Cuba Under Siege

As public health scholar Arachu Castro has analyzed in a Think Global Health piece, the United States’ fuel blockade, combined with its punitive restrictions on other countries seeking to provide Cuba with humanitarian assistance, has generated a ​“polycrisis,” in which the deliberate deprivation of fuel is ​“producing cascading harm across every health domain.” The fuel shortages have stopped imports of crucial medicines by air and sea, stranded humanitarian aid at ports and impeded refrigerated transport of vaccines and other vital materials. Any import substitution has also been rendered impossible by the systematic policy of energy starvation. As Castro concludes: ​“The longer the convergence of fuel shortages, pharmaceutical inaccessibility and technological deterioration persists, the less reversible the damage becomes — particularly for patients whose treatment windows close.” 

Misnamed an ​“embargo” — which suggests a government’s decision to unilaterally suspend trade with another state — the intensifying blockade of Cuba is a paradigmatic instance of economic warfare, which employs U.S. geopolitical clout along with extraterritorial financial and legal blackmail to prevent third countries from alleviating Cuba’s plight. Human rights experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council declared in June that American ​“efforts to change the constitutional order of a sovereign State through threats and coercion echo colonial-era practices.” Like the Israeli siege that suffocated Gaza before and since the beginning of the genocide, the blockade of Cuba reveals the racist and genocidal logic at work in colonial and imperial sieges. And Trump recently announced ​“economic warfare and isolation on an unprecedented scale” against the Islamic Republic of Iran. These sieges grimly exemplify abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s oft-cited definition of racism as ​“the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” 

The production and exploitation of the vulnerabilities of the Cuban population with lethal intent were envisaged even before John F. Kennedy issued a presidential proclamation stopping all trade with Cuba in February 1962. In a secret memo penned in April 1960, Eisenhower’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Lester D. Mallory, exploring strategies to crush a socialist revolution 90 miles away from the Florida coastline, proposed that — given majority support for Fidel Castro — the only way ​“of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” To that end, ​“every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba … denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” 

With the partial exception of the brief period of normalization at the tail end of the presidency of Barack Obama, Mallory’s philosophy has defined the United States’ relentless and still unsuccessful drive to bring Cuba to heel. As economist Helen Yaffe has compellingly argued, the Cuba blockade is ​“the longest and most comprehensive set of sanctions in modern history,” ​“a key instrument in the U.S. toolkit to pursue regime change on the island,” ​“an act of war” and ​“a violation of human rights designed to obstruct Cuban development” — together with any idea of a socialist alternative. The United States has exercised its imperial prerogative as capitalist hegemon to exert extraterritorial control over Cuba’s ability to survive — imposing punitive sanctions on foreign entities, including European banks, willing to transact with Cuba and preventing it from accessing any financial lifelines. The energy starvation is underwritten by a legal and financial siege, and the impact is brutal: Cuban economists have estimated the cost of the blockade to the island’s economy at $4.4 billion annually. 

Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have built on the legal, political and ideological infrastructure of over six decades of economic warfare against Cuba with the widely advertised aim of bringing the Cuban state to breaking point. While continuities with the past should not be downplayed, it is also important to understand the novelty of the present moment.

The ratcheting up of the siege on Cuba is part of a bullish turn to the Americas as the arena for the unrivaled projection of U.S. power. This hemispheric pivot has taken place under the cringeworthy banner of the ​“Donroe Doctrine,” as laid out in the 2025 National Security Strategy and incessantly trumpeted by U.S. officials — from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s call to ​“Make the Americas Great Again” to U.S. Ambassador to Panama Kevin Marino Cabrera’s video promoting the virtues of unchecked U.S. regional supremacy. This pivot is by no means all bluster. The Trump administration has been disturbingly successful in its efforts to promote a surge in the electoral fortunes of the far right across the Americas. A kind of ​“Alliance for Regression” ranges from Javier Milei in Argentina to Nayib Bukele in El Salvador to Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia to José Antonio Kast in Chile. Brought together under the aegis of the Shield of the Americas under the threadbare pretext of a war on ​“narco-terrorists,” this consolidating network of alliances is aimed at turning the Western Hemisphere from the ​“backyard” of the U.S. superpower to what William Callison and Verónica Gago have termed ​“a frontyard of fascist experimentation.” 

While electoral autocracy seems to be the preferred method, the Trump administration is happy to revive the belligerent model of Grenada’s 1983 invasion or Panama’s in 1989. In an operation that was also clearly intended to open up the Cuban front, the abduction of Maduro gave way to the capture and remote control of Delcy Rodríguez’s government in Venezuela, with Marco Rubio reported to be co-running the country via WhatsApp and with the critical oil sector in U.S. hands and the Venezuelan state subordinating its foreign policy to U.S. diktats. Trump was so taken with the spectacle of this Venezuelan model’s success— what has come to be termed ​“regime management” or ​“regime editing” — that he rather absurdly imagined it could be applied to Iran (even demanding he be allowed to name the new Ayatollah while the Israelis conspired to anoint famous anti-Semite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad).

No secret has been made of the wish to apply this model to Cuba as well, with much talk that the siege might be lifted if the Cuban president Miguel DíazCanel could be replaced. To this end, a new CIA task force has been set up to create divisions among the governing elite. The candidate for Trump’s man in Havana appears to be Raúl G. Rodríguez Castro— grandson of Cuba’s former leader, the 95-year-old Raúl Castro, who the United States indicted on murder charges in May. Rodríguez Castro already met with John Ratcliffe during the CIA director’s visit to Cuba and was recently interviewed by USA Today, declaring (even though on paper he is merely a colonel in the Ministry of the Interior and holds no official position) that he is open to negotiating with Trump himself. The notion that diplomacy and legality can be jettisoned for the sake of personalized ​“deals” with the true wielders of power, so characteristic of Trump and his entourage, is yet again on show.

Capitalism — not the implementation of a market system as much as the possibility for unbridled plunder and gain for those aligned with the Trump administration — is at the heart of the siege, which operates as a tool of imperial extortion. The blockade has already resulted in a raft of economic measures implemented by Díaz-Canel’s government that would open up the island to capital and real estate investments, especially from a diasporic Cuban-American business class set on the overthrow of Communist Party rule. Trump has made no secret that he would like to build the first hotel after the fall of castrismo. It doesn’t seem a stretch to suggest that Cuba before the revolution, the kind of paradise of plunder depicted in The Godfather Part II, is as close to Trump’s utopia as one could imagine.