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Forget about Somali daycare fraud for a moment - have you heard about toddler fight club?  A daycare in Fort Worth, TX is facing investigations and litigation after evidence showed staff abusing young children and forcing them to fight each other. 

One mother, Heather Harris, knew something was wrong when she picked up her 4-year-old son at the Arka Montessori Academy of Risinger daycare. He was crying uncontrollably and was covered in bruises.  Employees told the mother her son had fought with another child, but their explanations did not add up, according to a lawsuit filed this month by Harris and her husband, Richard Harris.  She insisted on seeing the classroom's surveillance footage.

The disturbing footage shows staff at the daycare swing a child around like a rag-doll and trying to force him to fight another child. 

Heather and Richard Harris filed the lawsuit September 4th against Arka Risinger Educators LLC, which operates the Fort Worth child care center on West Risinger Road. The case was filed in Tarrant County's 48th District Court.  The lawsuit accuses the center of negligence, gross negligence and failing to properly hire, train and supervise its employees.

The family is seeking more than $1 million in damages, and for a jury to determine the final amount.  The family and their attorney have described the scene as resembling a “child fight club.” State regulators cited the center for related violations (improper discipline, prohibited punishments such as grabbing/pulling, yelling, and failure to intervene).

The incident is only one of many that the daycare has been investigated for by authorities. 

The Texas Health and Human Services Commission's Child Care Regulation Division investigated and cited Arka Montessori for 16 violations since 2024.  Inspections found at least 21 safety deficiencies.   Violations included improper discipline; prohibited punishments, grabbing and pulling; yelling at children, etc.  The most recent investigation also uncovered employee accounts alleging Johnson had previously yelled at children or handled them aggressively.  

It is curious, though, that the daycare is still running after these problems were uncovered by officials.

Parents being more involved in the vetting of staff at these facilities is an obvious issue - checking the company's citation records would be a good start. That said, child care programs have a tendency to limit the vetting of prospective employees in favor of filling positions quickly.  HHS Child Maltreatment counted 2,341 victims of abuse by daycare providers in 2024 alone. 

Be very careful who you leave in charge of your children... but if you do choose the Arka Montessori, here are some 'rules'

The Rules of Toddler Fight Club

• The first rule of Toddler Fight Club: you do not tell Mommy about Toddler Fight Club.

• The second rule of Toddler Fight Club: you DO NOT tell Mommy about Toddler Fight Club.

• If someone cries, goes limp, or needs a diaper change, the fight is over.

• Only two toddlers to a fight. Sharing is still not a thing.

• One fight at a time, fellas. Then snack.

• No shoes, no shirts. Honestly, we weren't wearing them anyway.

• Fights go on as long as they have to, or until nap time, whichever comes first.

• If this is your first day at daycare, you have to fight.

And remember:

"You are not your onesie. You are not the contents of your diaper bag. You are not your light-up sneakers."

"We're a generation raised by screens. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our great war is bedtime. Our great depression is that the banana broke in half."

And never forget:

"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for every goldfish cracker drops to zero."

Sorry, we had to...

Iran has announced Saturday that its Supreme National Security Council has submitted Tehran's conditions for ending the war with the United States via Qatar, and that it awaits the Trump White House's response.

"We are in contact with the Qatari intermediary who conveyed our conditions to Washington to end the war, and we are awaiting a response from President Trump," the supreme council's secretary Mohsen Rezaei said.

But he warned that if Washington doesn't comply, the Islamic Republic is ready for a "decisive war". The conditions, according to his summary, features--

"the end of the war on all fronts, the release of frozen assets and the end of the naval blockade."

"Iran has become convinced of the need to change its strategy towards Washington following the US withdrawal from the memorandum of understanding," Rezaei explained in words given to Al Jazeera.

He blasted US and Israeli calculations which have been on display through over six months of war as "flawed" and asserted that the conflict was ultimately instigated by Netanyahu.

"Iran knows the US military’s vulnerabilities and is more prepared than ever to counter its air strikes," Rezaei stated. He went on to claim that Iranian forces recently tested an anti-ship missile near a US aircraft carrier.

"Iran is serious about defense," the high-ranking Iranian security official continued, and "if attacked, will strike US bases and Washington's interests in the region with greater force."

