Will President Trump act on his threat to take Cuba?

This is Fresh Air. I am Terry Gross. President Trump says he plans on taking Cuba. We're already at war with Iran, and the conflict has spread to over a dozen other countries in the Gulf region. Cuba is at a very vulnerable moment.

It had depended on Venezuela for fuel and supplies, but those shipments ended after the U.S. arrested Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, and then the vice president Delcy Rodriguez became president, and she has complied with Trump. Cuba is bankrupt. The power grid is now being slowly repaired after it completely failed, and that wasn't the first time Cuba was recently in the dark. There's hardly any food or fuel, and an estimated one in five Cubans have left the country in the last few years.

Here to explain how we got to this point is John Lee Anderson. He recently returned from a reporting trip to Cuba. He writes about Cuba in the new issue of The New Yorker where he's a staff writer. His piece is titled Is Cuba Next? Trump's campaign to topple foreign adversaries encounters a battered but defiant regime.

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