CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The United States’ Long War on Cuba

Image by Jasmina Ajkic.

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 U.S. 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 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 one 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 4.0 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.

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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. Empire

Cuba’s independence has long been imperiled by its proximity to and economic entanglement with the United States. Situated ninety miles off the coast of Florida, the island occupied a central place within the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S., 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........

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