Trump, Cuba, and the Return of the Offshore Exception

I served at Guantánamo Bay. I know the base, the fences cutting across Caribbean scrubland, the strange psychological geography of standing on Cuban soil under U.S. command. Guantánamo is not simply a military installation. It is a legal anomaly where the United States once tested the edges of its constitutional imagination.

That is why the Trump administration’s early 2025 attempt to send detained migrants there did not strike me as shocking but as diagnostic.

Relocating migrants to Guantánamo was never merely about capacity. It was about revisiting a legal architecture built after 9/11 and asking whether it could be repurposed. After September 11, 2001, the Bush administration created the designation “unlawful enemy combatant,” arguing that certain detainees could be held outside traditional constitutional protections. Guantánamo was selected precisely because it was believed to exist beyond the full reach of U.S. courts. The Supreme Court rejected that premise in Rasul v. Bush (2004), Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), and Boumediene v. Bush (2008).

But while the Court narrowed the theory, it never dismantled the geography.

The base remains.

In January 2025, President Trump ordered Guantánamo’s Migrant Operations Center expanded into a large-scale detention site. Flights began arriving in February. Publicly, the administration framed the move as targeting “dangerous” individuals, though reporting suggested the scope included low-risk migrants. Civil liberties organizations described the effort as a legal black hole. The operation quickly collapsed under logistical strain — staggering daily costs, inadequate infrastructure, and limited medical capacity. Within weeks, detainees were transferred out.

The failure was operational, not philosophical. When you combine post-9/11 legal architecture with aggressive immigration enforcement and a defense budget bloated enough to absorb almost any experiment, offshore detention becomes politically attainable. Power rarely moves through declarations. It moves through feasibility.

The greater danger is the quiet normalization of constitutional shadow zones. Guantánamo was once defended as exceptional — a temporary deviation justified by extraordinary circumstances. But exceptions harden into infrastructure. Once detention beyond full constitutional protection is tolerated for one category of person, the category expands. When law-of-war logic seeps into immigration enforcement, emergency authority becomes administrative habit. The line between criminal migrant and unlawful enemy combatant thins until it vanishes.

Meanwhile, Cuba itself is being squeezed at its most essential artery: energy. On January 29, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency and establishing tariffs on countries that sell oil to Cuba — effectively weaponizing secondary sanctions to choke off the island’s remaining fuel lifelines. The consequences are documented: nationwide blackouts, shuttered hotels, suspended classes, canceled flights, hospitals cutting services, and food spoiling without refrigeration. A struggling economy now confronts systemic paralysis.

U.S. sanctions are not the sole cause of Cuba’s dysfunction; decades of internal policy failures are real. But cutting off oil is not symbolic pressure. Energy underwrites mobility, medical care, and food distribution. When you constrict fuel access, you constrict the state itself. Sovereignty becomes brittle. And when that happens, leverage accumulates elsewhere.

Figures like U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio position themselves as authoritative validators of this conflict, playing the Cuban voice explaining Cuba to an American public primed by Cold War nostalgia. But Cubans are not a monolith. Rubio represents a particular exile politic, not the full spectrum of Cuban or Cuban American perspectives — even as his rhetoric flattens the island into a familiar specter of communist menace, amplified by MAGA-inflected paranoia.

Step back, and the strategic landscape clarifies. The United States already maintains a permanent military enclave on Cuban soil under a 1903 lease long contested by Havana. Add an offshore detention facility with a history of constitutional ambiguity, then layer on economic strangulation through energy sanctions, and what emerges is not a collection of unrelated policies. It is convergence. Annexation does not need to be formally declared for the conditions of control to exist.

I am not uncovering a secret colonial blueprint. It has long existed. The United States simply continues to deny that it still uses it. Governments rarely dismantle the powers they build. They refine them. Guantánamo has already served as a naval foothold, a detention laboratory, and a legal gray zone. The 2025 migrant transfer attempt confirmed it remains usable space — not a relic of empire, but a standing option.

Colonial control rarely arrives with a headline announcement. It takes shape through forced dependency, manufactured economic pressure, and the steady normalization of unchecked power framed as necessary exception.

From where I stand, the real question is not whether the Trump administration will declare Cuba a colony, but when. The infrastructure for expanded U.S. control is already there. The only thing left is the decision to use it. It’s whether we recognize what this convergence really represents. Not rhetoric, but capacity. 

This is not prophecy. It is pattern recognition: law, geography, funding, and power moving in the same direction. History is unambiguous about what follows. When infrastructure, precedent, and political will align, democracies do not simply drift. They consolidate power, expand territory, and begin to resemble the very empires they once claimed to oppose.

The only question is whether we recognize it before the temporary exception becomes part of the permanent architecture.

Denise Zubizarreta is a neurodivergent interdisciplinary artist and cultural operations specialist of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent, whose work as an arts and culture writer critically engages with post-colonial theory, identity, and the impact of colonialism on contemporary society.

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