Exclusive: Trump's accelerating squeeze on Cuba

The Trump administration is bracing for the potential collapse of Cuba's totalitarian government as early as this summer, and has war-gamed new military response plans in case the island descends into chaos, U.S. officials tell Axios. Why it matters: President Trump hasn't authorized an invasion and prefers a peaceful transition to a free Cuba, so the administration will keep pushing economic sanctions to try to strangle the regime in Havana in a slow-motion constriction. "The best way to describe it is 'accelerationism,' " one senior administration official said, referring to the philosophy of hastening societal collapse . "But we don't want to kill off the regime just yet. There's a method to this. It's in stages." Zoom in: This methodical squeezing of Cuba's communist regime is also designed to buy time for Trump — who's now engrossed in peace talks with Iran — to eventually focus on Cuba and decide how to bring about change there. "Iran's not finished, and the president is not in a rush," said another senior administration official. "Trump wants to exhaust all the levers that he can. But at this point, there aren't as many levers as before." Said a third senior administration official: "We have a pretty deep toolbox, especially when it comes to sanctions and enforcing them. More is on the way." The big picture: The Cuba operation aims to eliminate Latin America's source of Marxist agitation and anti-U.S. activism ever since Fidel and Raul Castro led their successful revolution in 1959. To bring Cuba to its knees this year, the administration first focused on the island's lifeline: Venezuela and its socialist leader, Nicolas Maduro, who kept Havana afloat with shipments of oil that helped power the country and gave it a source of export revenue. Maduro, who'd been indicted in the U.S. on "narco-terrorism" charges in 2020, was seized in a daring U.S. raid Jan. 3. After that, Venezuela's free oil shipments stopped, plunging Cuba into a ...

Original source: Axios