Peter C Goetzsch

I dedicate this article to all women invited to mammography screening and those who love them because the public has consistently been lied to, for over 40 years. In invitations to screening, women have been told that by detecting cancers early, screening saves lives and leads to less invasive surgery.^1,2 I shall demonstrate that all three statements are wrong.

Women are still being told these lies, by professional associations, screening advocates, screening researchers, cancer charities, and national boards of health.^3-5 The American Cancer Society declares in a headline that “Mammography Saves Lives”⁴ and claims, with no references, that results from many decades of research clearly show that women who have regular mammograms are less likely to need aggressive treatments like surgery to remove the entire breast (mastectomy).⁵

Screening Does Not Save Lives

In the randomised trials of mammography screening, the risk ratio for overall mortality after 13 years of follow-up was 0.99 (95% confidence interval 0.93 to 1.03) for those trials with adequate randomisation.⁶ The estimate happened to be the same for the other trials, some of which were so poorly randomised that the average age in the two compared groups was not the same, which makes an analysis of overall mortality unreliable.

For two of the three adequately randomised trials, those from Canada and the UK, there are follow-up data after 25 and 23 years, respectively.^7,8 The risk ratio for overall mortality was 1.01 (95% confidence interval 0.98 to 1.03) for all three trials (both with a fixed effect and a random effects model, Comprehensive Meta Analysis Version 3.0). In the table, the year means the year the trial started:

This is a very strong result as it is derived from a total of 25,046 deaths. We can therefore say with great confidence that mammography screening does not save lives.

If we restrict the analysis to the two trials with a very long follow-up, the result is the same, a risk ratio of 1.01 (0.99 to 1.04).

Breast Cancer Mortality Is a Seriously Flawed Outcome

It will surprise most people to learn that we cannot trust what has been reported in the randomised trials about the effect of screening on breast cancer mortality but this is an objective fact.⁶

A minority of the women who died were autopsied, and in several trials, cause of death was not assessed blindly.⁶ I have documented that assessment of cause of death was seriously biased.^6,9 If we include all trials in the analysis, we would expect to see the greatest reduction in breast cancer mortality in those trials that were most effective in lowering the rate of node-positive cancers (cancers that had metastasised) in the screened group.

This was indeed the case, but the regression line was in the wrong place. It predicts that a screening effectiveness of zero (i.e. the rate of node-positive cancers is the same in the screened groups as in the control groups) results in a 16% reduction in breast cancer mortality (95% confidence interval 9% to 23% reduction).^6,9 This can only happen if there is bias, and further analyses showed that assessment of cause of death and of the number of cancers in advanced stages were both biased in favour of screening.

Systematic reviews that include all the trials, also the poorly randomised ones, have reported that mammography screening reduces breast cancer mortality by 16-19%.^6,10 As this estimate is of the same size as the bias in the regression analysis, this suggests that screening does not lower breast cancer mortality.

Another reason why breast cancer mortality is a flawed outcome is that screening leads to overdiagnosis, which is the detection of cancers and precursors to cancer (carcinoma in situ), which would not have come to the attention of the woman in her remaining lifetime and therefore would not have become a problem without screening. Since it is not possible to distinguish between harmless cancers and dangerous ones, they are all treated, and radiotherapy and chemotherapy given to women who are healthy increase their mortality.⁶

If we take into account the cardiac and lung cancer deaths caused by the type of radiotherapy used when the screening trials were carried out and generously assume that screening reduces breast cancer mortality by 20% and results in only 20% overdiagnosis of healthy women, then there is no mortality benefit from screening.¹¹

Finally, it is noteworthy that the most unreliable trials were those that reported the greatest reductions in breast cancer mortality.⁶ The difference in the effect estimates between the adequately randomised trials and the poorly conducted trials was statistically significant, both after 7 and 14 years of follow-up (P = 0.005 and P = 0.02, respectively).¹²

Total Cancer Mortality

Since misclassification of cause of death often concerns deaths from other cancers,⁶ total cancer mortality is a less biased outcome than breast cancer mortality.

Some trialists have not reported what the total cancer mortality was but we have data from the three adequately randomised trials.^6,8 There was no effect of screening on total cancer mortality, including breast cancer, risk ratio 1.00, 95% confidence interval 0.96 to 1.04. There were two different age groups in the Canadian trial, 40-49 (a) and 50-59 years (b):

Since total cancer mortality is less biased than breast cancer mortality, it is of interest to see what the expected cancer mortality (including breast cancer mortality) would have been if the reported reduction in breast cancer mortality of 29% after 7 years in the poorly randomised trials⁶ were true.

