Report: Trump Wants Regime Change in Cuba

Washington is quietly testing whether the playbook it used in Caracas can be run again 90 miles off Florida's coast. According to US officials and people briefed on internal discussions, the Trump administration is actively looking for senior figures inside Cuba's government who might be willing to help push out the Communist leadership by year's end, reports the Wall Street Journal. The effort follows the US-led operation that removed Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, which the White House now casts as both a model and an implicit warning to Havana. While officials acknowledge they lack a detailed succession plan for Cuba, they describe the current regime as more vulnerable than at any point since the early 1960s, citing severe shortages, blackouts, and the loss of subsidized Venezuelan oil.

President Trump has publicly urged Cuba's leaders to make a deal "before it is too late," per the BBC, as his administration seeks to tighten pressure on multiple fronts: blocking remaining oil flows from Venezuela, targeting Cuba's lucrative overseas medical missions with visa bans, and signaling that the Maduro raid—aided by a high-level Venezuelan insider and resulting in the deaths of dozens of Cuban operatives—should be read as a deterrent. "Cuba's rulers are incompetent Marxists who have destroyed their country," a White House official said, arguing that Havana must choose between stepping aside or improving living standards. The State Department frames the objective as a transition to a democratic government that does not host US adversaries' military or intelligence services.

Behind the scenes, US officials and Cuban exile groups in Miami and Washington are trying to identify any potential dealmaker within the island's single-party system, though analysts caution that Cuba, unlike Venezuela, is "a much tougher nut to crack." The government, still dominated by 94-year-old Raúl Castro and led day-to-day by President Miguel Díaz-Canel, has rejected any talks "based on coercion or intimidation" and staged a national defense drill to project readiness for a US attack. But as fuel shortages and power cuts leave Havana streets dark and trash uncollected, Trump allies in Florida have been dreaming of transformation, circulating AI-generated visions of a post-Communist Cuba, with Trump and Marco Rubio driving a vintage convertible past new hotels.