Meanwhile, President Trump continues to shut down critics of his "little excursion" in the Middle East, which is increasingly an obvious quagmire from which the US is seeking to extricate itself, by saying that high fuel prices don't matter in light of the potential for Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Interestingly, at the same time Iran continues to seek to demonstrate it is not bent on achieving nuclear weapons status. 

However, Rezaei has also newly teased withdrawing from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty:

Iran complies with a fatwa issued by the late Ali Khamenei prohibiting the development of nuclear weapons and has not yet decided to withdraw from the Treaty on the Non·Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

"We still adhere to the fatwa of the late supreme leader and have not changed our nuclear doctrine, but we do not know what will happen in the future. We have not yet made a decision to withdraw from the Non·Proliferation Treaty, and this issue depends on Washington’s behavior," said Mohsen Rezaei

However, according to Rezaei, the actions of the United States and Israel allow Iran to withdraw from the treaty.

The Iranian official in the fresh remarks also addressed the escalating Saudi-Yemen war. He described that the Houthis seek a peace settlement with Saudi Arabia, and suggested a broader US-Iran deal would facilitate that.

Why is CENTCOM doing this? Markets say bullshit pic.twitter.com/BdkzCGrFY6

— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) September 19, 2026

Of course, Tehran at the same time knows that the Houthi advance along the Red Sea coast has only increased Iranian leverage over global energy - given the Yemeni rebels are now in easter shooting distance of the vital Bab Al-Mandab Strait. Iranian advisers are likely coordinating with the Shia Ansar Allah movement as it battles the Saudi coalition.

* * *

In a historic first of the Yemen conflict, Houthi ballistic missiles rained down on the Saudi capital of Riyadh overnight, triggering rare air raid alerts and a general state of panic among the citizenry.

The international airport may have been targeted, given huge black smoke plumes were seen rising above city’s King Khalid international airport. There looks to have been a significant ground impact just near the major aviation hub.

The Guardian reports, "Explosions were heard in the capital as firefighters battled to extinguish the flames of a burning fuel tank emblazoned with the logo of the Saudi oil company Aramco near the city’s King Khalid international airport."

Several rounds of explosions in the capital were heard overnight, with reports of flight cancelations and pauses, with FlightRadar24 citing "major problems" at the airport.

"The Saudi civil defense force sent air raid alerts overnight on Friday to residents of Riyadh, Jeddah and other cities including Yanbu, a major industrial port which is home to critical oil facilities," The Guardian report notes.

No casualties or major damage has been officially reported, and the air alert warnings were soon lifted. There hasn't been much in the way of a specific public assessment of the attack from Saudi authorities.

Smoke rises from fuel storage depot at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia pic.twitter.com/0qjb9oY3lC

— TRT World Now (@TRTWorldNow) September 19, 2026

Gulf states which have been targeted throughout the Iran conflict have by and large kept quiet on damage as a result of attacks either by Iranian forces or the Houthi rebels in Yemen. In some cases they've persecuted citizens who share photographs with the outside world.

Fierce fighting continues to unfold in Yemen, with regionally based analyst Yasmeen al-Eryani of the Sanaa Center think tank saying the Houthis continue to set the pace of escalation:

"You could see that the Houthis are determining the timelines and the levels of the escalation," al-Eryani said. "So, depending on the current situation, it seems that the Houthis are the ones in control."

The analyst traced the latest tensions back to July, when an Iranian Mahan Air flight resumed direct travel between Tehran and Houthi-controlled Sanaa.

She said tensions escalated with Saudi Arabia after a subsequent Mahan Air flight was prevented from landing in Sanaa, prompting Houthi retaliation and raising fears of a broader confrontation.

But the attacks have gone the other way as well, with the Houthi military on Saturday announcing that the Saudi coalition carried out 26 attacks against areas under the group's control over the prior day. 

Reported images and footage of smoke rising from facilities at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh following overnight ballistic missile attacks by Ansarallah: pic.twitter.com/bTSfEDdlYF

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) September 19, 2026

The Houthis further tallied that over 300 Saudi attacks had been launched on their positions over just the past week, as cited in the AFP. After the rapid Houthi advance along the Red Sea coast this month, the Iran-aligned group is in better position to potentially block international shipping in the Bab Al-Mandab Strait.

