In this episode of Hardpoints, Mike and Neal turn to a story that’s quietly fallen out of the headlines: Cuba. Ninety miles off the coast of Florida, 11 million people are living on an hour or two of electricity a day. Oil imports have collapsed from over 100,000 barrels a day to nearly zero in three months. Surgeries are postponed, neonatal wards are cycling off, and the US Navy is running what looks a lot like a blockade.

The administration is giving Cuba the full Iran-meets-North-Korea treatment — sanctions on its energy, financial, and security sectors, and secondary sanctions on anyone trying to fill the vacuum left by a post-Maduro Venezuela. The president says the USS Abraham Lincoln will pull up 100 yards offshore and the island will simply say thank you. Southern Command says it isn’t planning an invasion. So what’s actually going on here — and is there an endgame, or just punishment?

Mike and Neal trace the history (64 years of embargo, the Monroe Doctrine versus the “Trump Doctrine,” the Venezuela playbook) and lay out the scenarios — from a friendly transition with a rebuilt grid, to a Somalia-style failed state 90 miles from Key West, with China’s signals-intelligence sites and a tripling of Russian intelligence officers already on the island.

Plus, the reader mailbag goes deep on how the military and FAA screen wind turbines from radar and whether turbine blades can actually be recycled — and the usual Goods, Bads & Others: clean energy investment passing double that of fossil fuels, a proposed $300B US investment in Iran, the Pacific drug-boat strikes, and an update from the Heirloom build.