For many Europeans of my generation, Cuba was as much a progressive cause as a country.

In our selectively idealistic student days (mine were in the mid-1970s), it was a plucky little country that had overthrown a corrupt regime in cahoots with the US mafia. In a popular revolution led by the charismatic Fidel Castro and iconic guerrilla leader Che Guevara, it then withstood a crippling US economic embargo to defend its independence. Hasta la victoria siempre! (Ever onwards to victory!)

Now Cubans are languishing in desperate poverty with little or no electricity, enduring a US blockade of fuel supplies ordered by Donald Trump in a policy of maximum pressure aimed either at toppling the island’s communist rulers or forcing them to open up to US capitalism. The US decision to indict Raúl Castro – Fidel’s 94-year-old brother and successor who remains a key power broker in retirement – for murder over the shooting down of two US light aircraft in 1996 shows how determined Washington is to eliminate the old guard. Factories and transportation are at a standstill for lack of power. Hospitals struggle desperately to treat patients with scant fuel to keep emergency generators working.

Yet few beyond the hard-left fringes of European politics are protesting against the manifestly illegal strangulation of the Cuban economy and people, let alone countering the US strong-arming of Havana by sending fuel or power generators. The world won’t lift a finger to shield Cuba from Trump’s deadly squeeze or to prevent regime change. Even indignation is in........

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