Trump seeking ‘regime change’ in Cuba by end of the year: US media report 

United States President Donald Trump aims to remove Cuba’s leadership and is actively seeking government insiders in Havana who are willing to make a deal with Washington to “push out the Communist regime”, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

The US newspaper, quoting unnamed US officials, reported on Wednesday that the Trump Administration does not have a “concrete plan” for Cuba, but that the recent abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by the US military was “left behind as a blueprint and a warning for Cuba”.

A US official told the newspaper that meetings have been held with Cuban exiles and civic groups in Miami and Washington, DC, in a bid to identify a government official in Cuba who might “want to cut a deal”.

Trump has also directly threatened Cuba, writing on his Truth Social platform earlier this month: “I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”

David Smith, an expert in US politics and foreign policy at the University of Sydney’s US Studies Centre, told Al Jazeera that the White House may be “too optimistic” in thinking that threats alone will be enough to topple the Cuban government, which is led by President Miguel Diaz-Canel.

“We saw in Iran recently that Trump seemed to believe there that if there was a sufficient threat then the Iranian government might just cave,” Smith said.

“He was really encouraging the protesters and suggesting the Iranian regime was very weak, but it turned out the Iranian regime was still strong enough, repressive enough and certainly determined enough to hold on,” he said.

The situation in a country such as Cuba is also opaque to outsiders, Smith said, including the actual power of the government and the loyalty of its officials.

Ricardo Zuniga, a former official with the administration of US President Barack Obama, who helped negotiate a short-lived detente between Havana and Washington from 2014 to 2017, said Cuba’s leadership would be “a much tougher nut to crack” than Venezuela’s.

“There’s nobody who would be tempted to work on the US side,” Zuniga told The Wall Street Journal.

Bringing down the Cuban leadership has been a decades-long dream of many US politicians since the 1959 revolution that brought the country’s famed revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro, to power.

The US tried and failed to overthrow the Cuban leadership during the disastrous 1962 Bay of Pigs Invasion. The CIA also made many attempts to assassinate Castro during his lifetime, while Bolivian forces – backed by the US – executed the Argentinian-born Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara in 1967.

Cuba lies just 150km (93 miles) from South Florida, and hundreds of thousands of Cubans have left the island for the US, citing economic woes and political repression.

The Cuban diaspora in the US makes up a powerful voting bloc and includes senior Trump officials such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a longtime critic of Cuba’s communist government.

“There’s always been this sense for anti-Communist hawks in the administration that this place is so small and so close, it’s a real humiliation that this place is allowed to continue as it is,” the University of Sydney’s Smith told Al Jazeera.

“For Trump, whose political socialisation was during the Cold War period, he would really see the existence of that communist government in Cuba as an affront to the US,” he added.