It would have been a risk ratio of 0.95, which is significantly lower (P = 0.02)⁶ than what was actually found. This provides further evidence that assessment of cause of death was biased in favour of screening.

Breast Cancer Is Not Detected Early but Very Late

If we assume that the observed doubling times in longitudinal tumour studies are constant from initiation till the tumour becomes detectable, the average woman has harboured the cancer for 21 years before it acquires a size of 10 mm and becomes detectable on a mammogram.¹³

Given this large time span, it is misleading to call it “early detection” also because the effect of screening is trivial, namely to advance the diagnosis by less than a year.¹³

Yet all authorities repeat this mantra. As it is impossible that everyone working with cancer is unaware of the basics of tumour biology, we can draw the conclusion that the public all over the world is being misinformed. This is fraud because it is deliberate and because women think “early detection” will save their lives.

I once asked a famous tumour biologist, Keld Danø, during a coffee break at an international meeting, whether he agreed with me that it was impossible to lower breast cancer mortality by 30% with screening, based on our knowledge of tumour biology.¹⁴ He agreed. When I asked why people like him didn’t participate in the scientific debate, he didn’t reply and it is not difficult to imagine why. It is not wise to point out that your colleagues are wrong when you are on the receiving end of major funds from a cancer charity that touts screening.

The women suffer while everyone else prospers.

The earliest cell changes, carcinoma in situ, are not detected unless the women get a mammogram. In our systematic review of countries with organised screening programmes, we found an overdiagnosis of 35% for invasive cancer and 52% when we included carcinoma in situ.¹⁵

Although less than half of carcinoma in situ cases progress to invasive cancer,^16,17 the women are nevertheless routinely treated with surgery, drugs, and radiotherapy.

The deep irony is that the surgery is often mastectomy because the cell changes may be diffusely spread in the breast, and sometimes even in both breasts. In New South Wales, one-third of women with carcinoma in situ had a mastectomy,¹⁸ and in the UK, carcinoma in situ was more often treated by mastectomy than invasive cancer,¹⁹ and the number of women treated by mastectomy almost doubled from 1998 to 2008.²⁰

This brings us to the third big falsehood in the propaganda about mammography screening.

Screening Does Not Decrease but Increases Mastectomies

Because of the substantial overdiagnosis of invasive cancer and carcinoma in situ, and because screening only advances detection of invasive cancers slightly,¹³ it is inevitable that screening increases mastectomies.

In the randomised trials of screening, we found 31% more mastectomies in the screened groups than in the control groups.⁶

Denmark is a unique country to study this in practice as we had a period of 17 years (1991-2007) where only about 20% of potentially eligible women were invited to screening because some counties did not have screening.²¹ When screening starts, more breast cancer diagnoses than usual will be made and there will be more mastectomies. However, as can be seen on the graphs, the huge increases in mastectomies are not compensated by a drop in mastectomies later where there was a similar decline in mastectomies in non-screened areas as in screened areas:²²

Moreover, as the next graph shows, there is no compensatory drop in old age groups:²²

Yet women are told that screening leads to less invasive surgery, with fewer mastectomies. This is disinformation in the extreme.

The most commonly used trick used to disinform the women about this issue is to report percentages instead of numbers.³ Imagine a town with a certain level of crime. You divide the crimes into serious and less serious ones. Over a period of time, the rate of serious crime increases by 20% and the rate of less serious crime by 40%. This is a development for the worse. But although more people are exposed to serious crime and more people are exposed to less serious crime as well, a trickster would say that, as there are now relatively fewer cases of serious crime, the situation has improved.

It is deplorable that people who know better – screening researchers, cancer charities, national boards of health, etc – have lied to the public this way³ and still do, in direct contrast to logic and the scientific evidence.

I dryly remarked in my book that if they continued their line of research for other diseases, they may find the recipe for eternal life.³ I also noted that the problem with lying is that

sooner or later people usually contradict themselves, which they did in relation to a study they had published in The Lancet.³

A common way of duping the readers is to say that early detection of breast cancer “reduces mortality”³⁴ without specifying what kind of mortality this is, which makes the reader believe that screening saves lives.

