The United States is investigating whether Iran has drones stored in Cuba, President Donald Trump confirmed from the Oval Office on Monday.
Asked by reporters about a purported intelligence report pointing to the possibility, the president replied bluntly: “If they have them, and it’s very possible that they do, we’ll take care of it.”
Trump went further, suggesting the island might also be storing Iranian missiles, something that, he said, his administration “is looking into right now.”
Trump did not provide any photographs, intelligence documents or details on the number, model or location of the alleged equipment. The question that triggered his comments came from a journalist working for a media outlet aligned with conservative positions, who referred to a report that had not previously been made public.
The president also mentioned that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was in an adjoining room as he answered, implying that the issue was already on the State Department’s agenda.
For now, the only thing confirmed is that Washington has opened a review of the matter, not that the weaponry exists or that it poses an imminent threat. Cuba has not yet commented on the US president’s claims.
In February 1962, Washington enacted a financial and trade embargo against Cuba, which is still in force, in response to the Soviet Union’s courting of Fidel Castro.
In October 1962, the United States identified facilities for Soviet nuclear missiles on Cuba.
For two weeks, the world was gripped by fears of nuclear war between the superpowers until negotiations brought an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
More sanctions on an island already being choked
Trump’s words come at a time of growing pressure on Havana. The State Department announced that it was designating 10 entities linked to the Cuban government as part of what it described as an initiative to curb “the malign activities of the Cuban regime,” among them Enetec S.A. and Coreydan S.A., which trade in fuels, and the business groups Gecomex and Gemar.
In June, the sanctions had already reached the Cuban president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, several members of his family and Colonel Alejandro Castro Espín, son of former president Raúl Castro, who also faces a Justice Department indictment over the 1996 downing of two small planes flown by Cuban exiles, in which four people were killed.
On top of more than six decades of embargo, the administration has, since the start of the year, added an energy blockade that the Cuban authorities link to the nationwide power cuts suffered this year, the most recent of them last Friday.
An Axios analysis cited by several media outlets maintains that the Cuban regime has incorporated more than 300 military drones of Russian and Iranian origin since 2023, and that the Revolutionary Armed Forces are studying a possible use of these systems against US targets such as the Guantánamo naval base or facilities in Key West.
The report itself warns that portraying armed drones as defensive assets is more a distortion of language than standard military doctrine, and stresses that the deployment of these systems was the result of several years of planning, not an improvised response to the recent tensions with Washington.