Senator Peter Welch argues that the Trump administration's oil blockade and military deployments toward Cuba have crossed from economic coercion into the architecture of an unauthorized war — one with no plan for what follows. The senator contends the financial pressure campaign, which has eliminated electricity across the island and cut Cuba off from international bank financing, is manufacturing a crisis rather than resolving one.
The Blockade's Economic Reach
The mechanism of pressure is financial and logistical. A US oil blockade has shut down electricity across the entire island of Cuba, halting hospitals, schools, and factories. Cuba's placement on the US state sponsors of terrorism list has simultaneously severed the island from international bank financing, compounding what Welch describes as a collapse engineered to justify regime change. Three months after Trump predicted Cuba would "fall pretty soon" and that it wanted "to make a deal so badly," no deal has materialized.
Welch does not spare Cuba's leadership. The Cuban military's grip on the economy has, in his assessment, functionally ruined the country. But he draws a direct line: 65 years of US embargo have not achieved their stated objectives, and the current blockade layers additional suffering on a civilian population 90 percent of whom were born after the 1959 revolution.
Military Escalation and Its Timing
On May 20, the Justice Department announced the indictment of former Cuban President Raúl Castro, who is 95 years old, on the same day a second US aircraft carrier battle group arrived in the Caribbean Sea. Welch reads the simultaneity as deliberate signaling. Cuba, he notes, is a country roughly the size of Virginia with a bankrupt economy — one that neither has the capacity nor the intention to threaten the United States.
Separately, there are reports that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has held secret talks with Raúl Castro's grandson regarding Cuba's future, a back channel that runs parallel to the public escalation.
The Terms of a Deal — and the Cost of Refusing One
Welch lays out what he regards as a viable agreement. The United States would lift travel restrictions, push Congress to repeal the embargo, and remove Cuba from the terrorism sponsor list, opening the door to American private investment in Cuban infrastructure. Cuba's leadership would need to end military control of the economy, welcome foreign capital, and release political dissidents.
Without that deal, Welch warns, the US would inherit responsibility for governing a country with no organized political opposition, while a likely refugee crisis would unfold 90 miles from Florida. He invokes the administration's intervention in Iran — a "costly, ill-conceived debacle" that defied its own predictions — as the template a war with Cuba would follow, with American taxpayers absorbing the bill and no plan for what comes next.