The most common error in the screening literature could be that people falsely translate a recorded effect on mortality from a cancer into an effect on all-cause mortality. We see claims everywhere that common cancer screening tests save lives but a systematic review of the randomised trials found that the only screening test with a significant lifetime gain was sigmoidoscopy. It extended life by 110 days on average, and as the 95% confidence interval went from 0 to 274 days, this result was on the verge of not being statistically significant.³⁵

Another common trick is to use hypothetical statements when we have certain knowledge. For example, authors may write – even in our most esteemed medical journals – that overdetection “may” occur for invasive cancers and that it “may” cause harm through unnecessary labelling and treatment of patients who, without screening, “might” never have been diagnosed.³⁴ These are not hypothetical possibilities; they are inevitable consequences of screening.

[…]

Via https://brownstone.org/articles/the-three-big-lies-about-mammography-screening/

Gilmer Mirror

For the first time since 1980, Congress has fundamentally changed how the U.S. government registers young men for a potential military draft — and it no longer requires their participation.

Tucked inside the fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, which President Trump signed on December 18, 2025, is a provision that quietly marks the most significant transformation of the Selective Service System in over four decades. Beginning on December 18, 2026, the requirement for male U.S. residents ages 18 through 25 to register themselves with the Selective Service System will be replaced with a requirement for the Selective Service System to register them automatically, based on other existing federal government databases.

What the Law Does

Under the new provision, the Selective Service System will be able to tap into existing government data, such as Social Security Administration records, to build its registry of potential draftees. The agency will then cross-reference that data to identify and locate eligible men without any action required on their part.

The Selective Service System will also be tasked with notifying men they have been registered, asking them for any missing contact or biographical information, and informing them of the process to unregister if they’re not actually required to register.

Importantly, reviving a military draft would still require separate congressional approval. The most recent draft ended in 1973, and draft registration resumed in 1980. Automatic registration does not mean anyone is being called up for service — it simply updates the mechanism for maintaining the roster of draft-eligible men.

Why Congress Acted

The move comes against a backdrop of declining registration rates and a broader military recruitment crisis. According to the Selective Service System’s annual report to Congress, total registrations nationwide for men ages 18 to 25 declined from 15.6 million in 2022 to 15.2 million in 2023, a decline driven largely by the removal of the SSS registration requirement from the FAFSA form.

Supporters of the change argue it simply modernizes a cumbersome and outdated process. Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., a member of the Armed Services Committee who championed the provision, said that automatic registration “simply moves the burden of filing the registration paperwork from the individual to the government, where it belongs,” adding that it would save taxpayer money and make it easier for young men to comply with the law.

The provision had actually been attempted before. In 2024, the proposal for automatic draft registration was initially approved by both the House and Senate but was removed from the final version of that year’s NDAA after influencers, including rapper Cardi B, spread misinformation on social media that the legislation meant Congress would reinstate the draft.

Concerns and Opposition

Not everyone is pleased with the change. Critics have raised several objections spanning privacy, civil liberties, and the rights of conscientious objectors.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation, the lobbying arm of the Quakers, warned that “this extensive data gathering poses a significant risk of weaponization and misuse, particularly with the potential for targeting the most vulnerable such as immigrant and transgender young adults.”

The data collected will likely include sex assigned at birth, immigration status, visa status, and current address — information that some privacy advocates argue gives the federal government an unprecedented surveillance footprint over an entire demographic.

Conscientious objectors face a more nuanced situation. The Center on Conscience and War notes that some conscientious objectors consider registration with Selective Service to be a form of participation in war. While automatic registration would eliminate the requirement for these individuals to take an action contrary to their conscience, it also places their information within the system regardless.

Technical critics also question whether the system will even work as intended. Opponents argue that the current partially-automated draft registration system, based mainly on driver’s license records, has already produced a list of potential draftees so incomplete and inaccurate that it would be less than useless for an actual draft — and that the proposed fully-automated system based on federal records may make things worse.

What Happens Next

Regulations implementing and establishing procedures for automatic registration, including notices required for data collection, data matching, and data use, will be issued by the Selective Service System in 2026. The agency has until December 18, 2026 to have the system operational.

Men who are not required to register — for example, those with certain medical conditions or those present in the country on nonimmigrant visas — will have a process available to remove themselves from the rolls.

Analysts describe this as the largest change in Selective Service law since 1980, one that moves the United States closer to being able to activate a draft on demand than at any point in the past half century — even as the country continues to rely on an all-volunteer military with no current plans for conscription.

