The White House has been talking a tough game about Cuba for months. President Trump has repeatedly hinted that Havana's leaders could be the next target, and Florida Republicans have fueled expectations of military action.
But people familiar with the discussions say the military option has quietly moved to the back burner. Instead, the Trump team is focusing on something slower and less dramatic: cutting off every source of income for Cuba's Communist government.
The shift is notable because it comes after the January operation that captured Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro. That mission showed Washington was willing to use force to go after hostile leaders. For a moment, Cuba looked like it could be next.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe even visited Cuba in May, meeting with senior leaders in a country of 9.4 million people. At the time, an anonymous CIA official said Ratcliffe's message was simple: Trump should be taken seriously, and Venezuela was the proof.
But people familiar with the matter now see little purpose in a military or special forces operation against Cuba. Trump does not want U.S. soldiers on the ground, and the Middle East war is already in its fifth month and unpopular at home. Hitting Cuba after Iran just looks less realistic.
The policy instead follows the same playbook being used on Tehran. Scott Bessent, the U.S. Treasury secretary, said the U.S. will soon impose economic-isolation measures on Iran that have never been seen in history. Cuba is getting the same treatment, just quieter.
The economic pressure is not theoretical. In May, the U.S. sanctioned Gaesa, a military-run tourism conglomerate and Cuba's biggest tourism business. In July, it went after Cuba's tourism ministry, the second-biggest, hitting a main source of income.
The tougher oil and fuel embargo is now possible because Maduro fell and the U.S. has leverage over Venezuela, which was once Cuba's main oil backer. A U.S. naval quarantine of oil deliveries to Cuba's government has caused repeated blackouts. UN agencies warn of shortages of food and medicine, with hospitals and cancer care already affected.
Marco Rubio, the Cuban-American secretary of state chosen by Trump to lead Cuba policy, has been the public face of this approach. He built a reputation over a 14-year Senate career for blistering criticism of Cuba's communist leadership. But his words have become more measured since Maduro's capture.
On a podcast released this week, Rubio said he expects Cuba to be on "an irreversible path toward a much different future by the time this administration ends in January 2029." He also acknowledged the limits of the strategy, saying a system entrenched almost seven decades grows roots, and you cannot just rip it out overnight and plant something brand-new.
The strategy has an obvious weakness: despite sanctions stretching back almost seven decades, no credible opposition exists to promote. Washington wanted to remove President Miguel Díaz-Canel and the Castro family, but the effort is complicated by the absence of a real alternative since Fidel and Raúl Castro toppled Cuba's military dictatorship in 1959.
There is also no clear replacement leader, the way there was in Venezuela, where the U.S. captured Maduro and made his deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, acting president. Cuba is more complicated. Power is split among the Castro family, the military, Communist Party officials, and families of other revolution-era leaders. U.S. officials have had difficulty charting a path among them.
According to the State Department, the president has a broad set of tools available and will use every one of them to counter threats from Cuba's Communist government. Cuba's government calls the sanctions genocidal and says it would discuss economic changes, but the island's political system is non-negotiable.
This policy is a bet that economic pain will split Cuba's leadership and force negotiations. But the same bet has been placed for decades without much to show for it. The embargo has been in place since the early 1960s, and the government is still standing.
For investors and anyone watching global markets, this matters because it signals how this administration prefers to operate. Economic pressure is the tool of choice, and it can create real humanitarian consequences even without a single shot fired.