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If you sail 90 miles from Key West in Florida, you'll make landfall on the island of Cuba, run by a regime that America has never liked.

And since this is the year of bombs, drones and talk of regime change,

the island has not escaped close attention.

I do believe I'll be having the honor of taking Cuba.

Taking Cuba.

Taking Cuba, in some form, yeah.

Whether I free it, take it, I think I can do anything I want with it.

You want to know the truth.

So could Cuba be next?

In what form?

And what would that even mean for Cubans and Americans?

Step into the briefing room and together we'll find out.

First, a history lesson. To understand Cuba's present, you need to understand its past,

so let's go back to early 1959. After five and a half years, the Cuban revolution has succeeded,

President Volgencio-Bartista has fled, and Fido Castro has taken charge.

The good relationship between Cuba and the US is ending.

As Lillian Guerra, Professor of Cuban and Caribbean History

and the director of the Cuba program at the University of Florida,

explained to me.

That is a year in which we have an extraordinarily popular, very effective, and almost electric movement of change through laws and decrees that begin to transform the economy, not in terms of communism, but in terms of making it a pro-capitalist economy that is nationalist, that has high barriers to American goods

and to American manufacturers that's really giving the opportunities to small businesses,

...