Update (1200ET): Following through on his promise, journalists from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico were denied access to the White House grounds on Sept. 19 after President Donald Trump announced a ban targeting the outlets the day before.

Akayla Gardner, a White House correspondent for MS NOW, said that her press pass was revoked at the third gate she passed through to enter the grounds on Saturday morning.

“Once I was inside where we have magnetometers, I attempted to scan my badge, which we have to do to be able to get into the White House grounds,” Gardner said during a live broadcast on MS NOW.

“It did not work. There was a red beeping light, and so the officer asked me to hand over my badge. He said that it was disabled.”

Gardner said the officer on duty wasn’t able to explain specifically why her badge did not work, allegedly saying the decision “was above him.”

Gardner’s badge and her photographer’s badge were both then “taken” away from them by security, she said. However, an MS NOW producer’s pass was approved, and the employee was still able to go inside, Gardner said.

MS NOW defended its team and newsroom in a statement on Saturday morning, saying the media channel plans to take “any and all steps necessary to defend our First Amendment rights” as journalists in a democracy.

“The White House belongs to the American people and the decisions made inside are funded by our tax dollars,” MS NOW stated on social media.

The outlet stated that it will continue reporting on the Trump administration, even if its reporters are not allowed on White House grounds.

CNN’s reporter Betsy Klein was also denied access and had her press pass revoked.

CNN responded with a statement defending its White House team:

“CNN stands fully behind our White House team and their fair and accurate reporting,” the statement read.

“We have a right under the U.S. Constitution to do that reporting without hindrance or interference from the government. Should the ban which President Trump threatened go ahead, it would be an illegal assault on that fundamental and constitutionally-protected right.”

POLITICO editor-in-chief Jonathan Greenberger shared in the publication’s daily newsletter Playbook that the company’s White House reporter, Cheyenne Haslett, was also locked out on Saturday.

“Secret Service denied her entry to the complex and confiscated the pass that allows her access to the White House,” the statement read.

“We stand by her and all reporters here covering the White House. As we said yesterday, we will vigorously defend our First Amendment rights.”

White House Correspondents’ Association president Jacqui Heinrich, a Senior White House Correspondent for Fox News Channel, accused the White House of singling out CNN, MS NOW and Politico for “doing their jobs.”

“The Constitution protects the freedom of the press from government interference,” Heinrich wrote in a statement on Sept. 19.

“That protection does not depend on whether the president likes a news organization’s coverage, agrees with its reporting, or approves of the questions its journalists ask.”

Shortly thereafter, The White House Rapid Response account on X responded with a list cataloging years of the network's own reporting failures and outright fabrications, nearly 50 examples in all...

Ouch!

*  *  *

As Zachary Stieber detailed last night via The Epoch Times, President Donald Trump on Sept. 18 said he has banned three news outlets from the White House.

Trump said on Truth Social that he was, effective immediately, banning CNN, MS Now, and Politico from the White House “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!”

The president added:

“Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America. Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.”

MS Now and Politico did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

CNN could not be reached.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for more details regarding which stories or posts the president was referring to.

Trump routed them during a post-tweet press conference: 

"What I do ask is just a semblance of truth. CNN is fake news. MSNOW is fake news. They're fake news. They know it. They're putting there for a reason."

"Politico was bailed out by our government from going out of business."

?? President Trump is now LAYING THE HAMMER after the Fake News WHINED that he blocked CNN/MSNOW/Politico from the White House

"What I do ask is just a semblance of truth. CNN is fake news. MSNOW is fake news. They're fake news. They know it. They're putting there for a reason."… pic.twitter.com/sxUtdqwCOQ

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 18, 2026

Trump added that "I don't want them in my office", stating that he will take this as far he can including "we'll be suing these people too."

He concluded by noting that "there may be other media outlet bans to follow."

The Fake News are Democrat operatives pretending to be journalists.

The toughest question the media ever asked Joe Biden was his favorite ice cream flavor! pic.twitter.com/PMNXrAtRZO

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) September 18, 2026

Trump previously banned The Associated Press from the Oval Office and other spaces after the outlet declined to change its stylebook to reflect the president’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

A federal judge entered an injunction against the ban, determining that it violated the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment because it discriminated based on The Associated Press’s viewpoint.

