns to accept.No.• The writer is a prominent news anchor, programme presenter and media instructor.
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