In recent weeks and months, Washington has intensified its long-running campaign of collective punishment against the Cuban people. Escalating sanctions have further tightened the noose of a punitive US blockade that has strangled the island for more than half a century. The resulting “energy starvation” has deepened a manufactured crisis, threatening Cubans’ access to food, water, healthcare, fuel, electricity, and other basic human rights and needs, while intensifying the broader assault on the island’s sovereignty and development.

Since 2017, when the first Trump administration began dismantling the limited normalization measures introduced under former President Barack Obama, Cuba has once again been subjected to a regime of “maximum pressure” economic warfare. The consequences have been severe. These policies have degraded material conditions across the island, accelerated the exodus of more than 1 million Cubans, and imposed disproportionate suffering on the country’s most vulnerable populations.

This economic weapon, wielded by the ruling elites of the world’s largest financial and military power, has exacted particularly devastating consequences on mothers and children. During this period, the infant mortality rate rose from 4 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2018 to 9.9 in 2025. Put plainly, an estimated 1,800 Cuban infants died during these years who would have survived absent Washington’s intensified criminal sanctions. This is but one stark measure of the blockade’s profound brutality and inhumanity.

The only “crime” of these children, like that of countless other Cubans, was being born in a country that continues to insist on its right to determine its own political and economic future outside the structures of hemispheric domination the United States has sought to impose across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the wider world. The infliction of such suffering has never been incidental to such policies. It has been, and remains, a central feature.

It is time to end the madness of US policy toward Cuba and recognize that Cuba is not a failed state, but a state subjected to a criminal siege.

The same has been true since 1959, as Washington has pursued a singular, near-fanatical obsession with reversing the Cuban Revolution and restoring the neocolonial shackles it once imposed on the island. Its aim has been not only to undermine Cuba’s social transformation and internationalist commitments, but to extinguish the example the revolution represented: that an alternative to US hegemony and capitalist underdevelopment was possible.

So despite recent threats to “take” Cuba, such rhetoric cannot be understood in isolation, nor should it obscure a fundamental reality: A US invasion would hardly inaugurate a new conflict. It would instead mark the bloodiest phase in a long, bipartisan war against Cuba for the “sin” of reclaiming national sovereignty from a Washington-backed lawless order that has sought to punish Cuba for its defiance and refusal to submit meekly to the dictates of empire.

Cuba Under the Shadow of US Empire

Cuba’s independence has long been imperiled by its proximity to and economic entanglement with the United States. Situated 90 miles off the coast of Florida, the island occupied a central place within the US imperial imagination. Throughout the 19th century, Washington elites viewed Cuba not as a to-be sovereign nation, but as an inevitable extension of their commercial and geopolitical ambitions, a “crown jewel” destined to be drawn into Washington’s orbit.

The opportunity arrived in 1898. Seizing upon Cuba’s nearly victorious war for independence from Spain, the US intervened not to end empire in the hemisphere, but rather to inherit it. Washington presented its action as a selfless mission to secure Cuban liberation. But for many across the region, the contradictions were unmistakable. The US, itself forged in the crucible of empire, with all the violence and exploitation that project entailed, went to Cuba not to secure freedom, but to replace Madrid with Washington as the imperial metropole of the Americas.

As early as 1829, Simón Bolívar warned that “the United States seemed destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of freedom.” Decades later, Cuban revolutionary José Martí issued a similar denunciation. In his 1891 essay "Our America," he called for “common cause” among oppressed peoples and warned against the threat of subordination to the rising power to the north. Martí also championed self-sufficiency over integration into an unequal global capitalist system, insisting that Cuba must “make wine from plantains. It may be sour, but it is our wine!” Having spent years in exile in New York, Martí sharpened that critique shortly before his death in 1895, writing “I lived in the monster and I know its entrails.”

History would soon vindicate these words. As the United States extended its “Manifest Destiny” to foreign shores, it repeatedly intervened across the hemisphere, seeking to transform it into a de facto protectorate. In doing so, Washington consistently sided with the interests of capital and local elites over the demands for popular sovereignty. In the decades that followed, the US invaded countries throughout the region, overthrowing democratic governments, crushing revolutionary movements, and backing brutal dictatorships.

In Cuba, this took the form of three lengthy military occupations spanning half of the island’s first 24 years of “independence,” from 1898-1902, 1906-1909, and 1917-1922. In each case, the objective was to uphold the neocolonial order established during the first occupation and rooted in US economic interests. Under this restrictive framework, the Cuban government was denied control over its foreign relations and domestic economic policy, compelled to cede territory to the US military, and forced to accept Washington’s unilateral right of intervention.

By the 1920s, this relationship had produced a profound dependence on exports, mainly sugar, to the United States while fostering a deeply corrupt system incapable of responding to the needs and aspirations of the Cuban people. The island’s land remained concentrated in the hands of American corporations and a domestic collaborationist aristocracy, while the state invested more heavily in repression than social development, constructing more barracks than schools. With the onset of the Great Depression and the collapse of the sugar economy upon which the country had been made dependent, popular discontent only intensified.

By 1933, the government of Gerardo Machado, which promised to transform Cuba into an island of stability for American investment while violently suppressing nationalist and anti-imperialist currents in Cuban society, had become untenable. Amid mounting unrest, Machado was deposed, and a revolutionary coalition under Ramón Grau San Martín emerged, seeking to challenge Cuba’s semi-colonial status. But the United States refused to recognize it. The resulting instability created conditions for the rise of one of the more conservative figures within the anti-Machado coalition, army officer Fulgencio Batista, who in 1934 deposed the short-lived government and consolidated de facto power in his own hands with the backing of Washington.

The Roots of the Cuban Revolution

Batista would directly or indirectly pull the political strings in Cuba for much of the next quarter century. Though his earlier rule adopted a more populist posture, culminating in his election to the presidency from 1940 to 1944, life improved little for Cubans. Corruption and dependence on foreign capital remained entrenched. And by 1952, Batista had seized power outright in a military coup, inaugurating an authoritarian regime backed by increased state violence.

It was Batista’s rise, coupled with decades of economic disparities, political repression, and social neglect, that created conditions that were ripe for revolution. Among those preparing to contest the suspended elections that year was a young lawyer named Fidel Castro. Batista’s closure of even the limited avenues for democratic change lent weight to John F. Kennedy’s later observation that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

For more than six decades then, Cuba has represented the “threat” of example: the possibility of building a more just and humane society in which the state serves the people and not the other way........

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