The Cuban government vehemently rejects the current deployment of United States military forces in the Caribbean Sea. This dangerous act represents a serious threat and an aggressive show of force that violates the sovereignty and self-determination of the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean. It further ignores the commitment of the 33 member countries of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) to proclaim the region as a Zone of Peace.

The U.S. allegation linking the legitimate government of Venezuela and its President, Nicolás Maduro Moros, to criminal organizations involved in illicit drug trafficking constitutes an absurd pretext with no foundation. The leaders in Washington irresponsibly discard the assessment of their own Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which, in its report this year, did not mention the Government of Venezuela among the perpetrators or facilitators of drug trafficking operations that threaten U.S. territory.

The U.S. government is returning to lies to justify violence and plunder. It is using them in the renewed deployment of a scheme of domination anchored in the Monroe Doctrine, a cornerstone of its interventionism in the American continent. With similar fallacies, ruthless aggressions have been carried out with considerable and prolonged human costs. An example from recent decades was the farce regarding 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 market for narcotics in the region and possibly 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. It is there that the largest networks exist which stimulate consumption, guarantee distribution, facilitate trafficking, collect and hoard the substantial profits, and launder the resulting money within the country's own economy with relative impunity, without a serious and effective effort by the government to prevent it.

The enormous sums of money from the U.S. illegal market incite the creation and operation of drug trafficking networks in Latin America and the Caribbean. That country's vigorous arms industry and its uncontrolled privileges for commercialization 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 worsen the regional impact of this scourge.

Cuba reiterates its firm commitment to an 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 denounces with equal firmness the use of irregular migratory flows as a pretext to turn the waters of the Caribbean Sea into a war zone. No one with a modicum of common sense and honesty can conceive that the scale of the forces, military technology, naval means, including nuclear submarines, and firepower that the United States has chosen to deploy in this peaceful part of the world is the appropriate way to combat organized crime, illicit drug trafficking, or irregular migration flows, nor that this deployment truly intends to achieve its stated objectives.

Cuba reiterates the call made by President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez at the XIII Extraordinary Summit of ALBA-TCP on August 20 to firmly denounce these new demonstrations of imperialist force.

Havana, August 28, 2025.