US and Cuba have had contentious relationship through the years

• 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 former 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.

The fervent, if intermittent, hostilities between the United States and Cuba, spanning six decades, have been marked by pressure campaigns, antagonism and occasional bursts of violence.

The divisions further intensified when Cuban forces killed four armed Cuban nationals aboard an aging speedboat registered in Florida. People aboard the U.S. boat opened fire off the Cuban coast on Feb. 25, sparking a firefight that also injured six Cuban nationals living in the United States, according to Cuba’s Interior Ministry in Havana.

Those aboard the U.S. boat were equipped with assault rifles, handguns and Molotov cocktails, Cuban authorities said.

Tensions between the two countries have recently escalated. President Donald Trump has imposed new sanctions and tariffs on the Caribbean nation after the U.S. military operation in January that captured former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, a Cuban ally.

Here's a history of flare-ups involving the United States and Cuba.

The Cuban Revolution 

Fidel Castro was part of a group of guerrilla fighters that overthrew U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista, who took power in Cuba in 1959 and established a socialist state. Batista 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. Castro began strengthening ties with the Soviet Union. The next year, Castro nationalized all foreign assets in Cuba, raised taxes on goods imported from the United States and established trade deals with the Soviet Union.

President Dwight Eisenhower retaliated, slashing the import quota for Cuban sugar, freezing Cuban assets in the United States and imposing a trade embargo. Eisenhower also cut off diplomatic ties with the Castro government.

Bay of Pigs invasion

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

President John F. Kennedy, executing a strategy from the Eisenhower administration, deployed a brigade of 1,400 CIA-sponsored Cuban exiles by air, land and sea in the attempt.

The Cuban military defeated the exiles in three days after miscues by the exiled forces that eventually revealed the United States' involvement. More than 100 men in the exiled forces were killed, and nearly 1,100 were taken prisoner and held in Cuba for almost two years.

The prisoners were released by Cuba to the United States between 1962 and 1965 in exchange for $53 million worth of food and medicine. Estimates vary on how many Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces members were killed and wounded; various reports suggest up to 2,000 combined.

Unfazed 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. administrations carried out 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 nuclear war with the Soviet Union amid the Cold War.

Fearing a U.S. invasion, 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 an economic collapse, 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. Nearly 125,000 Cubans were allowed to enter the United States in a span of five months.

Many emigrated to Florida. The Coast Guard referred to the flow 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 were permitted to sell some of their produce privately instead of only to the government.

But 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.

Sinking of the '13 de Marzo' tugboat

In 1994, 41 people died after a tugboat called 13 de Marzo was allegedly struck by Cuban authorities and sank about 7 miles from the Port of Havana. The boat was used by people trying to flee from Cuba at the height of the "special period."

Seventy-two people were on board. Thirty-one people were rescued, according to a report by human rights organization Amnesty International.

An Inter-American Commission on Human Rights investigation ruled in 1996 that four boats belonging to the Cuban government attacked the tugboat.

"The Cuban state was seriously at fault for having failed to establish the identity of those responsible and punishing them so that such terrible events might never occur again," the commission said.

The Cuban government denied any involvement with the sinking, according to Amnesty International. The government said the tugboat was stolen and sank after colliding with other boats trying to intercept it.

On the 30th anniversary of the tugboat sinking in 2024, Florida Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, a Democrat, called the tragedy "one of the cruelest atrocities ever committed against the Cuban people by the murderous regime" in Cuba.

"The victims still have not seen justice for these heinous crimes," Díaz-Balart said in a statement. "Sadly, the Cuban people continue to suffer at the hands of a depraved dictatorship that has no respect for human life or freedom."

Brothers to the Rescue planes shot down by Cuba

On Feb. 24, 1996, two twin-engine Cessnas flown by the nonprofit Brothers to the Rescue in a humanitarian mission over the Florida Straits were shot down at the order of the Cuban government.

Four people on the planes died. Cuban authorities argued that the aircraft were violating Cuban airspace.

The volunteer group's flights centered on spotting Cuban refugees fleeing their homeland for the United States, often in makeshift boats or rafts. Brothers to Rescue would relay the coordinates to the U.S. Coast Guard.

The shootings rocked the South Florida Cuban American community. The victims were identified as pilots Carlos Costa and Mario de la Peña and observers Armando Alejandre and Pablo Morales. Their bodies were never recovered.

Many residents and local officials recently marked the 30th anniversary of the attack, and some Florida lawmakers have called on the Trump administration to indict former Cuban leader Raúl Castro for the deaths. 

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 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.

President Donald Trump would 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 custody battle

In 1999, a 6-year-old Cuban boy was rescued off Florida after the boat carrying his mother and other refugees capsized. 

Elián González became the poster child of an international custody fight and a media sensation 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 boat-related shootout in 2022, the Cuban coast guard killed one person aboard a Dakota speedboat with a Florida registration north of Bahia Honda.

Cuban authorities said at the time that they found drugs and evidence of firearms use aboard. That same year, five people, including a child, died when a speedboat carrying Cubans collided with a Cuban coast guard vessel, according to the Cuban Interior Ministry'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," a White House summary announced. "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 the White House in 2017, the first Trump administration reversed many Obama-era policies on Cuba. The administration reimposed strict sanctions and redesignated Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism.

After Maduro's capture in Venezuela, the Trump administration in January declared a national emergency over Cuba, calling the country "an unusual and extraordinary threat" to U.S. national security. The United States has cut off the flow of Venezuelan oil to Cuba and threatened to impose tariffs on any country supplying it with fuel.