A top US politician has threatened Cuba’s leaders days after the killing of Iran’s head of state.
Lindsey Graham, Republican senator for South Carolina and an ally of President Donald Trump, hinted that the Communist regime in Havana could be targeted next by the US.
He appeared on Fox News’s Sunday Night in America to discuss the weekend’s attacks against Iran that sparked further bombing raids and retaliatory strikes across the Middle East.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed at his compound on Saturday morning by a joint US-Israeli airstrike. The IDF has since expanded its military operation to Lebanon, hitting Hezbollah targets.
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Iran hit back, firing missiles at US military sites and Gulf allies, including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Britain’s Akrotiri airbase in Cyprus.
“The Iranian regime, the mother ship of international terrorism, is about to collapse,” Mr Graham said. “The captain of the ship, the ayatollah, is stone-cold dead.”
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However, the senator also said that “Cuba’s next”, adding: “They’re going to fall. This communist dictatorship in Cuba, their days are numbered.”
It is unclear whether any military operation is planned, but Cuba has been put under increasing pressure by the Trump administration since US forces kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro at the start of the year.
The US has maintained a strict trade embargo on Cuba since 1962, the year after a failed, CIA-sponsored invasion of the island at the Bay of Pigs.
In February, the Trump administration furthered the blockade with a fuel embargo, which caused an oil shortage and, according to international charities, a humanitarian crisis.
United Nations human rights experts condemned Donald Trump’s executive order imposing trade tariffs on countries exporting oil to Cuba last month, accusing the US of a “serious violation of international law and a grave threat to a democratic and equitable international order”.
Mexico and Canada have also sent aid to the Caribbean country in the wake of the embargo.
It comes after Mr Trump said on Friday that there was a possibility of a “friendly takeover of Cuba”, without offering details on what he meant.
Speaking to reporters outside the White House, Mr Trump said US secretary of state Marco Rubio was in discussions with Cuban leaders “at a very high level.”
“The Cuban government is talking with us”, the president said. “They have no money. They have no anything right now. But they’re talking to us, and maybe we’ll have a friendly takeover of Cuba.”
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Last week Havana said its forces shot and killed four Cuban nationals on a US-registered speedboat that entered its waters and opened fire on a patrol vessel.
The country’s interior ministry added that six other Cuban citizens also on the boat were injured in the shoot-out, just a miles off the island’s coast, and were detained.
Mr Rubio said no US government personnel were involved but insisted: “We are going to have our own information on this, we are going to figure out exactly what happened.”
