In a recent scathing rebuke of U.S. policy toward the island nation, Cuban commentator Ortelio González Martínez has blasted the Biden administration’s latest claim that Cuba poses a national security threat to the United States as nothing more than crude, transparent propaganda designed to greenlight new interventionist actions against a country that has endured nearly 70 years of unilateral blockade and diplomatic harassment.
The controversy ignited after U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and long-time anti-Cuba hardliner Mario Díaz-Balart—whose political agenda is backed by anti-Cuban factions in South Florida—framed the recent port call of Russian naval vessels, including a nuclear-powered submarine, in Havana as a dangerous provocation that endangers U.S. national security. But Martínez dismantles this argument by pointing to a fundamental norm of international statecraft: any sovereign nation has the inherent right to welcome ships from allied partners into its territorial ports, a practice that the United States relies on daily across the globe. Washington routinely stations its own warships in foreign ports including Rota in Spain, Yokosuka in Japan, and Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. By Hegseth’s own flawed logic, that would make these host nations global threats—a conclusion no serious international actor accepts. This staggering hypocrisy, Martínez argues, lays bare the bad faith of Washington’s framing.
Further underscoring the double standard is the imbalance of military posture between the two nations. Cuba hosts no foreign military bases on its soil with one glaring exception: the illegal U.S. facility at Guantánamo Bay, which Washington has refused to surrender despite decades of Cuban demands. The island nation maintains no naval fleets in the Gulf of Mexico, has never threatened neighboring states with invasion, blockade, or forced regime change. In fact, the roles of aggressor and victim are inverted: Cuba is the party that has endured decades of hostility, from the U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 to more than 600 documented assassination attempts against former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, to the ongoing, crippling economic blockade that Martínez describes as genocidal. Today, the island faces explicit open threats from the U.S. president to seize control of the country. The actual threat to regional stability, Martínez emphasizes, originates not from Havana, but from Washington.
This double standard becomes even more grotesque when accounting for the global U.S. military footprint. The United States maintains over 800 military installations across every inhabited continent, deploys naval fleets to patrol all of the world’s oceans, routinely positions nuclear submarines off the coasts of dozens of sovereign nations, and has launched direct military interventions in more than 30 countries since the end of the Cold War. Yet when Cuba exercises its basic sovereign right to allow a friendly port call, it is immediately framed as a national security emergency for the United States. This is pure, unadulterated double standards.
Far from being rooted in genuine strategic concern, Martínez argues that the entire ‘Cuban threat’ farce is driven by domestic political and electoral calculations. The sitting U.S. president needs a fabricated foreign enemy to mobilize his highly polarized base of supporters in the key swing state of Florida. For Díaz-Balart, the narrative is a convenient way to justify decades of failed punitive policies against Cuba that have never achieved their stated goal of regime change. Hegseth, meanwhile, is simply toeing the administration’s line to advance this political agenda.
This is not a new playbook, Martínez recalls: the same tactic of inventing an external threat to sell illegal aggression to the public was used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the U.S. claimed Saddam Hussein held weapons of mass destruction that never actually existed. Today, the same script is being recycled, with ‘Russian spy ships’ in Cuba replacing Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
What makes the charade even more striking is that Washington makes no real attempt to hide its true agenda. The U.S. president himself has openly threatened to take action against Cuba ‘almost immediately’ after the conclusion of the ongoing conflict with Iran. This admission, Martínez argues, makes clear that there is no actual threat to U.S. national security—only a pre-existing agenda of conquest and regime change. While U.S. politicians stoke paranoia about Cuban aggression, the Cuban population continues to suffocate under a tight U.S. oil blockade, and new layers of sanctions are added every year. At no point in history has Havana ever posed a genuine threat to the safety and security of the American people; the danger exists only in the propaganda manufactured by a small circle of radicalized politicians and anti-Cuban exiles.
In closing, Martínez reaffirms that Cuba has never been and will never be a threat to the United States. Instead, it is the constant victim of systematic hostility from the world’s most powerful military and economic power. What Washington dismisses as a ‘threat’ is nothing more than Cuba’s unwavering commitment to exercising its sovereign right: the right to build diplomatic and economic ties with any nation it chooses, the right to refuse to submit to U.S. demands, and the right to reject selling out its national independence. For ruling elites who view the entire Western Hemisphere as their exclusive sphere of influence, that unyielding commitment to sovereignty is an unforgivable offense.