But an appeals court in mid-2025 partially stayed the injunction. The court allowed Trump to ban the outlet from the Oval Office, Air Force One, and some other spaces, concluding that “these restricted presidential spaces are not First Amendment fora opened for private speech and discussion” and that the White House “therefore retains discretion to determine, including on the basis of viewpoint, which journalists will be admitted.

Judges also ruled that Trump could not ban reporters from the White House’s East Room.

“The identified harms are less clear with respect to the East Room, which does not share the hallmarks of spaces like the Oval Office,” the majority said.

At present, however, there is no White House press secretary and the usual press briefings are somewhat disrupted. The most likely immediate outcome is that the administration attempts to remove those networks from the presidential and vice presidential pool rotations.

* * * This bag made out of 1000D Military-Spec Cordura® 

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

The fellas over at Zero Hedge put up a Tweet last week that floated a wild monetary thought experiment: they said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent could theoretically “buy back” our roughly $40 trillion in U.S. government debt using cash from the Treasury General Account.

There would just be one small detail standing in the way…the government would first have to re-mark its gold reserves to somewhere around $155,000 per ounce.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, it probably sounds outright insane. But the basic idea is actually simple, and once you follow it through to its logical conclusion, things get interesting pretty quickly.

The United States owns roughly 261.5 million ounces of gold, giving it the largest official reserves in the world. Yet the government still carries that gold at a statutory price of just $42.22 per ounce, even though gold trades at about 100x that price.

At $42.22, the government’s entire gold hoard is officially valued at only about $11 billion. In the real world, it’s worth well north of $1 trillion. It’s roughly the equivalent of somebody who bought a Manhattan apartment for $25,000 decades ago insisting that it is still worth $25,000 today because that’s what the original paperwork says.

As a gold bull, naturally, I love the idea of finally marking this gold to market. But the attraction goes well beyond watching the government admit that gold is worth considerably more than $42. Revaluation could once again formally elevate gold’s importance as a monetary asset, something gold investors have been arguing for years could and should happen, while central banks around the world have quietly continued accumulating.

There’s also a practical reason Washington could eventually find the idea appealing. Treasury owns the gold and already has a mechanism for issuing gold certificates against it to the Federal Reserve. In exchange, Treasury can receive a credit to its account at the Fed. In other words, there is already plumbing in place that allows the government to monetize the value of its gold. The problem is that the current system is tied to that absurd $42.22 statutory valuation, meaning Congress would likely need to change the law before a major revaluation could take place.

A reasonable scenario would be relatively straightforward. Congress changes the valuation and brings Treasury’s gold much closer to something resembling reality. At $5,000 per ounce, America’s 261.5 million ounces would be valued at roughly $1.3 trillion. At $10,000, we’re talking about approximately $2.6 trillion.

Suddenly, an asset officially carried at about $11 billion becomes a source of potentially trillions of dollars of balance-sheet capacity. Treasury wouldn’t have to load up trucks at Fort Knox either. The gold could remain exactly where it is while the government monetized some portion of the higher official valuation through the existing certificate framework.

The Federal Reserve has studied official reserve revaluations and looked at examples of governments around the world using gains on reserve assets for fiscal purposes. So while the specific details of how America might do it remain hypothetical, the broader concept isn’t unprecedented.

That’s the relatively sane version. Now for the Fringe version…

Suppose Washington doesn’t revalue gold to $5,000 or $10,000. Suppose policymakers decide they’re going to establish an entirely new official valuation for gold and pick something truly ridiculous. Say $100,000 per ounce. Or roughly $155,000 per ounce, which would put America’s gold reserves at around $40 trillion, roughly enough, on paper, to match the national debt.

At $100,000, America’s roughly 261.5 million ounces of gold would carry an official value of about $26.15 trillion. At $155,000, you’re north of $40 trillion. Now we’re talking about numbers Washington can actually get excited about.

Under a hypothetical legal framework allowing it, Treasury could issue vastly more gold certificates against that revalued gold, with the Federal Reserve crediting Treasury’s account in return. That’s essentially how the existing system already works, except today the certificates are limited by law to the hilariously outdated statutory gold price of $42.22 per ounce.

