Cuba Libre: Why the EU’s Future is Also at Stake in the Caribbean
The island is among the top five producers of two strategic commodities: nickel and cobalt. A commentary by Andrea Colli
“You know, all my life I’ve been hearing about the United States and Cuba, and when the United States do it. I do think I’ll be the honor, of having the honor of taking Cuba. That will be a good honor, that’s a big honor taking Cuba. Taking Cuba in some form, yea, taking Cuba, I mean, whether I free it, or take it. I think I can do anything want with it. You wanna know the truth? They are a very weakened nation right now”.
These few words, uttered during an interview on the MS Now program on March 18 by the President of the United States, Donald Trump, carry far more weight than their informality suggests.
First, they are a plain illustration, in theory and practice, of what international relations historians call “Great Power Politics” – something that takes us back to the early nineteenth century, when the relations among leading nations were governed by a simple principle: “might is right”.
Second, they reflect the comeback of the very influential Darwinian perspective on interstate relations, which emerged in the late 19th century within the so-called biological school, aimed at justifying European imperial expansion abroad – the right of the stronger to expand into the vital space of the weaker, as a sort of natural right – the Nazis later elaborated this idea, formalising the concept of Lebensraum, while the U.S. encapsulated it in the more palatable “manifest destiny”.
Third, why Cuba, then? What does this low-income island have to do with the security of its dominant neighbour? Here, a bit of history can help to better frame the present.
The relationship between the island, a sort of aircraft carrier geographically parked (positioned) at about one hundred kilometres from the southern coast of Florida, and its powerful neighbour has been historically complicated, with Cuba symbolising what the nineteenth-century U.S. naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan would call a key hotspot, which the U.S. leveraged for decades as a component of its imperial strategy of hemispheric control.
During the second half of the 19th century and in a phase of global integration, that island was under Spanish control and economically aligned with other Caribbean countries – based on exports of staple products such as sugar and cocoa, mainly to the U.S. .
Politically, Cuba followed the path of other Spanish possessions in the area, repeatedly trying to achieve independence during the second half of the 19th century – most successfully, when in 1898 the U.S. decided to intervene, siding with local revolutionaries and starting a war with Spain.
Indeed, the Spanish-American War must be understood within a wider geopolitical strategy pursued by the U.S. since the second half of the 19th century, marking a revision of the American isolationist tendencies commonly known as the Monroe Doctrine.
After the conquest of California around the middle of the 19th century, U.S. westward expansion turned towards the Pacific Ocean, from north to south, with the forced opening of feudal (and backward) Japan in the 1860s and the purchase of Alaska from the Russian Empire in 1867.
The logical conclusion of this strategy was to expand the U.S. grip over the Caribbean and the possessions of Spain in the Pacific by the end of the century, while pursuing the ambitious project of cutting the isthmus of Panama to shorten the route between the Caribbean and the Pacific.
Both in the case of the Philippines and of Cuba, the U.S. played the role of the false liberator. Its intervention was welcomed, but the occupation was not.
The U.S. had to wage a bloody war against the Filipinos to establish a stable control over the islands.
Something very similar happened in Cuba, where the price of liberty was high, aside from the creation of the world-famous cocktail: nearly four years of U.S. occupation, followed by decades-long subjugation of the island to U.S. economic and political interests, protected by a series of U.S.-friendly political regimes, ultimately swept away by Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries.
Since then, under a permanent American embargo, Cuba has become a symbol of the contradictions of the Cold War – a thorn in the U.S. side, much as West Berlin was in the Soviet one.
Cuba was for a moment NATO’s Turkey where the U.S. Jupiter missiles were stationed, after the (attempted) placement of nuclear warheads by Moscow.
The following part of Cuba’s history is unfortunately that of a Soviet satellite out of orbit, subsidized by Moscow for geopolitical reasons, with a centrally planned, picturesque but fragile economy, and after the fall of the Soviet Union dependent on other Latin American “rogue” states, such as Venezuela, as well as on China and Russia.
This is just one part of the picture. Yet, the general framework in which the present situation of Cuba must be understood is:
Overall, the historically grounded grand strategy of the U.S. aimed at strengthening control over the area of the Caribbean and the Pacific – with the relevant corollary of the future status of the Panama Canal, a waterway connecting the eastern Pacific and the western Atlantic built for strategic reasons by the U.S., and on which the U.S. wants to reinstate some form of control.
A modern reprise of what already happened nearly one hundred years ago.
Additionally, Cuba is among the top five producers of two strategic commodities: nickel and cobalt, which have recently further enhanced its relevance due to Russia’s sanctioned position.
These two minerals account for a significant portion of the island’s GDP, and one third of its exports. Most of the exports go to China, and a significant share to Europe.
China has, in recent years, strengthened its collaboration with Cuba (as well as other Latin American countries), in the form of humanitarian and economic aid, in the field of renewable energy and technologies for the extraction of these minerals.
This openly clashes with the U.S. determination to strengthen its hemispheric control, as highlighted in the previous point, and to counter by all possible means China’s growing presence in Central and South America in a sort of new Cold War scenario.
Is this only a Latin American, U.S. and Chinese story? As noted in a recent Economist article — “Europe risks a rare-earths crunch between China and America”, 29 January 2026 — the EU has sleepwalked into all kinds of dependencies over the years, from American digital services to Russian energy.
Its reliance on Chinese rare earths, crucial in everything from electric cars and wind turbines to fighter jets, is perhaps the hardest to shake off.
This is where Cuba enters the picture.
Some countries such as the Netherlands, France, Italy and Spain are among Cuba’s main trading partners, especially in nickel, cobalt and zinc.
Given the EU’s structural weakness in this area of technological competition among great powers, the future geopolitical destiny of Cuba directly affects the European strategic autonomy in access to critical minerals.
The silence surrounding Cuba during these weeks, in which the world is focusing on the events in the Middle East, should not make us forget that a portion of the EU's future is at stake in this remote island bordering the Gulf of Mexico (or maybe of America?).
IEP@BU does not express opinions of its own. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors.
