GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made a trip to Cuba this week.
Hegseth was at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, where he met with U.S. service members who are stationed there.
Officials said he also plans to pay a visit to U.S. Central Command in Tampa, which is also home to a large Cuban American community.
Hegseth’s presence in Cuba comes amid the U.S. calling for dramatic changes on the island and the indictment of Raul Castro in connection to the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue plane shootdown.
The U.S. has blocked oil from reaching Cuba following threats by President Donald Trump to remove the country’s leadership regime by force.
Last month, a U.S. aircraft carrier and its strike group of fighter jets and radar-jamming equipment entered the southern Caribbean and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency visited Cuban officials in Havana.
At the time, Local 10’s Cuba analyst, Andy Gomez, said his contacts on the island confirmed they had access to drones for “defensive purposes.”
That came as Southcom posted on social media that it has established a new “autonomous warfare command”, displaying a military exercise in Key West earlier this year of its autonomous, semi-autonomous and unmanned systems used, they say, to counter threats in the region.
On Monday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk warned that America’s “maximum pressure” campaign, which has included blocking oil access to the communist island, is leading to a humanitarian crisis.
But U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has blamed economic weakening and growing unrest on what he has described as the island’s long legacy of greed, mismanagement and corrupt leadership, calling attention to a Cuban military-operated conglomerate which he said is starving the people from access to the money needed to address food shortages and crumbling infrastructure.
Copyright 2026 by WPLG Local10.com - All rights reserved.