Taken to its extreme, you eventually arrive at the idea that sent me down this rabbit hole in the first place: could the United States use Fort Knox to retire a gigantic portion, theoretically even something approaching all, of the national debt?

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On paper, you can construct something resembling that scenario. Unfortunately, there’s one small problem: revaluing the gold doesn’t actually create $40 trillion of new wealth. What it could create is an enormous amount of new financing capacity for Treasury.

Changing the official price of an ounce of gold from $42 to $155,000 doesn’t give America more factories, houses, data centers, oil, electricity, farmland or productive capacity. We still have the same economy and the same 261.5 million ounces of gold. We’ve simply assigned an enormously larger number of dollars to that gold and, under this hypothetical framework, allowed Treasury to monetize that higher valuation.

If Treasury then started using that money to retire government debt, the Treasury securities could disappear, but the people and institutions holding them don’t disappear. They get paid. In effect, Washington would be replacing enormous quantities of interest bearing Treasury securities with money and other monetary liabilities in the financial system.

And that’s where the thought experiment gets really interesting, because the ultimate consequence could show up in the value of the dollar itself.

The act of revaluing gold wouldn’t automatically dump $40 trillion into the economy or instantly destroy the dollar. Treasury would first have a vastly larger balance at the Fed. The real monetary event begins as Treasury actually uses that money. And if Washington attempted to deploy tens of trillions of dollars to retire debt without the Federal Reserve somehow offsetting the resulting liquidity, we’re talking about monetary expansion on a scale that has essentially no modern American precedent.

You haven’t made America $40 trillion richer. You’ve potentially created an enormous number of additional dollars and dollar like claims against essentially the same underlying economy.

Maybe the best way to understand $155,000 gold isn’t that Washington has suddenly decided an ounce of yellow metal is magically 30 or 40 times more valuable. Maybe it’s that Washington has decided it now takes vastly more dollars to represent the same ounce of gold.

In other words, the crazy number may tell you as much about the dollar as it does about the gold.

And if trillions upon trillions of those newly available dollars were actually deployed, the adjustment could eventually appear through some combination of a weaker dollar, higher inflation, rising nominal asset prices, higher inflation expectations and changes in interest rates. The exact outcome would depend enormously on how the operation was structured and how aggressively the Federal Reserve responded.

So there’s no magic trick here. You can’t make tens of trillions of dollars of government obligations disappear without something changing somewhere else in the system.

That’s the part of this thought experiment that should make gold investors’ ears perk up. A $155,000 official gold price could be viewed less as Washington declaring that gold suddenly became extraordinarily valuable and more as Washington implicitly acknowledging that the dollar has become extraordinarily cheap relative to gold.

You could potentially retire an enormous amount of nominal Treasury debt this way. You could make the government’s debt statistics look dramatically better. You might even reduce future Treasury interest expense substantially…but you haven’t eliminated the underlying economic cost. You’ve changed the form in which that cost is expressed.

Instead of carrying tens of trillions of dollars of Treasury securities, you’ve potentially pushed some of the adjustment into the monetary system itself, into liquidity, inflation, interest rates, asset prices and, ultimately, the purchasing power of the currency. So the really crazy part of $155,000 gold isn’t necessarily imagining gold becoming that expensive. It’s imagining what a dollar might be worth in a world where Washington decided it needed gold to be worth $155,000.

The debt gets smaller, the number of dollars potentially gets much bigger…and then those dollars may buy a hell of a lot less.

And setting an official government price of $100,000 wouldn’t automatically force gold to trade for $100,000 in New York, London or anywhere else. The government can choose an accounting value, but it can’t simply order the global market to agree with it. The signal, however, would be impossible to ignore.

The country responsible for issuing the world’s primary reserve currency would essentially be announcing that gold was important enough to use as a tool for restructuring its own sovereign balance sheet. Every central bank, sovereign wealth fund and large institutional investor on Earth would immediately have to consider what that meant.

If the United States itself suddenly decided gold deserved a dramatically higher monetary valuation, why wouldn’t other countries want more of it?

And if you’re running a central bank somewhere, the question becomes increasingly uncomfortable: how much of your reserves do you want sitting in dollars and Treasury bonds versus the asset Washington itself just decided was valuable enough to help address its fiscal problems?

