CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

On Slow Violence in Cuba

Photograph Source: Jason Gamble – Unsplash

The rooftop of Azotea de la India in Centro Habana offers respite. At this elevation, just peaking over the rival buildings, the sea breeze races across the island struggling to combat the heat that blankets the streets below. This place is a Cuban archive, an unmatched collection of vinyl records from a bygone era of cultural production, curated alongside a Cuban cocktail class. Dayle and Pancho are a Cuban-Italian couple skilled as artists, craftspeople and historians. When they are not hosting listening sessions, this space is a haven for artists and other creatives that resist succumbing to the despair of the country below. Instead, they have created a space for joy to exist and propagate, to cultivate community, to take care of their neighbors and to embody the resilience of the Cuban identity. A 1960’s Irakere jazz record ricochets off neighboring walls and spills down the unseen alleyways below. Everything in this space is recycled and re-purposed by hand. The bar, the DJ booth, the dining table and the generator articulate more than a gritty DIY event space – this is a passion project of preservation that simply could not be accomplished without care and love for Cuba.

In many ways, a short research-focused trip to Havana in mid-May of 2026 is wildly incapable of capturing Cuba in its entirety; certainly not the amplified precarity of our contemporary moment. My profession and political proximity to violence, however, lends itself well to discuss the unique cadence of war that Cuba is embattled in. In contrast to the pure carnage the world has witnessed in Gaza, in Sudan, in Ukraine, in Kashmir and in the DR, Americans are co-authoring a slow violence that violates the international human rights of the Cuban people (Nixon 2013). This slow violence is responsible for crimes against humanity and for violating multiple United Nations Charters for Human Rights. I will not make broad sweeping generalizations about the Cuban government here, though it should be of note that the Cuban citizens who held space for me will not excuse their government’s role in their decades-long suffering. This, however, is a key feature of this silent military strategy. In economic warfare, sanctions and embargoes are offensive volleys aimed at starving out international commerce, stagnating value, production, prosperity and daily life for citizens in the public sector.

These are not poorly calculated decisions but rather precise attacks on communist rule. Communism, or rather the goal thereof is, “the creation of a state where every person can contribute according to their ability, and in return receive what is necessary to live equally with everyone else, Furthermore, “the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not ‘abolished’. It withers away,” (Engels 1932). Since communism is seen as a direct threat to the global dominance of US empire and capitalism, coercing a government into paralysis and shaming it publicly as a failed state requiring intervention are important components of a much larger campaign of manufactured ruin. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has peddled this propaganda and seemingly awaits ascendance to the Republican party throne, gambling on the fall of Cuba’s regime as his crown achievement as a politician. His Cuban-American heritage serves as a credential to validate his approval of human suffering, all without acknowledging the critical role that American policy has served in crushing any attempts for the communist state to thrive, starting in 1960.

Rubio wants to usher in a new era for Cubans, one that is (allegedly)........

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