Statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Vientiane, August 29, 2025.The Cuban government strongly rejects the current deployment of US military forces in the Caribbean Sea. This dangerous act represents a grave threat and an aggressive show of force that undermines the sovereignty and self-determination of the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean. It also ignores the commitment of the 33 member countries of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States to proclaim the region a Zone of Peace.
The US accusation of associating the legitimate government of Venezuela and its President Nicolás Maduro Moros with criminal drug trafficking organizations constitutes an absurd and baseless pretext. Those in power in Washington are irresponsibly dismissing the assessment of their own Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which, in its report this year, does not name the Venezuelan government among the perpetrators or facilitators of drug trafficking operations that threaten US territory.
The United States government once again resorts to lies to justify violence and plunder. It uses them in the renewed deployment of a system of domination anchored in the Monroe Doctrine, the key to its interventionism in the Americas. Similar fallacies have been used to carry out ruthless attacks with considerable and prolonged human costs. An example from recent decades was the hoax about the alleged presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a pretext used to attack and invade a sovereign country, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of its citizens and the forced displacement of a similar number.
The United States is the largest drug market in the region and possibly in the world, according to the 2025 Global Drug Report, issued by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. This is a well-known fact, and the international community has a duty to denounce it. This is where the largest networks exist to stimulate consumption, guarantee distribution, facilitate trafficking, collect, and hoard the large sums of profits, laundering the resulting money within the country's own economy with relative impunity, without any serious and effective government effort to prevent it.
The enormous sums of money from the U.S. illegal market encourage the creation and operation of drug trafficking networks in Latin America and the Caribbean. That country's vigorous arms industry and its uncontrolled marketing privileges fuel the lethal power of criminal organizations in the region. The lack of attention and action against the root causes of the phenomenon within the United States will only exacerbate the regional impact of this scourge.
Cuba reiterates its firm commitment to the honest and effective fight against illicit drug trafficking, the defense of national sovereignty, and the promotion of peace and stability in Latin America and the Caribbean.
It equally firmly denounces the use of irregular migration flows as a pretext to turn the waters of the Caribbean Sea into a war zone. No one with a modicum of common sense or honesty conceives that the scale of the troops, military equipment, naval assets, including nuclear submarines, and firepower that the United States has prepared to deploy in this peaceful region of the world is the appropriate way to combat organized crime, illicit drug trafficking, or irregular migration flows, nor that this deployment truly achieves the stated objectives.
Cuba reiterates the call made by President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez at the 13th Extraordinary Summit of ALBA-TCP, on August 20, to firmly denounce the new displays of imperialist force.
Havana, August 28, 2025.
Embassy of Cuba