Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush stood beside a recovered Iranian Shahed drone at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables on July 8 and warned that roughly 300 of them now sit in Cuba, within range of South Florida.
U.S. Representative Carlos Gimenez, a Republican from Florida, stood with him. The drone behind them, a Shahed-136, is the same one-way attack weapon DroneXL has followed across the war in Ukraine. What the event never settled is where that number 300 actually comes from.
Bush and Gimenez framed the drone as a threat aimed at Florida
The two men spoke at an event organized by United Against Nuclear Iran, an advocacy group that tracks Tehran’s military ties, and they used a captured Shahed as a physical prop to argue that Cuba’s deepening relationship with Iran now reaches American soil.
Bush called the design one of the deadliest weapons U.S. forces have faced in recent years. “Most loss of life of the U.S. military than any single weapon that exists over the last 15 years,” he said.
Gimenez went at the payload and the reach. He told the room the model carries “about over 100 pounds of explosives,” flies around 115 miles per hour, and can travel more than 1,000 miles. By his math, that puts South Florida, the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Tallahassee, and Atlanta inside the circle.
“That’s a pretty big bang,” Gimenez said. “That’s why they call them kamikaze drones, they crash into their target and they explode.”
As NBC Miami reported, Bush lowered the temperature on his way out. He said the country has “very good defense capabilities” and that the event was “not a press conference to scare the bejesus out of people.” He also credited recent U.S. pressure with weakening Iran’s military reach across the region.
The Shahed-136 is cheap, slow, and built to be spent
The Shahed-136 is an Iranian loitering munition, a propeller-driven drone that flies to a set of coordinates and detonates on arrival, and open defense sources put its warhead between 66 and 110 pounds (30 to 50 kg), its cruise speed near 115 miles per hour (185 km/h), and its maximum range around 1,550 miles (2,500 km).
Those figures track with what Gimenez described, though his “over 100 pounds” sits at the very top of the published warhead range rather than the middle. The airframe runs about 11 feet (3.5 m) long and rides on a piston engine reverse-engineered from an old German design. None of it is exotic. That is the point.
It steers itself with a commercial inertial unit corrected by civilian GPS and GLONASS, the same satellite backbone a hobby drone leans on. That is also its softest spot, because a civilian signal can be jammed or spoofed off course, which is why the counter-drone fight often looks more like electronic warfare than anti-aircraft fire.
Iran has launched these in swarms across the Middle East and shipped thousands to Russia, which has fired them at Ukrainian cities since 2022. One Shahed is slow enough that a trained gunner can bring it down. A dozen arriving at once is a different problem, and Gimenez leaned on exactly that fear when he described drones launched together to saturate air defenses.
Does this not sound like the Cuban Missile Crisis, part two? Nothing here is confirmed yet.
And let me ask you something. You really think Guantanamo Bay, a U.S. base sitting right there, doesn’t already have systems that would spot one of these launching and swat it out of the sky faster than I burn through my paycheck the second it hits my account?
The 300 figure traces to press reports, not a confirmed count
The headline number carried the whole event, yet Bush sourced it himself in plain language, telling the room that “the press reports are that there are 300 of these in Cuba,” which points at journalism, not at a declassified U.S. intelligence finding.
That distinction matters. Mark Wallace, the group’s chief executive and a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, added that the drones were moved to Cuba “years ago, before the current conflict.” Neither man produced a document, a satellite image, or a named agency assessment to pin the count down.
I am not saying the drones are not there. I am saying the public evidence offered on July 8 was a round number and a warning, delivered next to a very real piece of hardware. A captured Shahed on a table proves the weapon exists. It does not, on its own, prove that 300 of them are parked ninety miles off Key West.
Good reporting here holds both ideas at once. Iran-Cuba military contact is documented and worth watching. The specific claim of 300 armed drones staged against Florida is, for now, an unverified figure attributed to unnamed reporting.
Cost is the real reason these drones scare planners
The strategic worry with Shahed-style drones has never been that one of them is unstoppable, it is that each one costs a sliver of the missile you would fire to intercept it, which turns the economics of air defense against the side doing the defending.
A Shahed is commonly estimated to cost in the low tens of thousands of dollars to build. The interceptors and crewed responses used to stop one can run into the millions. An attacker who can afford to lose ninety-nine drones to land one has already won the arithmetic, and that gap is why militaries from Ukraine to the Persian Gulf have scrambled for cheaper ways to shoot them down.
Russia already builds its own copy, the Geran-2, by the thousands at a plant in Tatarstan, no longer waiting on Iran to ship them. That is the part of the Coral Gables event that earned less airtime than the 300. Whether or not Cuba is holding a specific stockpile, the Shahed template is already loose in the world, and it does not care about a naval base’s budget.
DroneXL’s Take
Here’s what nobody is saying out loud. The 300 came straight out of Bush’s own mouth as a press report, not a confirmed intelligence finding. The “over 100 pounds” of explosives Gimenez quoted sits at the ceiling of the range, not the middle. Both could be true. Neither is proven.
Now look at the picture. A former governor and a sitting congressman, standing next to a captured drone, in an election year. That is national security and politics in the same photo op. So where does the legitimate warning end and the show begin?
Take every last piece of this story with a pinch of salt. Or maybe three.
Photo credit: NBC Miami
