The Unfinished Cold War: Why Cuba Is Back on Washington’s Radar in 2026 I. Prologue: The Island That Refused to Bow When U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a statement in Spanish in May 2026 calling Cuba “the last bastion of tyranny in the hemisphere,” Washington felt a familiar tremor. It was as if a dormant fault line — one buried under decades of geopolitical sediment — suddenly shifted. Cuba, only 150 kilometers from Florida, has long been the United States’ most