The following is from the Trumpet Brief sent out yesterday. These daily e-mails contain personal messages from the Trumpet staff. Click here to join the more than 20,000 members of our mailing list, so you don’t miss another message.

Half of United States seaborne trade passes through the Gulf of Mexico. The island of Cuba dominates the mouth of this gulf. A foreign power that controls Cuba could potentially destroy the U.S. economy by restricting America’s access to oceanic shipping. This makes Cuba’s current outreach to the European Union a potential threat to America.

After 60 years of Communist rule, Cuba is experiencing a perestroika moment. Revolutionary leader Fidel Castro died two years ago, and his brother Raúl Castro turned over Cuba’s presidency to Miguel Díaz-Canel in April. Now Cuba’s National Assembly has adopted a draft constitution that would limit the president to two five-year terms. State media sources say this new constitution would also divide the powers of the current Cuban presidency between a president and a prime minister, and it would officially recognize private property.

The Constitution, which allegedly must be approved in a nationwide referendum, keeps the Communist Party and the one-party system but enacts many of the same economic and political reforms that Communist China implemented in the 1980s. This means Cuba may soon abandon its traditional Marxist-Leninist approach to government in favor of a socialist market economy run by an authoritarian bureaucracy (similar to China and Russia).

“This does not mean we are renouncing our ideas,” National Assembly President Esteban Lazo was quoted as saying by state-run media. “We believe in a socialist, sovereign, independent, prosperous and sustainable country.”

These changes to Cuba’s Soviet-era Constitution are supposed to make the nation’s brand of socialism more sustainable. But they will also make it easier for Cuba to establish strong economic connections with Europe.

Due to Cuba’s role in arming Marxist insurgents around the world and providing a safe haven for terrorists wanted in the United States, the U.S. State Department named its Communist regime a state sponsor of terror in 1982. This designation remained until 2015, when U.S. President Barack Obama removed Cuba from the list and called on Congress to lift the U.S. economic embargo against the island. But President Donald Trump reversed this decision due to Cuba’s support for terrorists in Iran, North Korea and Venezuela.

With tensions between Cuba and America remaining high, the Communist regime is reaching out even more to Europe. Last week, Cuba’s vice minister of Foreign Affairs, Abelardo Moreno, attended a ministerial meeting between the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States and the European Union. At this meeting, the head of EU diplomacy, Federica Mogherini, reiterated the EU’s commitment to establishing strong bilateral relations with Cuba, and she condemned the U.S. embargo against the island.

In an interview with Prensa Latina, the Cuban minister stressed that “to the same extent that the anti-Cuban measures of Donald Trump’s administration are intensifying, the fact that relations with Europe are increasing is an extremely positive element and establishes an important contrast in political terms.”

The fact that Cuba’s government is starting to act more like China than North Korea will only make it easier for the EU to reach out to Cuba—and thereby establish a foothold on an island that could potentially block ships from Houston, Port Arthur, New Orleans and Tampa. Roughly 57 percent of U.S. seaborne exports and 44 percent of U.S. seaborne imports pass through the Gulf of Mexico, making the shipping lanes that pass by Cuba indispensable to U.S. economic security.

As Peter Zeihan wrote for Stratfor in 2008, “A hostile power in Cuba could fairly easily seal both the Straits of Florida and the Yucatan Channel, reducing the Gulf of Mexico to little more than a lake.” The threat of a naval blockade is why the U.S. took Cuba from Spain in 1898 and tried to oust the Soviet Union from Cuba in 1962.

In “The Deadly Dangerous U.S.-Cuba Deal,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry explained how then President Obama’s push to normalize relations with Cuba was largely the handiwork of the Vatican. Both Pope Francis and his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, worked to open Cuba to U.S. diplomacy and U.S. markets. Now President Trump is trying to reverse this policy. But Germany and the Vatican still desire a strong presence on the Communist island.

The Bible prophesies of a deadly economic siege that will strike the end-time nations of Israel (primarily the United States and Britain). In one prophecy, God likens modern Israel to a hedged vineyard, protected on all sides. The United States has been hedged, north, south, east and west by nonthreatening nations and the two largest oceans on Earth. But because of the sins of the people, God warns, “I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard: I will take away the hedge thereof, and it shall be eaten up; and break down the wall thereof, and it shall be trodden down” (Isaiah 5:5).

In 1979, the Trumpet’s parent magazine, the Plain Truth, identified Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution in Cuba as the first breach in America’s protective hedge. In light of Bible prophecy and how valuable Cuba has been to America’s enemies in the past, you need to watch what is happening in Cuba. The island is America’s geographic weak spot.