A senior Trump administration official said it out loud last week — the word that no one in Washington is supposed to use. Accelerationism. The philosophy of hastening societal collapse. “We don’t want to kill off the regime just yet,” the official told Axios. “There’s a method to this.”

That candor is worth pausing on. The United States government has openly described its policy toward a sovereign nation — ninety miles from Florida — as the deliberate engineering of collapse. Not regime change by force, not diplomatic pressure with a handshake at the end. Methodical strangulation, timed for effect, calibrated to produce maximum internal fracture before the patient flatlines. This is the operating doctrine for Cuba in the summer of 2026, and it has been building since a January weekend that changed the strategic map of the Western Hemisphere.