A sufficiently large revaluation could amount to an admission that gold never really left the monetary system in the first place. We just spent decades pretending it did while central banks continued stacking bars in vaults.

I’m not predicting $100,000 gold. That number is intentionally ridiculous because it demonstrates how powerful the mechanism becomes when taken to its extreme. But the current $42.22 valuation is arguably even more ridiculous in its own way.

Eventually, Bessent or somebody at Treasury is going to look at 261.5 million ounces of gold, look at the government’s fiscal situation and ask why one of America’s most valuable financial assets is still being carried at a price that hasn’t had anything to do with reality for more than half a century…especially at a time when we are desperate to clean up our fiscal house…

The interesting question isn’t whether $42 makes sense. It clearly doesn’t. The question is what price will Scott Bessent arrive at that does make sense.

More from QTR:

• Cathie Wood’s $10 Trillion SpaceX Fantasy
• This Is Where Things Get Nasty
• Dear Nike, Here’s How You Save Your Company
• Why The AI CEOs Really Want To Be Regulated
• 14 Stocks I’d Watch During A Market Selloff

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Contributor posts, guest posts and curated posts have been hand selected by me, but have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author or reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

I cannot guarantee the accuracy of any or all facts and figures included in this article though I made an effort to get them right. I have been wrong before and will be wrong again, and encourage you to always double check, do your own research and speak to a licensed financial professional, which I am not.

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Any of my positions can change immediately as soon as I publish, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier. Hence, why I am a writer.

The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. Many times I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour.

Also, again I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it multiple times because it’s that important you understand.

Cuba’s power grid collapsed once again this week, this time at a national level, leaving millions of people across the island without electricity.  This is the sixth time since the US cut off fuel sources to the island since January that the national grid has collapsed and it's the most utility shutdown events in the country's recent history.  

Even when Cuba's grid is in operation, only 30% of the population at most receives electricity at any given time.  Many regions stay dark 20 to 30 hours at a stretch. Some provinces have reported 60–90 hours without power. Havana has gone from 4 hours a day early in the year to 18 hours after the fuel cutoff. 

"Protocols are now in place to begin ?the gradual restoration of the system," said Felix Estrada, an ?official with Cuba's National Electrical Union (UNE). Power had returned to a handful of ?scattered neighborhoods in Havana by late evening, primarily around hospitals, but much of ?the city remained completely dark.

Many exhausted residents ?of the capital Havana were already without power when the national blackout hit.

"Yesterday I'd gone without ?power ?for 24 hours. They turned the lights on for an hour, and then the grid collapsed," said Frank Lorenzo, a 23-year-old Havana resident.

Around 61% of Cuba's oil was sourced from Venezuela until the US capture of illegitimate president Nicolas Maduro.  Shipments from Mexico have were also scaled back and then cut off.  Russia has sent only one tanker so far this year. 

Reports of a "shadow fleet" of tankers carrying Iranian oil to Cuba have circulated since at least 2020.  Investigations of the seized tanker "Skipper" in 2025 found it had previously carried Iranian oil to Syria and China, then later moved Venezuelan oil on a route tied to Cuba. It confirmed the existence of overlapping Iran–Venezuela–Cuba shipping networks. 

The US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has proven incredibly effective in shutting down Iranian oil exports, leaving Iran's clandestine trade partners high and dry.  

The communist regime has operated as a hub for Chinese, Russian and Iranian operations including intel operations in the western hemisphere for decades.  Along with Venezuela, Cuba has represented a hostile eastern foothold in America's backyard.  The Trump Administration also accuses the Cuban government of engaging in propaganda programs in the US, working with far-left organizations (including Antifa and Democratic Socialists) to organize activist subversion to undermine national stability.   

Cuba reports limited negotiations with US officials and has largely pandered to the American media in the hopes of winning favor in the court of public opinion.  As with Iran, Trump seems to be playing the long game, waiting for Cuba to economically falter before entering into serious talks.  The frequency of power outages on the island nation is increasing and it will be difficult for Cuba to continue functioning for much longer. 

Without an industrial base, agriculture and basic utilities, internal breakdown is inevitable.