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What Does Trump Want With Cuba?

The Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign is pushing Cuba into a deeper humanitarian crisis.

Cuba is spiraling into a humanitarian crisis. The country’s long-standing economic and political turmoil reached new heights this week as the effects of the Trump administration’s oil blockade took hold.

The president’s targeting of Cuba is part of the administration’s broader attacks on the region, where the U.S. kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores earlier this year and has executed more than 140 people in boat strikes.

As the U.S. hurtles toward war with Iran and further military action in the Middle East and continues to fund Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Cuba is just the latest foreign policy arena where the Trump administration has further ensnared the U.S. This week on The Intercept Briefing, senior politics reporter Akela Lacy speaks with fellow reporter Jonah Valdez about how U.S. foreign policy is impacting the upcoming midterm elections and Valdez’s recent reporting on how a new anti-Zionist PAC has associated with influencers who have made statements that are outright antisemitic. 

Lacy also speaks to University of Miami history professor Michael Bustamante and Andrés Pertierra, a historian of Cuba specializing in post-1959 regime durability, about the crisis unfolding in Cuba.

Missing from mainstream news coverage of Trump’s attacks on Cuba and U.S. efforts to impose regime change in the region is a recognition of how Trump’s policies fit into his attacks on immigrants in the U.S., Bustamante says.

“One of the, I think, subtext of why this administration might be keen on government change in Cuba, like in Venezuela, it’s not just about being able to plant the flag and say, ‘We buried communism in the Americas. Something that no other president could do,’” Bustamante says.   

“It’s also about, we can deport more people. And so how does the Cuban American community react to that? That, I think, is an open question. Something that I haven’t seen linked yet to the conversation about regime change, per se.”

The Trump administration’s strategy is likely to backfire, Pertierra says.

“You don’t get long-term cooperation stability through fear,” he says. “So I don’t think it’s actually going to solidify the U.S. position in Latin America. I think it’s going to further weaken it.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. 

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter for The Intercept. 

Jonah Valdez: And I’m Jonah Valdez, reporter for The Intercept, also covering politics and U.S. foreign policy.

AL: We have been deep in midterms coverage. We had early voting in Texas start this week. The first real midterms of the cycle are less than a month away in March.

Jonah, you’ve been reporting on a new and interesting fundraising group that’s active in midterms this cycle — a group called the Anti-Zionist America PAC, or AZAPAC. Tell us a little bit about them.

JV: AZAPAC got its start in August, and so they’ve been around for a few months now, but really sort of hit traction online when they posted sort of like an ad video in November.

And the video is full of a lot of explosive imagery and language from Trump and Netanyahu shaking hands, to a lot of images of Israel’s bombs blowing up Palestinian civilian infrastructure, a lot of dead children. And in this, there’s this voiceover stating the whole thesis for the thing, which is “We need to get Zionists out of American politics. They are extorting Americans of their taxpayer dollars and they have too much influence over the U.S. government.” And they list some of their top enemies, which is AIPAC — which, Akela, you’ve reported on extensively — on top of the more moderate group J Street. So they’ve really positioned themselves as a group that is diametrically opposed to the pro-Israel lobby establishment in U.S. politics.

However, when you go a little deeper into its founder Michael Rectenwald, who is a former New York University professor, and the associations that he’s made with figures on the far right, the picture starts to be a lot muddier than just opposition of Zionism.

StopAntisemitism Takes Credit for Getting Hundreds Fired. A Music Teacher Is Suing.

It’s a tricky thing, right? Because, as you know, it’s like the biggest weapon that the pro-Israel establishment has against the free Palestine movement, against any sort of advocacy to hold Israel accountable for the genocide in Gaza or any of its actions, is a blanket statement that all of that is antisemitic. A phrase that’s commonly used is, you know, claims of the genocide in Gaza is “antisemitic blood libel.” So you have this situation where this group is trying to be a very loud anti-Zionist voice, but is also making affiliations with figures who are very clearly interested in rooting their criticism of Israel in antisemitic conspiracy theories.

AL: Are they gaining a lot of traction? Are they raising a lot of money? Why should people care about what this group is doing?

