Cubans Face Twin U.S. Attacks |
CounterPunch Exclusives
CounterPunch Exclusives
Cubans Face Twin U.S. Attacks
Photograph Source: Jason Gamble
Jules Dassin’s classic film noir of New York, The Naked City, was released in 1948. It’s a police investigation of a young woman’s murder and after the two perpetrators pay for their crime, the camera pans to shots of city streets and the skyline. A voiceover narrator intones these now-famous lines: “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” Another of those stories involves Cubans.
In the wake of the 1959 Cuban Revolution – and the U.S.-backed failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion – many Cubans fled the island and, as of 2021, some 2.9 million Cubans are living in the U.S. In September 2025, CNN reported, “A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement flight returned 161 Cuban deportees to the communist-run island last week, the first time many of the men and women aboard had touched Cuban soil in years.”
Yet, as The Guardian reports, “Cubans have traditionally enjoyed a privileged position in the US compared with other Latin American immigrants, thanks to fast-track routes to residency and citizenship.” Going further, it notes “about 45,000 Cubans across the US are believed to have been issued with deportation orders, with another 550,000 vulnerable.”
The targeting of Cubans in the U.S. – and the island nation of Cuba – is led by Marco Rubio, whose parents came from Cuba in 1956, three years before the revolution.
After imposing ever-tighter sanctions on Cuba in January 2026, on February 27th, Trump went so has to suggest that the U.S. could carry out a “friendly takeover” of the island nation.
Cubans have a far longer history of living in New York. The first Cubans began settling in the city in 1823, when NYC was the center of the sugar trade. That year, James Monroe proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine, which asserted the U.S.’s unofficial hegemony over the Western Hemisphere, warning European nations to halt any........