On Tuesday, August 18, mobile phone users across Cuba received an automatic earthquake warning on their Android celular devices, which provoked an immediate reaction: people left their homes and workplaces, and social media was flooded with comments, images, videos, and live streams of the widespread confusion. But, in the following minutes, the authorities assured everyone that no such event had occurred.

“Fidel is phenomenal,” so chant several Asturians in Porto, on a cold October dawn as several European groups await the Commander, at the sports center in the town of Matosinhos, during the VIII Ibero-American Summit in 1998, at the act of Confraternization with the Solidarity with Cuba organizations of the Iberian Peninsula of Spain and Portugal.

The United States’ foreign policy toward Cuba has once again displayed, in recent days, its classic contradiction: the rhetoric of absolute crushing clashes with the reality of a country that, no matter how much it is suffocated, refuses to submit. The arrival of the Russian oil tanker Anatoly Kolodkin at the port of Matanzas, with 730,000 barrels of crude oil, is not only a breath of fresh air for an island mired in an unprecedented energy crisis. It is, above all, a symptom of the labyrinth into which Donald Trump has fallen by trying to simultaneously play the role of the ruthless hawk and the pragmatic negotiator.

While the world focuses its attention on other conflicts, Cuba has become the stage for an unprecedented communications offensive. Mind you, we're not talking about an invasion in the style of the last century; this is more subtle, and perhaps for that reason, more dangerous. It's a war designed to shape perceptions, sow doubt, and fabricate realities.