The Trump administration is capable of just about anything these days, especially when it comes to Cuba, Marco Rubio’s most coveted prize of all.
This is very much a developing story with sharply conflicting accounts from both sides. On Wednesday, a US-registered speedboat carrying 10 passengers entered Cuban waters. The boat, apparently stolen from the Florida Keys, approached the El Pino channel north of Corralillo, a town in the central Cuban province of Villa Clara, according to an official statement by the Cuban government.
When a vessel belonging to the Cuban coastguard approached the boat seeking identification, the occupants opened fire on the Cuban personnel, wounding the Cuban vessel’s commander. The Cuban border guards returned fire, killing four crew members and injuring the other six.
Interestingly, or perhaps predictably, reports in the Western media have tended to downplay or completely ignore the fact that it was the “civilians” in the US-registered boat who opened fire first. In the following tweet, the Cuban journalist El Necio contrasts the way in which the Spanish news agency EFE reported an earlier US attack on a Venezuelan speedboat with how it reported the incident in Cuban waters:
- If the US did it, the headline reads: “US attacks suspected drug traffickers…”
- If Cuba does something similar in its own waters, the headline reads: “Police kill four crew members of civil vessel.”
The way the media frames these kinds incidents is, as always, fundamental. In this current clown world, random boats destroyed from the air by the US military in the complete absence of evidence are described as “narco boats” while a boat filled with armed gunmen that attacks the local coastguard is described as a “civilian vessel”.
NBC News buried the fact that the people on the US-registered vessel initiated the firefight so deep within its article that presumably nobody actually read it. Mission accomplished!
Here’s a video of two of the alleged “civilian” boatmen showing off their wares before the attack:
Here’s the official statement regarding the incident from Cuba’s US embassy:
On the morning of February 25, 2026, a violating speedboat was detected within Cuban territorial waters. The vessel, registered in Florida, United States, with registration number FL7726SH, approached up to 1 nautical mile northeast of the El Pino channel, in Cayo Falcones, Corralillo municipality, Villa Clara province.
When a surface unit of the Border Guard Troops of the Ministry of the Interior, carrying five service members, approached the vessel for identification, the crew of the violating speedboat opened fire on the Cuban personnel, resulting in the injury of the commander of the Cuban vessel.
As a consequence of the confrontation, as of the time of this report, four aggressors on the foreign vessel were killed and six were injured. The injured individuals were evacuated and received medical assistance.
In the face of current challenges, Cuba reaffirms its determination to protect its territorial waters, based on the principle that national defense is a fundamental pillar of the Cuban State in safeguarding its sovereignty and ensuring stability in the region.
Investigations by the competent authorities continue in order to fully clarify the events.
Interestingly, while many in the Western media were trying to paint the ten boatmen as civilians, Javier Díaz, a Cuban-American journalist working for Miami-based Univision, the most-watched Spanish-language media network in the US, offered a different story from his Facebook account. From Ciber Cuba (machine translated):
Versions offered by relatives of those involved in the maritime incident that occurred in front of Villa Clara indicate that the Cubans who traveled in the boat registered in Florida would have received prior training in Miami before leaving for the island.
According to Facebook posts by Univision journalist Javier Díaz, who cited testimonies from family members, the group had been preparing on a farm in South Florida after coming together through social networks such as TikTok.
The sources consulted by the reporter maintain that it was not a migratory departure, but a coordinated action with the intention of entering Cuba.
Relatives of some of the participants claim to have lost contact with them hours after they left between 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning.
The Cuban government has already released the names of the six detained individuals as well as one of the deceased. Most of them allegedly have prior criminal criminal records involving activity, including for their “alleged involvement in the promotion, planning, organization, financing, support, or execution of terrorist acts in Cuba or abroad.”
US authorities say they are investigating the incident since Cuba’s communist government “cannot be trusted” and must be held “accountable”:
Unsurprisingly, senior members of Miami’s “Gusano Industrial Complex”, as Max Blumenthal likes to call it, are spitting blood. Florida Rep. Carlos Gimenez has called for revenge, despite the fact that all reports indicate that the US boat attacked the Cuban vessel. There’s no one more senior in Miami’s GIC than US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said late Wednesday:
“We’re going to find out exactly what happened and who was involved. We’re not going to just take what somebody else tells us.”
Rubio also tried to sow doubts about the Cuban government’s version of events by saying: “it is highly unusual to see shootouts in the open sea like that… It’s something, frankly, that hasn’t happened with Cuba in a very long time.”
The Intercept was one of the few US media outlets that provided what seems to be a more balanced portrayal of what went down. The article, by Nick Turse, whom we have cross posted here many times, mentions that Cuban authorities provided medical treatment to the six injured gunmen, which already makes them way more civilised than their US counterparts:
The Cuban government said on Wednesday that the “injured individuals were evacuated and received medical assistance.” The U.S. government, by contrast, has killed survivors clinging to wreckage or left boat strike victims to drown…
As the article notes, the US military has carried out dozen of attacks on supposed drug boats in the Caribbean, the most recent on Monday, killing three people — not that most people would know that since the Trump administration has gone very quiet on Venezuela’s drug gangs despite continuing to vaporise boats on the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific:
There have now been 44 such attacks in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean, killing at least 151 people since September…
The Trump administration has been ratcheting up pressure on Cuba’s Communist government and extreme pain on its people, cutting off foreign oil shipments and other revenue sources that had kept Cuba’s rickety economy afloat. The pain has increased after oil shipments from Venezuela, its main supplier, were halted after the U.S. attacked the South American country, kidnapped its then-president Nicolás Maduro, and began running the country via a puppet regime. Mexico, another major petroleum supplier, also suspended oil shipments under U.S. pressure. This has sparked a humanitarian catastrophe of food, medicine, and fuel shortages, raging inflation, prolonged blackouts, and service cuts at hospitals.
The latest incident invites the obvious question: will the US try to use this incident, and other future incidents like it, to justify escalating its war on Cuba?
In any normal world, which we clearly no longer inhabit, the answer would be no — largely because the US has already tried to topple Cuba’s communist government so many times and failed, often embarrassingly, each and every time that it would have learnt its lesson by now. But this is a government that has already attacked eight countries in one year, and is clearly intent on toppling governments on the American continent that do not toe the US line…
Nick Corbishley 