U.S. President Donald Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. arrive at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 3, 2026.
President Donald Trump has had his eyes on Cuba, but while he reportedly is biding his time, there are plans in place.
“Iran’s not finished, and the president is not in a rush,” a senior administration official told Axios, according to a report in The Daily Beast. “Trump wants to exhaust all the levers that he can. But at this point, there aren’t as many levers as before.”
Noting that Trump wants a “peaceful transition to a free Cuba,” Axios calls his approach the “methodical squeezing of Cuba’s communist regime.”
“To bring Cuba to its knees this year,” Axios revealed, “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.”
The Trump administration captured Maduro during a raid in early January.
A senior Trump administration official called the approach “accelerationism.” The Daily Beast reports they were “referring to the fringe philosophy of speeding up a perceived inevitable societal collapse.”
“But we don’t want to kill off the regime just yet. There’s a method to this. It’s in stages,” they said. That strategy allows the commander in chief to focus on his three-month-long war in Iran — something Senate Republicans reportedly prefer takes priority over any Cuba incursion.
The president’s approach to Cuba is “classic Trump,” a presidential advisor told Axios: “Push your enemy off balance. It’s pressure, watch the response, apply more pressure, watch the response, apply more pressure.”
While the administration says there is no immediate plan to invade the island nation of roughly 9.7 million people, the Defense Department is primed and has been performing “tabletop” exercises in preparation. Axios credits Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a “chief architect of Trump’s Latin America policy.”
But according to Axios, one Trump advisor said: “The president does not want boots on the ground for more than 48 hours. It’s a quagmire in the making. This could get messy.”
“Everything is on the table, but no invasion is planned or imminent,” a senior official told Axios. “When POTUS says go, we’re ready for anything.”
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