Trump Said Cuba Is Next. Cuba Runs on Huawei. Here Is What That Really Means.

On March 27, at the FII Priority Summit in Miami — a Saudi sovereign wealth fund investment forum — President Trump said this: "And Cuba is next, by the way, but pretend I didn't say that please. Please, please, please, media, please disregard that statement."

The media did not disregard it. Neither should developers and technology professionals tracking the geopolitical reshaping of the global internet.

Trump made the remark after touting two accomplishments: the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and what he described as progress in Iran nuclear negotiations. Cuba was the third item on a list of regimes his administration intends to pressure or remove. Secretary of State Marco Rubio reinforced the point separately, stating that Cuba's economy "can't change unless their system of government changes."

The geopolitical implications are being covered everywhere. The technology implications are being covered almost nowhere. Here is what those are.

Cuba Runs on Chinese Tech. Almost Entirely.

US sanctions on Cuba have been in place since 1962. Six decades of embargo means Cuba could not buy American telecommunications equipment, American semiconductors, American networking hardware, or American software at scale. The void was filled by China.

Cuba's national telecommunications provider, ETECSA, built its entire backbone network on Huawei infrastructure. ZTE and TP-Link supply significant portions of Cuba's consumer WiFi equipment and mobile hardware. The ALBA-1 undersea cable — Cuba's primary high-capacity submarine cable connection, linking Havana to Venezuela and Jamaica — was financed and constructed with Chinese assistance.

This is not marginal Chinese involvement. It is structural dependency. Cuba's telecommunications infrastructure is, at the network layer, a Chinese-built system operating under Cuban state control.

What Happens to That Infrastructure If the US Moves

Regime change in Cuba — the framing Rubio used explicitly — would almost certainly trigger immediate pressure from Washington to remove Huawei and ZTE from Cuban networks, the same pressure the US applied to its NATO allies, Australia, Japan, and South Korea over the past six years.

The Five Eyes campaign against Huawei resulted in billions of dollars of "rip and replace" spending in the UK, Australia, and Canada. The US subsidised some of that replacement with CHIPS Act adjacent funding and FCC reimbursement programs. Cuba would face the same requirement with none of those subsidies available, and with a post-regime economy that starts at near-zero hard currency reserves.

The ALBA-1 cable creates a specific problem. It connects Cuba to Venezuela and Jamaica — not to the United States. Cuba has no direct cable connection to US internet infrastructure. A post-regime Cuba aligned with Washington would need either a new cable to Florida (roughly 150 miles) or renegotiated routing through existing Caribbean cables, most of which pass through US territories or US-allied nations that could facilitate connection.

Building a new submarine cable takes three to four years minimum and costs $200-300 million for a short route. Cuba's current connectivity would be a day-one infrastructure priority for any US-aligned transition government, and it is a problem with no fast solution.

The Starlink Question

Cuba is one of the few remaining countries where Starlink is completely banned and technically jammed. ETECSA and the Cuban government operate signal jamming infrastructure specifically to prevent satellite internet access that would bypass state-controlled ETECSA networks.

During Cuba's historic 2021 protests, the Cuban government shut down mobile internet access for days — the same playbook as Iran's SHOMA strategy, but with older and less robust domestic intranet infrastructure. Cubans who tried to use VPNs during the shutdown were identified and in some cases detained.

Starlink access in Cuba would be transformational for the same reason it was transformational in Ukraine: it provides internet connectivity that cannot be controlled at the national network layer. SpaceX has demonstrated in Ukraine, Iran, and Venezuela that Starlink can operate under active jamming attempts, though not perfectly.

A US-aligned transition in Cuba would almost certainly include immediate Starlink deployment as a first-day infrastructure priority — exactly as the US has done in Venezuela with limited Starlink penetration through the opposition government channels.

The Sanctions Architecture Already Targets Cuban Tech

The 2026 US Outbound Investment Security Program formally added Cuba to its list of "countries of concern" alongside Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela. The practical impact of that designation is currently minimal because the existing embargo already covers most investment categories.

But the designation signals intent. It closes loopholes that might have allowed US capital to flow into Cuban tech infrastructure through third-country intermediaries. It specifically targets semiconductor investment, AI infrastructure, and quantum computing development — the categories where Cuban researchers have had some internationally recognised work despite their isolation.

