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• Hostilities between the United States and Cuba have spanned more than six decades.
• Key historical conflicts include the Cuban Revolution, the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
• Relations briefly normalized under President Barack Obama but were later reversed by President Donald Trump.
• Recent tensions have escalated following a fatal speedboat incident and new sanctions related to Venezuela.

Hostilities between the United States and Cuba date back more than six decades, if not longer.

The division further intensified as Cuban troops killed four people on a speedboat from Florida who opened fire off the Cuban coast on Feb. 25, according to Cuba’s Interior Ministry in Havana.

It was unclear if any American citizens were aboard the boat.

Tensions between the two countries have escalated recently, with President Donald Trump putting new sanctions and tariffs on the Caribbean country after the operation capturing Cuban ally and former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Here’s a history of key flare-ups between the two countries.

Cuban Revolution 

Fidel Castro took over power in Cuba in 1959, overthrowing U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. Castro establishes a revolutionary socialist state in Cuba after he and a group of guerrilla fighters successfully revolt against Batista, who was supported by the United States for his anti-communist stance, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Batista fled Cuba after seven years of dictatorship, and Castro began strengthening ties with the Soviet Union. The following year, Castro nationalized all foreign assets in Cuba, hiked taxes on US imported goods and established trade deals with the Soviet Union.

President Dwight Eisenhower retaliated. He slashed the import quota for Cuban sugar, froze Cuban assets in the United States and imposed a near-full trade embargo. Eisenhower also cut off diplomatic ties with the Castro government.

Bay of Pigs invasion

In 1961, CIA-trained Cuban exiles failed to overthrow Castro, leading to severed diplomatic ties.

President John F. Kennedy, executing an approved strategy by the previous Eisenhower administration, deployed a brigade of 1,400 Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored Cuban exiles in a failed attempt to overthrow Castro.

The Cuban military defeated the exiles in three days after several miscues by the exiled forces that eventually revealed the United States’ involvement. Undeterred by the failed invasion, the Kennedy administration implemented Operation Mongoose to destabilize Cuba’s government and economy. The operation included plans to assassinate Castro.

For many decades, several U.S. presidential administrations conducted covert operations against Cuba.

Cuban Missile Crisis

In 1961, the United States discovered Soviet nuclear missiles being built in Cuba when an American U-2 spy plane photographed nuclear missile sites. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 caused widespread panic as America seemed on the brink of a nuclear battle with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Fearing a U.S. invasion, Cuban leader Castro allowed the Soviet Union to place missiles on its soil. The crisis was resolved when the Soviet Union pledged to remove the missiles in exchange for the United States removing its missiles in Turkey.

Mariel boatlift and ‘Cuban Exodus’

In 1980, after housing and job shortages led to a severe economic downturn, the Cuban government opened its coast to allow anyone with a permit to flee the country on boats at the Port of Mariel, just west of Havana. As a result of the mass movement, nearly 125,000 Cubans were allowed to emigrate to the United States in a span of five months.

Many emigrated to Florida. The Coast Guard refered to the influx of Cuban immigrants as the “1980 Cuban Exodus.“

In 1993, after more economic turmoil, Cuba legalized the American dollar, and allowed privately owned businesses and services. Farmers could also sell some of their produce privately instead of only to the government.

However, Cuba accused the United States of tightening an economic embargo and depriving Cubans of medicine and other needed resources.

In 1994, U.S. officials and Cuba reached an immigration agreement that would allow the United States to accept 20,000 Cubans annually, contingent on the Cuban government controlling the exodus of Cuban refugees.

Helms-Burton Act

After two U.S. civilian planes were shot down by Cuban Air Force jets in 1996, Congress passed legislation known as the Helms-Burton Act (Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996) to further tighten the Cuban trade embargo between the two countries by penalizing foreign companies doing business in Cuba.

When it passed the Helms-Burton Act, Congress authorized the president to suspend Title III on national security grounds. The provision was then suspended by three presidents, hoping to avoid diplomatic conflicts with U.S. allies, including Canada and Spain, whose companies have invested in Cuba.

However, President Donald Trump would later lift that suspension in 2019 during his first term in office.

The Cuban Five

In 1998, the Clinton administration charged five Cuban counterintelligence officers in the United States with conspiracy to commit espionage, among other illegal activities.

The officers were part of a ring known as the “Wasp Network,” who were sent by the Castro government to infiltrate Cuban-American exile groups and politicians in South Florida opposed to the Castro regime. They were found guilty in 2001.

Two of the officers were released at the end of their terms in 2011 and 2014. The other three officers were released later in 2014, as part of a prisoner swap for a U.S. intelligence officer held in Cuba.

Elián González’s custody battle

 In 1999, a 6-year-old Cuban boy was rescued off the coast of Florida after the boat his mother and others were traveling in capsized. 

Elián González became the poster child of an international custody fight and a media firestorm as the boy’s uncle and relatives in Miami fought with his father and the Cuban government over where the boy should live.

In 2000, armed U.S. federal agents seized the boy from his relatives in Miami and eventually returned him to his father in Cuba after a lengthy custody battle. More than two decades later, González is a lawmaker in Cuba’s National Assembly.

Controversial boat-related killing

In another fatal boat-related shootout in 2022, the Cuban coast guard killed one person aboard a Dakota speedboat with a Florida registration number 3 nautical miles north of Bahia Honda.

Cuban authorities said at the time they found drugs and evidence of firearms use aboard. That same year, five people, including a young child, died when a speedboat carrying Cubans collided with a Cuban coast guard vessel, according to the Cuba Ministry of Interior’s version.

Survivors later said the coast guard vessel rammed their boat.

‘Cuban thaw’

In 2016, President Barack Obama and Cuban leader Raúl Castro announced a historic normalization of relations between the two countries to end the more than 50 years of hostility.

The roughly two years of discussions resulted in a prisoner swap, Obama’s historic 2016 visit to Cuba embassy reopenings and the easing of banking and traveling restrictions for Americans and Cubans.

“The President has instructed the Secretary of State to immediately initiate discussions with Cuba on the re-establishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba, which were severed in January 1961,” said a White House summary announcing the major overhaul of US-Cuba relations. “In the coming months, we will re-establish an embassy in Havana and carry out high-level exchanges and visits between our two governments as part of the normalization process.”

Trump reverses policies

Shortly after taking over the White House in 2017, the first Trump administration reversed many Obama-era policies regarding Cuba. The administration reimposed strict sanctions and redesignated Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism.

In the wake of Maduro’s capture last month, the second Trump administration in January declared a national emergency regarding Cuba, calling the country “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security. The United States has cut off the flow of Venezuelan oil to Cuba and threatened to slap tariffs on any country supplying it with fuel.