Straining at the Chain: Cuba, Iran, Brazil, and Vietnam. Part 3

None of these is a complete model. None has achieved the combination of technological self-sufficiency, financial independence, and industrial capacity that genuine sovereignty requires. What they demonstrate collectively is that the space for partial sovereignty exists, and that it can be defended, at a price.

Part Two examined nations that have achieved meaningful strategic autonomy: China through patient, state-directed industrialization and technological self-sufficiency, and Russia through the reassertion of state control over strategic sectors at enormous political cost.

This third part occupies the contested middle ground: nations genuinely straining for sovereignty against enormous structural and geopolitical resistance. Cuba, Iran, Brazil, and Vietnam each represent a distinct strategy, a different balance of defiance and accommodation, a different set of achievements and costs.

Taken together, they illuminate both what is possible under the heavy hand of American-led coercive power and what remains, for now, structurally out of reach.

Cuba: Sixty Years Under the Embargo

Cuba’s struggle to keep its independence amid ongoing American economic pressure is one of the most remarkable social experiments in modern history. Since 1962, the United States has enforced what it refers to as an embargo, while Cuba and much of the world call it a blockade. This blockade is a complete set of trade restrictions that the United Nations General Assembly has condemned every year since 1992, usually by votes of 180 to 2. The embargo’s architecture is notably expansive. It prohibits not only direct American trade with Cuba but also threatens secondary sanctions against third-country companies that trade with the island. This extraterritorial reach, by which the United States claims the right to punish businesses in France, Canada, or Japan for trading with a Caribbean island of eleven million people, is itself a profound assertion of coercive power that inverts the usual meaning of sovereignty.

Against this background, Cuba’s achievements in medicine, biotechnology, and education are remarkable. Cuban life expectancy equals or exceeds that of the United States. Its physician-to-population ratio is among the highest in the world. Its biotechnology sector has produced several vaccines and cancer treatments adopted internationally, including a lung cancer therapeutic used in dozens of countries.

These outcomes are the product of deliberate policy decisions to prioritize human development over capital accumulation: decisions that genuine sovereignty makes possible, and........

© New Eastern Outlook