Today, on the occasion of the 124th anniversary of Cuba’s 1902 “liberation” from the United States, of which it became a protectorate in late 1898 at the end of the Spanish American War, President Donald Trump issued a threatening statement suggesting that regime change on the island may not be long off. He repeated Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s constant claim that the island’s communist regime has destroyed the country and the economy and caused untold suffering of the people, while allegedly raking in billions of dollars for themselves and their “lavish lifestyle.” The regime, he said, is focused only on “maintaining control and [its] raison d’etre of violently exporting communism and despotism abroad.”
Not coincidentally, Miami was today the site of the splashy event orchestrated by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida to indict the 95-year-old former President Raul Castro on charges of murder and conspiracy to commit murder. This involved the 1996 shooting down of two civilian aircraft belonging to the Cuban-exile-run Brothers to the Rescue “humanitarian” group, which has a well-documented history of provocations against the Castro government, including repeatedly violating Cuban air space allegedly to seek out Cubans trying to escape the island on rafts.