Cuba's AI development, such as it is, has been shaped by its Soviet-era mathematical tradition and UNESCO support programs. Cuban researchers have produced meaningful work in machine learning theory and computer vision despite having almost no access to GPU compute. That work happens entirely in isolation from the global AI ecosystem — no AWS, no Google Cloud, no Azure, no access to Anthropic or OpenAI APIs, no participation in international model benchmarks.

The Venezuela Parallel

Venezuela is the clearest template for what a Trump-led Cuba policy looks like in practice.

The US recognised Juan Guaidó as Venezuela's legitimate president in 2019, imposed severe sanctions on PDVSA and the Maduro government, and attempted to cut Venezuela off from the global financial system. The technology dimension of that campaign included sanctions on Venezuelan state entities that prevented software license renewals, hardware purchases, and cloud service access.

Venezuelan government systems ran increasingly on Russian and Chinese technology as Western software vendors were prohibited from selling to sanctioned entities. Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP all had to navigate complex sanctions compliance. Cuban state systems would face the same exodus of Western software vendors the moment US sanctions shifted from embargo to active regime-pressure mode.

The Maduro capture that Trump referenced at the Miami forum means Venezuela is now the most recent case study. If Cuba becomes the next active target, the Venezuela tech playbook — sanctions on state entities, technology vendor withdrawal, attempted Starlink deployment, pressure on Chinese suppliers — is the template.

What This Means for the Global Internet

Cuba sits at a strategic point in Caribbean undersea cable geography. The island's north coast is 90 miles from Florida. Multiple major undersea cables pass through or near Cuban territorial waters connecting the US East Coast to Latin America.

A Cuba aligned with Washington — even partially — changes the routing dynamics of Caribbean internet infrastructure. It opens the possibility of new cable landings that reduce dependence on the current routing through the Bahamas and Puerto Rico. It changes the threat assessment for cable cuts in the region, since a Cuban government under US influence would have incentive to protect cables rather than threaten them.

It also removes one of the few remaining operating examples of a state-controlled internet architecture in the Western hemisphere. Cuba's network, alongside Venezuela's, has been a laboratory for authoritarian internet control techniques that the global freedom of information community has studied closely. A transition changes that research landscape.

The Developer Impact Is Indirect But Real

No Cuban APIs. No Cuban cloud providers. No Cuban developer ecosystem that touches global tech infrastructure in any meaningful way. So why does this matter to the people reading this?

Because the Cuban situation is a preview of the infrastructure consequences of geopolitical realignment — the same dynamic playing out in Iran, Venezuela, Russia, and now Cuba in sequence. Every country that transitions from Chinese-infrastructure dependency to US-aligned connectivity goes through the same painful sequence: rip-and-replace of Huawei hardware, reestablishment of submarine cable connections, re-entry into Western cloud and software ecosystems.

Each transition is a multi-year infrastructure project. Each one reshapes the routing of global internet traffic. Each one creates demand for the network equipment, cable installation capacity, and cloud onboarding that the Western tech industry supplies.

Cuba is small — 11 million people. But it sits at the edge of Florida, 90 miles from the largest cloud infrastructure concentration in the Western hemisphere. The infrastructure implications of a Cuban transition are disproportionate to its population because of its geography.

Key Takeaways

• Trump said "Cuba is next" on March 27 at the FII Priority Summit in Miami, after touting Venezuela and Iran as recent wins. Secretary of State Rubio separately called for regime change in Havana.
• Cuba's entire telecom infrastructure runs on Huawei, ZTE, and TP-Link — a direct consequence of 60 years of US embargo filling the void with Chinese suppliers. ETECSA's backbone network is Huawei-built.
• The ALBA-1 undersea cable is Chinese-financed and connects Cuba to Venezuela and Jamaica, not to the US — any transition government faces a multi-year, $200-300M cable infrastructure challenge
• Starlink is actively jammed in Cuba — a US-aligned transition would almost certainly begin with satellite internet deployment as a first-day infrastructure priority, matching the Venezuela and Ukraine playbooks
• The 2026 US Outbound Investment Security Program already lists Cuba as a country of concern alongside Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela — closing third-country investment loopholes
• The Venezuela template applies: sanctions on state entities trigger Western software vendor withdrawal, Chinese/Russian tech fills the gap, then reversal requires years of rip-and-replace
• Geography matters: Cuba is 90 miles from Florida, sits adjacent to major Caribbean undersea cable routes, and a US-aligned Cuba changes the infrastructure risk map for Atlantic-to-Latin-America internet traffic