Today, Cuba remains one of Hamas’s most vocal international supporters, openly backing the group’s attacks on Israel.

By Jose Lev Alvarez, Middle East Forum

Iran has brought its war against Israel and the West to America’s doorstep.

Since 2023, Cuba has acquired more than 300 attack drones, mainly from Iran. Tehran is planting its proxy warfare model inside America’s historic sphere of influence and turning the island into a forward operating base to pressure and provoke the United States.

Iran has spent decades perfecting this strategy with proxies from Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq and Syria.

These forces impose costs on stronger powers while advancing Tehran’s revolutionary goals at minimal risk.

Cuba now follows the same script. The drones, battle-tested by Iranian-backed groups, bring not only weapons but also tactics and doctrine that let a weak regime harass a superpower.

Havana has become Iran’s newest Caribbean proxy—a low-cost extension of the Russia-China-Iran axis.

For almost 70 years, Cuba has been an ideological enemy of America and its allies but especially Israel.

During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Cuba sent more than 1,000 troops and pilots to fight alongside Syrian forces against Israeli forces in the Golan Heights.

Cuban MiG pilots even engaged Israeli aircraft while Cuban tank units fought in several ground battles.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Cuba trained Palestine Liberation Organization terrorists, hosted Palestinian leaders, and led the charge for the 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution at the United Nations.

Today, Cuba remains one of Hamas’s most vocal international supporters, openly backing the group’s attacks on Israel.

The current drone partnership with Iran continues Cuba’s long war against America but also the Jewish state by new means.

Today, Cuba functions as a persistent hybrid threat. Since 2021, more than 600,000 Cubans have attempted or reached United States shores, outpacing both the 1980 Mariel boatlift and the 1994 rafting crisis.

United States Customs and Border Protection recorded more than 225,000 Cuban encounters at the southwest border in 2022 alone.

These flows enable narcotics trafficking, espionage, and now drone pressure; that is why the United States Navy responded by deploying a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier strike group to the Caribbean in May 2026.

Conversely, Cuba fields 50,000 active-duty troops, 40,000 reservists, and approximately 1,145,000 members of the Territorial Troops Militia.

Its air force operates roughly 20 aircraft with readiness rates below 50 percent. The army fields approximately 200 aging T-55 and T-62 tanks from the 1960s and 1970s, plus outdated artillery and surface-to-air missile systems upgraded by Belarus in 2025.

The Global Firepower Index ranks Cuba 65th globally—a position that hides profound obsolescence and minimal combat power.

Some analysts claim that Havana is militarily irrelevant, but this reading is misguided. Geographic proximity combined with Iranian drone technology is a strategic multiplier.

A small number of drones launched from the Caribbean nation could force the United States to divert air and naval assets at the exact moment Iran and its proxies are testing American resolve in the Middle East and China is challenging it in the Indo-Pacific.

If a U.S. offensive operation is launched against Havana, air and naval dominance could be achieved within hours through strikes on air defenses, command nodes, and leadership, all supported by cyber and electronic warfare.

A naval quarantine would complete the isolation and Cuban conventional forces would collapse.

The regime’s “War of All the People” doctrine would likely rely on militia forces for guerrilla and urban fighting to raise American costs.

This could create friction but cannot offset technological inferiority or Cuba’s deepening economic crisis.

The island’s gross domestic product stands at approximately $108 billion, with cumulative decline exceeding 10 percent since 2018.

Inflation reached 25 percent in 2024 and stayed near 21 percent into 2025. The fiscal deficit has exceeded 10 percent of gross domestic product, financed through money printing, which fuels further instability.

Chronic blackouts, food shortages, and protests in 2021 and 2024 have exposed the regime’s fragile control.

In March 2025, Russia signed a military cooperation agreement with Cuba and maintains an intelligence facility on the island.

China provides economic support amid credible suspicion of intelligence ties, too. Both offer limited equipment and diplomatic cover at the United Nations, just as they do for Iran. Yet neither can project real power into the Caribbean, so Cuba likely would have to face any military confrontation alone.

Historical precedents show how such regimes can be neutralized. The 2003 “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq shattered an adversary’s command structure through precision strikes in 21 days.

Operation Just Cause in Panama in 1989 removed Manuel Noriega in five days.

A focused U.S. response could achieve similar speed: immediate air and naval supremacy, cyber and electronic shutdown of regime communications and the fragile grid, targeted leadership strikes, a naval quarantine, and information operations exposing the regime’s failures to encourage defections.

Centralized regime control could erode within 48 to 72 hours.

Geography and overwhelming military asymmetry give the United States decisive initiative. Cuba’s transformation into Iran’s Caribbean proxy creates a self-inflicted strategic liability that forces Washington to split resources between the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, and its own hemisphere.

