Cuba, the country that supposedly poses an existential threat to the United States, is teetering on bankruptcy and can barely keep the lights on. It has an annual budget of $862.99 million, spending $2.36 million per day, on average. That compares to $19,452,054,794 per day for the United States.<\/p>\n
The U.S. outspends Cuba’s entire annual budget in less than one hour.<\/p>\n
Follow the money and you’ll find that the U.S. has vastly more power and resources than Cuba. Here are 10 other comparisons showing the asymmetrical difference between the two nations:<\/p>\n 1. Cuba’s gross domestic product is about $108 billion. The U.S. economy churns out the same output every 29 hours.<\/p>\n 2. The United States government spends more money fighting the conflict with Iran in less than 24 hours than the Cuban government spends to maintain its entire country’s national public healthcare system, education network, and military infrastructure for a full year.<\/p>\n 3. The money the United States spends in a single day on the Iran war could build roughly 6 to 10 mega-scale luxury beach resorts from the ground up in such spots as Varadero and Cayo Santa Mar\u00eda.<\/p>\n 4. The Pentagon spends roughly $895 billion to $900 billion annually, spending in less than nine hours what the Cuban government spends in a whole year.<\/p>\n 5. The U.S. military spends more on gasoline and fuel in a single week than Cuba spends on its entire armed forces in a year.<\/p>\n 6. A single U.S. aircraft carrier like the USS Gerald R. Ford costs $13 billion to build, more money than the Cuban government spends in 15 years.<\/p>\n 7. The U.S. spends $540 million to $660 million to operate its naval base at Guantanamo Bay, which is four to five times more money than the Cuban government spends on its entire armed forces.<\/p>\n 8. The military prison camp at Guantanamo houses roughly 15 wartime detainees. According to a report by the Niskanen Center<\/a>, they cost the U.S. $44 million per prisoner per year. That’s more than Cuba spends on annual training and ammunition for multiple military divisions.<\/p>\n 9. A 90,600-square-foot medical clinic for 5,500 to 6,000 residents at Guantanamo Bay cost $227.6 million. That’s more than double Cuba’s entire national healthcare budget of roughly $110 million to $120 million.<\/p>\n 10. With the U.S. spending roughly $1 billion per day on active warfare operations, a little over one year of the U.S. war budget matches the total capital needed to rebuild the entire nation of Cuba from scratch.<\/p>\n Critics say it’s misleading to only look at the civilian side of the Cuban government. As infrastructure crumbles, the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces have accumulated billions of dollars through a group known as GAESA, the Miami Herald reported<\/a> in January.<\/p>\n “…the Cuban military is riding high: Its bank accounts are stuffed with cash, as much as $18 billion,” the Herald said.<\/p>\n The State Department says judging Cuba based on money alone misses the point.<\/p>\n “To mistake Cuba’s poverty for harmlessness is to misunderstand the threat entirely,” the State Department said in its report, Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.<\/p>\n “Its material weakness was never the measure of its danger. Its power was always ideological, subversive, and parasitic \u2013 and it has proven remarkably durable, outlasting the Soviet empire that helped build it and grafting itself onto every new enemy of the United States that has arisen since. Today it serves as the connective tissue of a broader anti-American coalition, a staging ground where the ambitions of Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran converge with the radical movements operating inside our own borders.<\/p>\n “Today, Cuban agents and operatives maintain a foothold in hundreds of front groups, activist organizations, solidarity centers, and ideological NGO and nonprofit networks. These groups collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history. Many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history \u2013 from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses \u2013 can be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence.”<\/p>\n Google’s Gemini describes this article as “highly accurate.” See fact check<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The State Department contends that Cuba poses a deep, multifaceted threat to U.S. national security and hemispheric stability. “Even as its economy teeters on the brink of collapse in the wake of decades of corrupt communist rule, the Cuban regime\u2019s fundamental objective remains the same as it was when Castro first marched into Havana in … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":5942,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[375,130],"tags":[385,24,389,383,382,386,388,286,387,384],"class_list":["post-5956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cuba","category-news","tag-budget","tag-cuba","tag-guantanamo","tag-iran","tag-pentagon","tag-security-threat","tag-starbucks","tag-state-department","tag-taco-bell","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/traceyeaton.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/traceyeaton.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/traceyeaton.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traceyeaton.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traceyeaton.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5956"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/traceyeaton.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5961,"href":"https:\/\/traceyeaton.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5956\/revisions\/5961"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traceyeaton.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/traceyeaton.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traceyeaton.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traceyeaton.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/traceyeaton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image_69aa80fd-1024x572.jpg\")
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\nGuantanamo expenses include:<\/p>\n\n
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