Hal Kempfer

speaker

198 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 30 May

Hal Kempfer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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The President's Daily Brief · PDB Situation Report | May 29th, 2026: U.S. And Iran Reach Draft Agreement & Cuba Feels The Squeeze · 30 May 2026 podcast

Same thing that Castro had, which everybody forgets, in the early 60s was, or early to mid-60s, there was an anti-communist insurgency up in the hills that he was fighting.

So my concern is we get in there, and then we end up with something akin to what we dealt with in Iraq, which is, yes, we defeated the conventional military, but then we dealt with this massive insurgency for years and years and years.

eats up a lot of blood treasure just wears us down and and by many measures politically everything else so that would be my concern so whatever it is it's got to be something that's going to be decisive and it has to work yeah it seems i don't want to say fanciful but it it seems um

I think in many ways, you know, the threat, as you mentioned, has always been there.

I would say at different periods of time, the threat's been much bigger.

You know, back in the mid-90s, when I was down with U.S.

Southern Command when we were in Panama, I was part of the crisis action team that was focused on...

this massive exodus of Cubans and Haitians by boat trying to get out of there any way they could.

That was a huge operation, civil, military, a lot of things going on with that, as you can well imagine.

So, you know, they've been a threat in various different ways at various different times over the many, many years.

I think what kind of came out of this, though, was, you know, somebody back there, and you know, you've been back there, you've been back at the D.C.

area, we've been in those meetings, you know,

There are some really smart guys that walk in the room and they're looking at this and say, you know, by the way, Mr. President, there's an opportunity here.

And they're basically saying, you know, with Venezuela gone, with Maduro gone, with the oil cut off from Cuba, this is what will happen to the Cuban economy.

This is where they're going.

And they looked at Russia and China and what they can and can't do.

And that's exactly what's playing out.

There's a number of predictions that say by this summer,

And frankly, things could shift well before that.

But by the middle of the summer, you could see the Cuban economy essentially collapse.

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