Trump moots toppling Cuba authorities before leaving office

US President Donald Trump has said he would “certainly consider” using military force against Cuba, adding that he wants to “get Cuba done” before he leaves office in 2029. In a phone interview on Thursday with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, of Salem News Channel, Trump was asked whether he was considering “freeing Cuba” through a military intervention. “I’d love to be able to do it for the people, for the Cubans that came and were treated really badly, and they came to America,” Trump said.

He added that he won the Cuban vote in Florida by a wide margin. In March, he said he believed he would have “the honour of taking Cuba”, making the remarks as the island’s power grid collapsed . Trump put Cuba under a de facto oil blockade in January, after the US seized Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, and cut off Venezuelan oil to the island.

He signed an executive order declaring Cuba an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the US and threatened tariffs on any country that supplied it with fuel.