US Secretary of State Marco Rubio at a press conference on his visit to Mexico, September 3, 2025. Photo: Cristina RodrĂguez.
By Rosa Miriam Elizalde – Sep 11, 2025
Shakespeare has never been more relevant than now. Macbeth’s famous line – “Life is but a shadow… a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” – seems to refer to the situation Donald Trump has created in the Caribbean.
Determined to cloud reality, the Republican administration has fabricated a scenario of preventive war that illuminates the waters of the Caribbean with F-35 fighter jets and warships, but obscures the legality, international cooperation, and true causes of the organized crime it claims to be fighting.
Some US media outlets have described this scenario as an example of “performative militarism”: a deployment conceived less as a rational security strategy than as a spectacle designed to show force and fuel headlines. This logic has already been seen in cities such as Los Angeles and Washington, where troops were sent against the will of local authorities, and is now being replicated in the Caribbean under the pretext of fighting drug trafficking.
Washington mobilized destroyers, a nuclear submarine, and thousands of Marines in the region. On September 2, a bombing of a small boat attributed to the Tren de Aragua—with 11 deaths—marked the first direct military action by the United States in Latin America since Panama in 1989. Without multilateral endorsement or conclusive evidence, the alleged episode shows how the rhetoric of “narco-terrorism”—which equates drug trafficking with global terrorism—has become a lethal resource in the new dynamic between war and sovereignty, ushering in a period of heightened hemispheric tensions.
At the center of this narrative is Marco Rubio, the true architect of the warmongering agenda. For years, the senator from a Cuban family has mixed drug trafficking, terrorism, and regimes uncomfortable for the United States in the same discourse. Under his impetus, criminal organizations have been labeled “narco-terrorists,” opening “legal” loopholes for military intervention and aligning U.S. foreign policy with the hardest-line sectors of the Cuban and Venezuelan emigration in Florida. Rubio has turned the Caribbean into a laboratory for his project: subordinating the region to Washington, weakening state autonomy, and normalizing confrontation as a form of hemispheric relations.
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Donald Trump’s role in this machinery is to turn it into a spectacle. He has turned foreign policy into a script for immediate headlines: symbolically renaming the Department of Defense as the “Department of War,” deploying supersonic fighter jets over Puerto Rico, threatening to shoot down Venezuelan planes, and offering million-dollar rewards for the capture of Nicolás Maduro. All of this is part of a performance designed to project toughness and control, although in reality it generates uncertainty and destabilization.
Hence, the US press speaks of “performative militarism.” It is not a coherent strategic plan, but rather a theatrical gesture that confuses form with effectiveness: demonstrating strength for domestic consumption, producing grandiose images, and dominating the media agenda. The Washington Post and Reuters have pointed out that these operations are carried out with vague legal grounds, weak evidence, and unpredictable diplomatic consequences.
The repercussions in the Caribbean are immediate. The region, whose GDP depends on tourism for 30 percent, according to the World Tourism Organization (2024), faces a decline in visitor confidence due to the military presence and headlines of violence. Maritime trade, vital to island economies such as Jamaica and Barbados, is threatened by the disruption of routes. In addition, the diversion of drug trafficking, as already occurred in the Pacific in 2023, could intensify violence in countries such as the Dominican Republic, where homicides linked to organized crime grew by 15 percent last year, according to the Citizen Security Observatory.
In Caracas, the response was to mobilize troops and denounce an attempt at regime change, while the rest of the region grows increasingly concerned about the future. The hawks have done a poor job of concealing their true intentions. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Axios that the attack on the alleged drug-trafficking boat was only the beginning of a larger mission, and while he denied that Trump was seeking direct intervention in Venezuela, he also hinted that “they would not be concerned if Maduro fell.”
What this spectacle leaves behind is not security or justice, but a more fragile Caribbean: caught up in Rubio’s warmongering agenda, Trump’s media circus, and a script that privileges image over reality. A tale told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
(Resumen Latinoamericano – English)
Rosa Miriam Elizalde
Rosa Miriam Elizalde is a Cuban journalist who was First Vice President of the Union of Cuban Journalists (UPEC), a founder of Cuba Debate and a writer of several books. She is also a regular contributor to La Jornada.
