When a government turns a tool into an automatic response to any problem, it stops using an instrument and starts practicing a reflex. That is exactly what is happening with the United States’ sanctions policy, and the Cuban case once again demonstrates this starkly.
A recent article in Politico reveals that the Trump administration is considering a total naval blockade to prevent oil imports to Cuba. The leak has set off alarm bells, as it is the most extreme expression of a long-rehearsed logic that uses economic coercion as a weapon of “regime change,” even though evidence shows that it is not governments, but people, who pay the price.
American political scientist Daniel W. Drezner accurately defined it in Foreign Affairs: The United States has turned sanctions into a “Swiss Army knife” of its foreign policy—an instrument that can be applied to everything: nuclear proliferation, human rights, migration, and geopolitical disputes—even though it is not designed to solve any of these problems in a structural way. The result is the use and abuse of economic coercion as a substitute for diplomacy, multilateralism, or simply political realism.
Drezner warns that sanctions are attractive not because they work well, but because they are easy to impose, create the appearance of immediate action, and shift the costs outside U.S. territory. But that convenience comes at a strategic price. They rarely achieve their political objectives and do cause massive collateral damage, which also erodes the international legitimacy of those who impose them.
In the case of Cuba, the equation is particularly transparent. An oil embargo does not “put pressure” on an abstract elite, but rather paralyzes ambulances, reduces surgeries, interrupts cold chains and the production of medicines, paralyzes the infrastructure for purifying water, exacerbates food insecurity, and multiplies blackouts. This is not an ideological hypothesis, but a documented fact. In recent days, for example, cities such as Colón, in the province of Matanzas in the western part of the island, have been reported to have been without electricity for up to 40 hours.
A systematic review of medical and public health studies over 30 years, published by the University of Toronto in 2023 under the eloquent title “The Violence of Non-Violence,” concluded that, under external coercive measures, 100% of cases experienced negative health effects; and nearly 90% documented the deterioration of health systems. Sanctions, even those Washington calls “smart,” break supply chains, block payments, make medicines more expensive, and reduce hospital capacity, with disproportionate impacts on children, the elderly, and the chronically ill. That is exactly what we see in Cuba today.
Political scientists Bryan Early and Dursun Peksen show something similar in a study published in Global Studies Quarterly (2022). They analyzed more than four decades of U.S.-led sanctions and concluded that they systematically increase social “misery,” measured in terms of food, life expectancy, and education. Paradoxically, sanctions justified in the name of human rights are, according to the analysis, those that cause the greatest setbacks and rarely achieve the invoked “regime change.”
Cuba is a prime example. Six decades of blockade have not produced the political result that Washington claims to seek, but they have contributed to a situation of structural vulnerability that today is being exploited to the limit—even at the risk of provoking a regional humanitarian crisis, as acknowledged by the sources cited by Politico.
Talking about a naval oil blockade is not describing a “technical” measure, but a conscious political decision to cut off energy and logistics, knowing that the immediate effect will fall on everyday life and that the suffering of the people will be reduced to acceptable and useful “collateral damage” to force geopolitical objectives.
And when a monkey with a knife is in charge of the White House, there is no spectacle more profitable than the pain of injustice.
Rosa Miriam Elizalde is a Cuban journalist who is first vice president of the Union of Cuban Journalists (UPEC) and was a founder of Cubadebate. She is the author of several books and a regular contributor to La Jornada.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English
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