Photo credit: The New York Times
Former CIA Director Robert Gates said Cuba’s greatest national security risk to the United States is not an imminent military attack, but the possibility that the island’s deepening crisis could produce another mass migration emergency like the 1980 Mariel boatlift.
The Latin Times reports that Gates told Margaret Brennan in an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation that, “The bigger risk is that we end up with another Mariel evacuation from Cuba that has tens of thousands of Cubans heading to the United States out of desperation.”
Gates said Cuba has affected US national security through its overseas activities, including its long involvement in Venezuela. But he drew a distinction between Havana’s regional operations and a direct threat to the US.
“They have been involved in ways that have impacted our national security and our interests in their engagement in other countries for a long time,” Gates said, according to CBS, referring to Cuban security forces and advisers abroad. “Other than in these, if you will, peripheral ways; I think the main threat is, frankly, collapse.”
The warning comes as President Donald Trump has escalated pressure on Cuba and publicly threatened possible military action against the island. CBS reported that the Trump administration has imposed an oil blockade that experts say has pushed \Cuba into one of its most severe economic crises since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Cuba officials last week announced the country had run out of fuel.