–The automatic registration provision is Section 535 of the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act. Men with questions about their registration status can visit sss.gov.

[…]

Via https://www.gilmermirror.com/2026/03/12/uncle-sam-will-now-find-you-automatic-draft-registration-becomes-law/

GeoPolitics Prime

The famous Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC) has been hit by Iranian kamikaze drone wreckage – sending shivers to global banking bigwigs.

🔶 The Dubai authorities were quick to label it a “successful interception,” despite the conspicuous plume of smoke rising near the DIFC Innovation Hub

🔶 They offered no details about what had supposedly been “intercepted,” assuring the public only that the debris “caused a minor incident on the facade of a building”

🔶 Whatever minor damage was done to the building, the DIFC has sustained far greater reputational damage as a top global financial center

Everyone’s jumping the sinking ship?

🔶 The attack followed Iran’s March 11 warning (https://t.me/geopolitics_prime/66587) that it would retaliate against US and Israeli financial interests after a strike on a bank in Tehran

🔶 Iran’s warning triggered a hasty exodus of several major Western banks from offices in Dubai and elsewhere in the Gulf on the same day:

👉 Employees of the US financial services group Citi were instructed to vacate offices in the DIFC and Oud Metha district

👉 Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs followed suit

👉 British banking groups Standard Chartered and HSBC also began evacuating staff from their Dubai offices

👉 On the same day, British consulting firm PwC announced it would close offices in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Kuwait “for the remainder of the week”

👉 Staff of the British consulting firm Deloitte also evacuated their Dubai offices

🔶 Economic observers say the halo of safety that once surrounded Dubai has faded, warning that capital is likely to flee if the Iran war drags on

🔶 Even if the conflict eases, the vulnerability of Dubai’s airspace, infrastructure and communications has been laid bare for all to see

[…]

Via https://t.me/healthimpact/3239

Michael Hudson

Iran and Donald Trump have each explained why failure to fight the current war to the end would simply lead to a new set of mutual attacks.

Trump announced on March 6, “There will be no deal with Iran except unconditional surrender,” and announced that he must have a voice in naming or at least approving Iran’s new leader, as he has just done in Venezuela. “If the U.S. military must utterly defeat it and bring about a regime change, or else “you go through this, and then in five years you realize you put somebody in who’s no better.’” It will take at least that long for America to replace the weaponry that has been depleted, rebuild its radar and related installations and mount a new war.

Iranian officials likewise recognize that U.S. attacks will keep being repeated until the United States is driven out of the Middle East. Having agreed to a ceasefire last June instead of pressing its advantage when Israeli and regional U.S. anti-missile defenses were depleted, Iran realized that war will be resumed as soon as the United States is able to re-arm its allies and military bases to renew what both sides recognize is to be a fight to some kind of final solution.

The war that began on February 28 can realistically be deemed to be the formal opening of World War III because what is at issue are the terms on which the entire world will be able to buy oil and gas. Can they buy this energy from exporters in currencies other than the dollar, headed by Russia and Iran (and until recently, Venezuela)? Will the present U.S. demand to control of the international oil trade require oil-exporting countries to price it in dollars, and indeed to recycle their export earnings and national savings into investments in U.S. government securities, bonds and stocks?

That recycling of petrodollars has been the basis of America’s financialization and weaponization of the world’s oil trade, and its imperial strategy of isolating countries that resist adherence to the U.S. ruler-based order (no real rules, but simply U.S. ad hoc demands). So what is at issue is not only the U.S. military presence in the Middle East – along with its two proxy armies, Israel and ISIS/al Qaeda jihadists. And the U.S. and Israeli pretense that it is about Iran having atomic weapons of mass destruction is as fictitious an accusation as that levied against Iraq in 2003. What is at issue is ending the Middle East’s economic alliances with the United States and whether its oil-export earnings will continue to be accumulated in dollars as the buttress of the U.S. balance of payments to help pay for its military bases throughout the world.

Iran has announced that it will fight until it achieves three aims to prevent future wars. First and foremost, the United States must withdraw from all its military bases in the Middle East. Iran already has destroyed the backbone of radar warning systems and anti-aircraft and missile defense sites in Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain, preventing them from guiding U.S. or Israeli missile attacks or attacking Iran. Arab countries have bases or U.S. installations will be bombed if they are not abandoned.