JV: That’s a good question. I mean, the first FEC filings came out in January. And so from August when they were founded up until December, they raised about $111,000 — which in the grand scheme of things, when you’re going up against a PAC as large as AIPAC, it’s not a lot.

But I think why we should care about them is what makes them unique. And what makes them unique is they are very directly trying to win over support from not just the left, not just progressives, but also the right and growing criticism of Israel on the right, which has been a huge question mark for pro-Palestine advocates for the past year. Of like, how do we grapple with growing criticism of Israel among the Republican base or even further right than that, and people who are disaffected voters who may not have voted or even avoided voting for Trump altogether, but still have conservative views and are now criticizing Israel for its genocide in Gaza? How do we treat them? Should we ally with them? Should we get support wherever we can? Or should we be skeptical because of their other views?

And so AZAPAC is really, especially in its early months, really catered to that audience. And we see this with its founder Michael Rectenwald going on podcasts such as The Stew Peters Show. Which, if you’re not familiar with Stew Peters, he is a far-right white nationalist who has a show, a podcast that has gained popularity but really took off during Covid. But a big feature of his brand is what he calls the “Zionist occupation” of the government, and a lot of Jewish antisemitic conspiracy theories basically blaming Jewish people for all the issues, including domestic issues of the U.S. government.

He says the U.S. is “occupied” by “anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-American Jews who are not just working on behalf of Israel, but on behalf of a more broad Satanic Talmudic agenda that’s taken shape over thousands of years.” And in that same episode, he referred to Department of Justice Attorney Leo Terrell [as] the N-word, and also in another episode referred to Jewish people using another antisemitic slur. And this is just kind of run of the mill for folks like Stew Peters, who, again, the AZAPAC founder Michael Rectenwald is associating himself with, willingly, he told me, to gain support from other audiences to have a broad range of support.

AL: Jonah, I know you’ve had extensive conversations with Mr. Rectenwald, but can you tell us a little bit about his responses to some of your reporting?

JV: I reached out hoping to have an open-ended conversation. Just giving everyone the benefit of the doubt when they say that they are trying to be critical of Israel. It’s like, OK, well, let me hear out what you have to say. 

But before our call, I did a little bit of digging — of like, how is he kind of framing the argument when he’s off-camera? Just going on his Twitter, his X account, and what I found was a lot of references, not just to Zionism, but a lot of references to what he calls the “Jewish mafia” or “Jewish elites,” which are pretty common dog whistles to the far right.

A New PAC Wants to Counter Israel’s Influence. It Also Welcomes Hitler Apologists.

So I bring some of these questions to our conversation, and he gratefully agreed to talk with me on the phone. And [I] gave him a chance to let me know what his platform is, and he reiterated that he wants to end all U.S. military support to Israel. He opposes the genocide, wants to oppose the pro-Israel lobby in Congress, and he is pouring money into certain campaigns that are looking to unseat certain pro-AIPAC members, such as Randy Fine in Florida. 

Then I ask him about, well, what about the language that you use? Don’t you think that this risks kind of blurring the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism? And that’s when he started kind of going on the defensive, and he disavowed any idea that he himself was antisemitic.

At the time, I only knew that he was on The Stew Peters Show for one appearance. And he said that that was like a very uncomfortable situation for him and that he would’ve called out Peters, but he’s a very aggressive person on his show and he didn’t want to startle him or anything. After our conversation, I come to realize that he has actually been on The Stew Peters Show three to four times to promote AZAPAC.

So I call him back and press him on this more. I say, like, hey, what’s going on here? You’re clearly a regular, and I think you’re clearly trying to gain his support and the support of his audience.

This time, he said, Stew Peters really helped us out in the beginning and after appearing on his show a lot of donations poured in and I don’t want to throw him under the bus. And he didn’t rule out any future appearances.

AL: Who are the candidates that this PAC is working with?

JV: I want to highlight two of them that stuck out to me. One of them is Tyler Dykes. You might recognize him as a convicted rioter from the Capitol riots on January 6. He pleaded guilty to assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal officers, but also was accused, famously, of performing a Nazi salute on the Capitol steps while storming the Capitol building. And even before that, he was also convicted of taking part in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.  Actually, for that, he was also sentenced for carrying a burning tiki torch, which I guess there’s a charge in Virginia for carrying a burning object to intimidate.