This is not an existential threat, but it is a distraction threat that Iran has built at minimal expense.

Removing Cuba’s regime as a forward base of the Iran-led axis would restore deterrence, eliminate a harassment vector near Florida, and establish that the United States no longer will tolerate the extension of Iran’s war on Israel into the Western Hemisphere.

The post Iran opens a Caribbean front against America appeared first on World Israel News.

The video showcases the vibrant Jewish community in Curaçao, highlighting their historic Mikvé Israel-Emanuel Synagogue—the oldest in continuous use in the Americas—built in 1732, nestled among the island’s stunning beaches.

Jews of the Caribbean! Curaçao! pic.twitter.com/W4t1Pb681v

— Tal Oran (@travelingclatt) March 16, 2025

The post WATCH: Meet the Jews living on the Caribbean island of Curaçao appeared first on World Israel News.

Residents of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic face a considerable cleanup in the aftermath of Hurricane Fiona. The Category 3 Storm went on to blast the Turks and Caicos Islands on Tuesday with sustained winds of 115 mph (185 kph).

The post WATCH: Hurricane Fiona slams Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico appeared first on World Israel News.

It could be the “worst forgery of all time,” Israeli officials chuckle, with Hebrew words upside down and a misspelling even in English.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A Syrian national was caught recently in Barbados trying to board a flight to Germany with a badly forged Israeli passport, the local authorities announced Tuesday.

The fake was so terrible that Israeli officials chuckled that it was “a candidate for the worst forgery of all time.”

Almost every word in Hebrew in the document presented by “Hormuz Assulin” to passport control was misspelled. Many had final letters coming in the middle of words. Others were turned into complete gibberish. For example, the passport was ostensibly issued in Jerusalem, but on the Hebrew side, the city’s name was the product of a computer’s imagination.

Although probably few in the Caribbean nation actually read Hebrew, one notable error in the language could hardly be missed: While the nationality stated in English was “Israeli,” in Hebrew the word was nonsense – and turned upside down.

Another very obvious mistake was in the translation of “Israel” as Assulin’s birthplace. Although the word is spelled (almost) correctly at the top of the page, it didn’t even come close on this middle line, where “Greece” is typed in badly spelled Hebrew.

If even all that went unnoticed, there was one mistake in English as well, with the word “expiry” gaining an unnecessary “a” in the middle. The highly trained staff also spotted an Israeli border control stamp dated August 3, 2022, which they knew had to be fake because it’s been years since the state has used such stamps.

The authorities in Barbados got in touch with their counterparts in Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority (PIA) and arrested the would-be passenger. A search of his luggage turned up a Syrian passport with a picture of the same man.

“The keyword in solving these cases and learning good lessons is fruitful working relationships between authorities from the various countries of the world,” said Eran Zahavi, Deputy Head of the Border Control Administration at the PIA.

According to Zahavi, fake Israeli passports are much in demand.

“Every such case that is brought to us only strengthens the knowledge that the Israeli passport is a sought-after and powerful passport in the world,” he said.

Over recent years, Ynet reported, the border control in several countries, including Canada, Ecuador and the Netherlands, have contacted PIA about forgeries.

The post Syrian nabbed with fake Israeli passport, ‘worst forgery of all time’ appeared first on World Israel News.

Florida is bracing itself for the catastrophic strike of Hurricane Irma, which has left 10 dead in the Caribbean.

Fearsome Hurricane Irma cut a path of devastation across the northern Caribbean, leaving at least 10 dead and thousands homeless after destroying buildings and uprooting trees on a track Thursday that could lead to a catastrophic strike on Florida.

The most potent Atlantic Ocean hurricane ever, Irma weakened only slightly Thursday morning and remained a powerful Category 5 storm with winds of 180 mph (285 kph), according to the US National Hurricane Center.

The storm was increasingly likely to rip into heavily populated South Florida early Sunday, prompting the governor to declare an emergency and officials to impose mandatory evacuation orders for parts of the Miami metro area and the Florida Keys. Forecasters said it could punish the entire Atlantic coast of Florida and rage on into Georgia and South Carolina.

Most Costly Storm in US History

“This could easily be the most costly storm in US history, which is saying a lot considering what just happened two weeks ago,” said Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami, alluding to the damage caused by Hurricane Harvey.

French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb told France Info radio that eight had died and 23 injured in the country’s Caribbean island territories, and he said the toll on Saint-Martin and Saint-Barthelemy could be higher because rescue teams have yet to finish their inspection of the islands.

“The reconnaissance will really start at daybreak,” Collomb said.

At a news conference, Collomb also said 100,000 food rations have been sent to the islands, the equivalent of four days of supplies.

“It’s a tragedy, we’ll need to rebuild both islands,” he said. “Most of the schools have been destroyed.”

