Today, Cuba remains one of Hamas’s most vocal international supporters, openly backing the group’s attacks on Israel. By Jose Lev Alvarez, Middle East ForumIran has brought its war against Israel and the West to America’s doorstep.Since 2023, Cuba has acquired more than 300 attack drones, mainly from Iran. Tehran is planting its proxy warfare model inside America’s historic sphere of influence and turning the island into a forward operating base to pressure and provoke the United States.Iran has spent decades perfecting this strategy with proxies from Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq and Syria.These forces impose costs on stronger powers while advancing Tehran’s revolutionary goals at minimal risk.Cuba now follows the same script. The drones, battle-tested by Iranian-backed groups, bring not only weapons but also tactics and doctrine that let a weak regime harass a superpower.Havana has become Iran’s newest Caribbean proxy—a low-cost extension of the Russia-China-Iran axis.For almost 70 years, Cuba has been an ideological enemy of America and its allies but especially Israel.During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Cuba sent more than 1,000 troops and pilots to fight alongside Syrian forces against Israeli forces in the Golan Heights.Cuban MiG pilots even engaged Israeli aircraft while Cuban tank units fought in several ground battles.In the 1970s and 1980s, Cuba trained Palestine Liberation Organization terrorists, hosted Palestinian leaders, and led the charge for the 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution at the United Nations.Today, Cuba remains one of Hamas’s most vocal international supporters, openly backing the group’s attacks on Israel.The current drone partnership with Iran continues Cuba’s long war against America but also the Jewish state by new means.Today, Cuba functions as a persistent hybrid threat. Since 2021, more than 600,000 Cubans have attempted or reached United States shores, outpacing both the 1980 Mariel boatlift and the 1994 rafting crisis.United States Customs and Border Protection recorded more than 225,000 Cuban encounters at the southwest border in 2022 alone.These flows enable narcotics trafficking, espionage, and now drone pressure; that is why the United States Navy responded by deploying a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier strike group to the Caribbean in May 2026.Conversely, Cuba fields 50,000 active-duty troops, 40,000 reservists, and approximately 1,145,000 members of the Territorial Troops Militia.Its air force operates roughly 20 aircraft with readiness rates below 50 percent. The army fields approximately 200 aging T-55 and T-62 tanks from the 1960s and 1970s, plus outdated artillery and surface-to-air missile systems upgraded by Belarus in 2025.The Global Firepower Index ranks Cuba 65th globally—a position that hides profound obsolescence and minimal combat power.Some analysts claim that Havana is militarily irrelevant, but this reading is misguided. Geographic proximity combined with Iranian drone technology is a strategic multiplier.A small number of drones launched from the Caribbean nation could force the United States to divert air and naval assets at the exact moment Iran and its proxies are testing American resolve in the Middle East and China is challenging it in the Indo-Pacific.If a U.S. offensive operation is launched against Havana, air and naval dominance could be achieved within hours through strikes on air defenses, command nodes, and leadership, all supported by cyber and electronic warfare.A naval quarantine would complete the isolation and Cuban conventional forces would collapse.The regime’s “War of All the People” doctrine would likely rely on militia forces for guerrilla and urban fighting to raise American costs.This could create friction but cannot offset technological inferiority or Cuba’s deepening economic crisis.The island’s gross domestic product stands at approximately $108 billion, with cumulative decline exceeding 10 percent since 2018.Inflation reached 25 percent in 2024 and stayed near 21 percent into 2025. The fiscal deficit has exceeded 10 percent of gross domestic product, financed through money printing, which fuels further instability.Chronic blackouts, food shortages, and protests in 2021 and 2024 have exposed the regime’s fragile control.In March 2025, Russia signed a military cooperation agreement with Cuba and maintains an intelligence facility on the island.China provides economic support amid credible suspicion of intelligence ties, too. Both offer limited equipment and diplomatic cover at the United Nations, just as they do for Iran. Yet neither can project real power into the Caribbean, so Cuba likely would have to face any military confrontation alone.Historical precedents show how such regimes can be neutralized. The 2003 “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq shattered an adversary’s command structure through precision strikes in 21 days.Operation Just Cause in Panama in 1989 removed Manuel Noriega in five days.A focused U.S. response could achieve similar speed: immediate air and naval supremacy, cyber and electronic shutdown of regime communications and the fragile grid, targeted leadership strikes, a naval quarantine, and information operations exposing the regime’s failures to encourage defections.Centralized regime control could erode within 48 to 72 hours.Geography and overwhelming military asymmetry give the United States decisive initiative. Cuba’s transformation into Iran’s Caribbean proxy creates a self-inflicted strategic liability that forces Washington to split resources between the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, and its own hemisphere.This is not an existential threat, but it is a distraction threat that Iran has built at minimal expense.Removing Cuba’s regime as a forward base of the Iran-led axis would restore deterrence, eliminate a harassment vector near Florida, and establish that the United States no longer will tolerate the extension of Iran’s war on Israel into the Western Hemisphere.The post Iran opens a Caribbean front against America appeared first on World Israel News.