Anyway, there’s also figures that AZAPAC is supporting, like Casey Putsch who is running for governor in Ohio. He posted a video where basically he is giving a lot of Hitler apologist statements. 

But there’s two other candidates that I wanted to mention who AZAPAC supported and endorsed, which is Anthony Aguilar, who is running as a progressive Green Party candidate out of North Carolina. And he was actually one of the whistleblowers from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation that blew the whistle on violence aimed at aid-seeking Palestinians in Gaza. He’s taken that moment into a whole political career. 

He actually decided to rescind his endorsement after The Intercept approached him — after we approached him — with our reporting on both Rectenwald, his statements, his associations with the far right, but also these backgrounds of other candidates that Aguilar’s campaign wasn’t aware of.

And it’s the same case for another recent AZAPAC endorsement, which is Greg Stoker, who is also a progressive Green Party candidate. He was part of one of the flotillas to break the siege in Gaza. And, you know, similar case where when we approached him with our reporting on Rectenwald and AZAPAC — decided to rescind his endorsement. And sure enough, as of this week, all mention of both Aguilar and Stoker’s campaign were removed from AZAPAC’s website, scrubbed from social media.

I think they are making a calculation similar to some concerns that I’ve raised in my reporting — it harms the movement.

AL: Jonah, we’re looking forward to reading your piece, which is up now. Thank you for walking us through your reporting. You know, while frustration over Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been a major focus of our reporting and covering how the Israel lobby is approaching midterms and how much voters still care about that — this is far from the only foreign policy issue that is top of mind for voters right now. 

We are potentially moving toward war with Iran, according to reporting from Axios on Wednesday. There is a very large aircraft carrier moving toward the Middle East.

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Our episode today focuses on what’s happening as the U.S. is ramping up sanctions in Cuba. If you’ve been following The Intercept’s reporting, you know, we’ve been tracking the more than 140 people the administration has killed in boat strikes in the Caribbean. Amid these boat strikes, we hope you did not forget that the U.S. also kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

After toppling Maduro, the Trump administration demanded the Venezuelan government hand over its oil. This has led to a fuel shortage in Cuba, which largely depends on Venezuela’s oil. Now the Trump administration has Cuba squarely in its crosshairs. At the end of January, Trump signed an executive order declaring that Cuba constituted an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security — we’ve heard that one before — which has led to an oil blockade, which is now spiraling into a humanitarian crisis in Cuba as we speak. 

To understand what’s happening, I spoke to Michael Bustamante, an associate professor of history and chair in Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, and Andrés Pertierra, a historian of Cuba specializing in post-1959 regime durability. 

Here’s our conversation. 

Michael Bustamante and Andrés Pertierra, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Andrés Pertierra: Thanks for having me. 

Michael Bustamante: Thanks for having me.

AL: To start, Andrés, the last time you spoke to The Intercept in 2024, you were joining us from Havana, Cuba. You’ve since left. What can you tell us about what life was like for people in the country when you were last there?

AP: I was there in 2024. Things were really bad already when I was there. The country was recovering from the Covid crisis more or less, protest waves had gone from a historic exception to part of the new normal. And while I was there, there were actually the beginning of what became, I think, in total six national blackouts. Six times that the entire national grid collapsed, usually for two to three days. Inflation was out of control. Wages had gone back to basically symbolic, at least if you were in the state sector. 

And there was just a despair, a generalized despair, that I had never remembered seeing before. I mean, people were always desperate and frustrated, but there was a despair of things ever getting better that was novel, that was kind of pushing people to leave en masse. In the last five years about 20 percent of the population has left the island, which is pretty extraordinary for a country not in a state of war.

AL: Recently, a reporter asked Trump about Cuba making a deal with the United States. Let’s hear Trump’s response.

Reporter: You’re warning Cuba to make a deal. What does that deal look like? What do you want them to do? 

Donald Trump: Make a deal. Cuba is right now a failed nation, and they don’t even have jet fuel to get for airplanes to take........

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