French President Emmanuel Macron’s office said he will go to the islands has soon as weather conditions permit.

In the United Kingdom, the government said Irma inflicted “severe and in places critical” damage to the British overseas territory of Anguilla. Foreign Office Minister Alan Duncan said the Caribbean island took the full force of the hurricane. He told lawmakers on Thursday that the British Virgin islands have also suffered “severe damage.”

Irma blacked out much of Puerto Rico, raking the US territory with heavy wind and rain while staying just out to sea, and it headed early Thursday toward the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

To the east, authorities struggled to get aid to small Caribbean islands devastated by the storm’s record 185 mph (298 kph) winds. Communications were difficult with areas hit by Irma, and information on damage trickled out.

Nearly Every Building Damaged

Nearly every building on Barbuda was damaged when the hurricane’s core crossed almost directly over the island early Wednesday and about 60 percent of its roughly 1,400 residents were left homeless, Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne told The Associated Press.

“It is just really a horrendous situation,” Browne said after returning to Antigua from a plane trip to the neighboring island.

He said roads and telecommunications systems were wrecked and recovery would take months, if not years. A 2-year-old child was killed as a family tried to escape a damaged home during the storm, Browne told the AP.

One death also was reported in the nearby island of Anguilla, where officials reported extensive damage to the airport, hospitals, shelters and school and said 90 percent of roads are impassible, according to the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency.

The agency also reported “major damage” to houses and commercial buildings in the British Virgin Islands.

On St. Thomas in the nearby US Virgin Islands, Laura Strickling spent 12 hours hunkered down with her husband and 1-year-old daughter in a boarded-up basement apartment with no power as the storm raged outside. They emerged to find the lush island in tatters. Many of their neighbors’ homes were damaged and once-dense vegetation was largely gone.

“There are no leaves. It is crazy. One of the things we loved about St. Thomas is that it was so green. And it’s gone,” Strickling said. “It will take years for this community to get back on its feet.”

Significant damage was also reported on St. Martin, an island split between French and Dutch control. Photos and video circulating on social media showed major damage to the airport in Philipsburg and the coastal village of Marigot heavily flooded. France sent emergency food and water there and to the French island of St. Bart’s, where Irma ripped off roofs and knocked out electricity.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said Thursday the storm “caused widescale destruction of infrastructure, houses and businesses.”

“There is no power, no gasoline, no running water. Houses are under water, cars are floating through the streets, inhabitants are sitting in the dark, in ruined houses and are cut off from the outside world,” he said.

By Thursday morning, the center of the storm was about 110 miles (180 kilometers) north of Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, and was moving west-northwest near 17 mph (28 kph).

More than half the island of Puerto Rico was without power, leaving 900,000 in the dark and nearly 50,000 without water, the US territory’s emergency management agency said in the midst of the storm. Fourteen hospitals were using generators after losing power, and trees and light poles were strewn across roads.

Puerto Rico’s public power company warned before the storm hit that some areas could be left without power from four to six months because its staff has been reduced and its infrastructure weakened by the island’s decade-long economic slump.

Florida Flees to Safety

President Donald Trump approved an emergency declaration for the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, allowing the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other agencies to remove debris and give other services that will largely be paid for by the U.S. government.

The US National Hurricane Center predicted Irma would remain at Category 4 or 5 for the next day or two as passes just to the north of the Dominican Republic and Haiti on Thursday, nears the Turks & Caicos and parts of the Bahamas by Thursday night and skirts Cuba on Friday night into Saturday.

It will then likely head north toward Florida, where people were rushing to board up homes, fill cars with gasoline and find a route to safety.

Gov. Rick Scott, who has mobilized parts of the state’s National Guard, declared a state of emergency and asked the governors of Alabama and Georgia to waive trucking regulations so gasoline tankers can get fuel into Florida quickly to ease shortages.

An estimated 25,000 people or more left the Florida Keys after all visitors were ordered to clear out, causing bumper-to-bumper traffic on the single highway that links the chain of low-lying islands to the mainland.

Hurricane Katia On the Way

Meanwhile, Hurricane Katia hovered in the southern Gulf of Mexico, threatening to hit the vulnerable Mexican coast as a Category 2 or 3 hurricane, possibly late Friday or early Saturday. It had winds of 80 mph (130 kph) and was located about 210 miles (335 kilometers) east of Tampico, Mexico.

And a third hurricane, Jose, was growing far out in the Atlantic. It was no immediate threat to land, though the forecast track showed it could affect the Irma-blasted Leeward Islands over the weekend. Hurricane Jose had winds of about 90 mph (150 kph). It was centered about 815 miles (1,310 kilometers) east of the Lesser Antilles and moving west-northwest at 18 mph (30 kph).

By: AP

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