The next two Iranian demands seem to far-reaching that they seem unthinkable to the West. Arab OPEC countries must end their close economic ties to the United States, starting with the U.S. data centers operated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google. And they not only must stop pricing their oil and gas in U.S. dollars, but disinvest in their existing petrodollars holdings of the U.S. investments that have been subsidizing the U.S. balance of payments since the 1974 agreements that made to gain U.S. permission to quadruple their oil-export prices.

These three demands would end U.S. economic power over OPEC countries, and thus the world oil trade. The result would be to dedollarize the world’s oil trade and re-orient it toward Asia and Global Majority countries. And Iran’s plan involves not only a military and economic defeat for the United States, but an end to the political character of the Near Eastern client monarchies and their relations with their Shi’ite citizens.

Step 1: Driving the United States out of its Middle Eastern military bases

Iraq’s parliament has continued to demand that U.S. forces leave their country and stop stealing its oil (sending most of it to Israel). It has just approved legislation yet again directing that American forces to leave their country. Meeting with senior advisor to Iraq’s interior minister and his accompanying military delegation in Tehran last Monday (March 2), Iran’s Brigadier General Ali Abdollahi reiterated the demand that Iran has been making for the last five years, ever since Donald Trump closed his first administration on January 3, 2020. by ordering the treacherous assassination of the two top Iranian and Iraqi anti-terror negotiators, Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who were seeking to avoid an all-out war. Seeing that Trump is now continuing the same policy, the Iranian commander stated: “Expulsion of the United States is the most important step toward the restoration of security and stability to the region.”

But all the Arab kingdoms are hosting U.S. military bases. Iran has announced that any country permitting U.S. aircraft or other military forces to use these bases will risk immediate attack to destroy them. Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates already have come under attack, leading Saudi Arabia to promise Iran not to permit the U.S. military to use its territory for part of its war.

Spain has banned U.S. use of its airfields to support its war against Iran. But when its Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez forbade the United States from using them, President Trump pointed out at an Oval Office news conference that there was nothing that Spain really could do to prevent the U.S. air force from using the Rota and Morón installations in southern Spain that the U.S. and Spain share, but which remain under Spanish command. “And now Spain actually said we can’t use their bases. And that’s all right, we don’t want to do it. We could use the base if we want. We could just fly in and use it, nobody is going to tell us not to use it.” What would Spain do to prevent it, after all? Shoot down the U.S. aircraft?

This is the problem confronting the Arab monarchies if they try to deny U.S. access to their own U.S. bases and air space to fight Iran. What can they do?

Or more to the point, what may they be willing to do? Iran is insisting that Qatar, the United Arab Republics, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other Near Eastern monarchies close all U.S. military bases in their kingdoms and block U.S. use of their airspace and airports as a condition for not bombing them and extending the war to the monarchic regimes themselves.

Refusal – or inability to prevent the U.S. from using bases in their countries – will lead Iran to force a regime change. This would be easiest in countries in which Palestinians are a large proportion of the labor force, as in Jordan. Iran has called for Shi’ite populations in Jordan and other Near Eastern countries to overthrow their monarchies so as to break away from U.S. control. There are rumors that Bahrain’s king has left the country.

Step #2: Ending the Middle East’s commercial and financial linkages to the U.S.

Arab monarchies are under further pressure to meet Iran’s ultimate demand that they decouple their economies from that of the United States. Ever since 1974 they have tied their economies to the United States. Most recently Bahrain, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have sought to use their energy resources to attract computer data centers, including Starlink and other systems that have been associated with U.S. regime-change and military attacks on Iran.

Opposing U.S. plans to tightly integrate its non-oil sectors with the Arab OPEC Middle East, Iran has announced that these installations are “legitimate targets” for its drive to expel America from the region. One cloud computing manager suggested that Iran’s AWS attack on Amazon’s data center was targeted because it was serving military needs, much as Starlink (which the UAE is interested in financing) was used in February in the U.S. attempt to mobilize demonstrations against Iran’s government.

Step #3: Ending the recycling of OPEC oil exports into U.S. dollar holdings

The most radical Iranian demand has been for its Arab neighbors to dedollarize their economies. That is a key to preventing U.S. businesses from dominating their economies and hence their governments. An Iranian official told CNN that Iran has accused companies that buy U.S. government debt and invest in Treasury bonds of being partners in the war against itself, because it sees them as financiers of this war. “Tehran considers these companies and their managers in the region as legitimate targets. These individuals are warned to declare their capital withdrawal as soon as possible.”

Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar are indeed discussing withdrawing from U.S. and other investments as Iran’s blocking of Hormuz has led them to stop producing oil and LNG now that their storage capacity is full. Their income from energy, shipping and tourism has stopped. The Gulf States are meeting on Sunday, March 8, to discuss drawing down their $2 trillion in U.S. dollar investments (mainly from Saudi Arabia). The threat is that this is an initial step to diversifying OPEC investment outside of the U.S. dollar.

[…]

For the monarchies themselves, the changes demanded by Iran to end the U.S. war against the Middle East would have an effect similar to the aftermath of World War I: the end of monarchic regimes in many of the Arab countries whose economies and political alliances have been based on an alliance with the United States. And for starters, pressure is now on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait and United Arab Emirates that have agreed to join Trump’s Board of Peace.

Indonesia, with the world’s largest Islamic population, has just withdrawn its earlier offer to provide 8000 troops to the Trump “peace plan” in Gaza, and Iran is pressuring Arab monarchies to follow suit by withdrawing in protest against U.S. policy.

[…]

Collateral effects of Iran’s goal to drive the United States out of the Middle East

Pursuit of Iranian aims means a long war. It will escalate as Israel and the U.S. military exhaust their supply of anti-aircraft and missile defense, enabling Iran to launch its serious attack on a scale that it stopped short of last June when it agreee to a ceasefire. In coming weeks Iran will start using its most sophisticated missiles to attack Israel and other U.S. proxies.

There’s nowhere to put additional oil production now that Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz to all but its own ships, most of which are carrying oil destined for China.. No ships are even trying to approach it, because Lloyds of London is not issuing insurance policies.

The U.S. military has recently sunk or seized Russian ships carrying oil, but the soaring oil prices have led it to permit such transfers in order to stem the world inflation. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said the Treasury Department is examining whether additional sanctioned Russian crude shipments could be released to the market. “We may unsanction other Russian oil,” he said. “There are hundreds of millions of barrels of sanctioned crude on the water … by unsanctioning them, Treasury can create supply.” His remarks follow a U.S. decision to issue a temporary 30-day waiver allowing Indian refiners to purchase Russian oil in an effort to maintain global supply.

Matters are not so easily cured for liquified natural gas, which is exported mainly by Qatar. Its storage tanks are full, forcing production to be shut down. Its LNG gas works have been bombed and will have to be rebuilt and put back on line. That will take two weeks plus an equal time to cool this gas properly.*

*LNG can spontaneously ignite above -162 degrees C.

[…]

Via https://libya360.wordpress.com/2026/03/12/reflecting-on-the-unthinkable-irans-grand-plan-to-end-the-us-presence-in-the-middle-east/

Joanna Campos

President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are pushing an economic agreement with the Cuban regime that includes an “off-ramp” —a negotiated exit— to allow the Castro family and President Miguel Díaz-Canel to cede power without forced exile, according to an exclusive report from The Telegraph.

The plan would allow these leaders to remain on the island in exchange for concessions in ports, energy, and tourism, with possible selective relief in sanctions.

The conversations involve Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, grandson of Raúl Castro, who maintains key influence. Rubio, son of Cuban immigrants, leads the high-level negotiations, as confirmed by Trump in public statements.

The president has said that “Cuba is in its final moment of life as it is” and that an agreement will be reached “very easily”.

This pressure intensified after the capture of Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores on January 3, 2026, in Caracas by U.S. forces.

After rejecting offers of exile, they were transferred to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, facing charges of narcoterrorism and drug trafficking, according to CNN coverage from January 4, 2026. The cutoff of Venezuelan oil shipments caused an energy crisis in Cuba with massive blackouts.

Trump declared at a press conference in Doral, Florida, on March 9, 2026, that the agreement “may be a friendly takeover or not,” but that the regime is “without energy, without money” and in “deep humanitarian problems.” In previous interviews, such as with CNN on March 6, he stated that “Cuba will fall soon” and assigned Rubio to handle the talks.

The approach combines economic force with a realistic offer, contrasting with past policies of engagement without results. Trump emphasized that Cuba “wants to negotiate desperately” after losing allies like Venezuela.

[…]

Via https://gatewayhispanic.com/2026/03/trump-rubio-give-final-offer-castros-diaz-canel/