US THREATS to Cuban revolutionary leader Raul Castro reek of the extraterritorial arrogance of a thuggish imperial power.

They indicate too that the extreme economic war Washington is waging to break the Cuban people could escalate to a direct military attack very soon.

The charges levelled at the 94-year-old former president of Cuba — a veteran of the 1959 revolution and a communist even before his great brother Fidel — are a sick joke.

Claiming the Cuban military shooting down a plane belonging to the terrorist, Miami exile-based Brothers to the Rescue outfit that had violated Cuban airspace back in the 1990s amounts to murder is to deny Havana the basic rights of a sovereign state — to protect its borders and its people.

But then, Washington has denied Cuba those basic rights for over 60 years.

The most sustained expression of this has been the illegal blockade, cutting it off from essential trade and imposed on third parties via US legal action against companies that try to do business with Cuba, wherever they are from. Not just an affront to Cuba’s rights as a state but to the rights of all states to choose their trading partners, including Britain which has consistently voted, along with the overwhelming majority of countries, at the UN to condemn the blockade but whose banks often enforce it anyway from fear of the US.

Donald Trump’s transformation of the blockade into a siege cutting off almost all oil supplies is causing intense suffering and even death as not just transport but hospitals and emergency services lack power for maternity and intensive care wards, diesel for ambulances and fire engines.

Now the suggestion that Raul Castro will somehow be dragged before a US court echoes the illegal kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January, again on totally bogus charges — and via a military assault that saw the US kill 100 people, including 30 Cubans.

The cowardice of Western leaders who refused to call out this outrageous violation of international law enables Trump to continue in the same vein.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio says a non-military “solution” to this crisis — an entirely artificial crisis created by the White House — is unlikely, that Cuba sponsors terrorism worldwide.

Cuba’s inclusion on the US list of state sponsors of terrorism — again, a complete invention of the US government — was “justified” by it hosting peace talks between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the Colombian government, in a process brokered jointly by Cuba and Norway which ended a four-decade civil war. It is a scandal that helping end a devastating conflict is being used to smear Cuba in this way.

Cuba is, rather, a longstanding victim of US terrorism. Examples include aerial spraying of sugarcane fields with toxic chemicals to poison Cuban workers (part of Operation Mongoose), deliberately infecting Cuban pigs with African swine fever in 1971 forcing the culling of half a million animals and serious food shortages, and Luis Posada Carilles’s bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1976, killing 73 people. The US shielded this mass murderer from justice until his death in 2018.

Trump is obsessed with his place in history and bruised by the debacle of his unprovoked war on Iran. The symbolism of smashing the Cuban Revolution, especially in the centenary year of Fidel Castro’s birth and if it can be combined with humiliating Fidel’s brother and comrade in arms, is a strong temptation to this vainglorious brute.

The United States hates Cuba because it demonstrates that another world is possible — that a country can export doctors not bombs, stand for peace not war, socialism and equality not capitalist exploitation.

Those are exactly the reasons Cuba must survive. Every pressure must be brought to bear on our government to call out Trump’s lawless aggression and maximum solidarity and practical assistance to the island mobilised via the Cuba Solidarity Campaign.