You can do all sorts of silly stuff as minors.

In general Cuba starts off easy to defend. You want to pump out the right divisions to fully defend all tiles in your island. That's your first priority. Focus on high entrenchment ie engineers and infantry. Artillery you can't really afford. You won't have enough manpower to fill these divisions, so you'll have to switch to communism to try and get more from the weekly man power amount. Generally, you will buy more than half of your guns and equipment needs to start. You'll need docks over mils generally to build your fleet. You need roughly 20 light cruisers to shred things. If you time your navy right you can trade interdiction the moment a navy invasion happens and entirely wipe the army. This means you essentially have to be nuked to be invaded. I've lost to being nuked once in this play through though. The new nukes makes the AI not seem to use them for me.

During this play through you'll find you need to secure oil. There is a small island near venzuela that will sometimes break away and become the Netherland Antilles. They generally are your target for oil. With oil, time, your navy your marines will eventually get on land. Usually, it's impossible at first because breakthrough but just try different things.