“For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding—its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe”, US Secretary of State Marcio Rubio told the Munich Security Conference on 14 February.
With no hint of irony, he praised the European colonisers’ “civilising mission”. In Rubio’s world, an Italian explorer ventured “into the great unknown to discover a new world”, bringing “Christianity to the Americas”. According to Rubio, we can thank “German farmers and craftsmen” for transforming the “empty plains” of America’s Midwest “into a global agricultural powerhouse”, English settlers for their creation of the US political and legal system, and Spaniards for “the cowboy archetype that became synonymous with the American West.”
But, from 1945 onwards, it all went downhill.
“The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come”, Rubio told his receptive audience.
In Rubio’s view, one of the countries still shackled by “godless communist” rule is Cuba, from whose shores his parents left in 1956. For the Trump administration, the Caribbean island represents not only a throwback to the Cold War, but a nation unwilling to bow to the diktats of US imperialism.
Spanish conquistadors brought not only Christianity to Cuba, but also the trans-Atlantic slave trade. When the Haitian revolution ended colonial slavery in French-ruled Saint-Domingue in 1804, Cuba took its place as a European investors’ paradise, where 600,000 African slaves were put to work in the sugar plantations. Spanish rule ended in 1898, following Cuba’s war of independence, only to be replaced by the tyranny of a series of US-backed military dictatorships.
The Platt Amendment (1901) gave the United States control over Cuba’s foreign policy, economy and internal affairs, and established a naval base at Guantánamo Bay, on the island’s south-eastern coast. While most of these measures were repealed in 1934, the naval base remained. Since 2001, it has served as an American prison and torture chamber for hundreds of “enemy combatants”, nine of whom have died there.
Until 1959, when the Batista dictatorship was overthrown, power and telecommunications were in the hands of US companies. In 1956, sugar exports accounted for 87 percent of the nation’s exports, augmented by tourism, prostitution and gambling. Landowners, bar owners and pimps profited handsomely from the exploitation of an impoverished population.
Batista’s overthrow represented a major turning point. Denied any assistance from Washington, the new Cuban government, led by Fidel Castro, set about nationalising all US-owned industrial and agrarian enterprises. The US retaliated with a comprehensive trade embargo, which has continued to this day. Determined to restore a regime beholden to its interests, the Kennedy administration backed an invasion by 1,400 US-trained and equipped Cuban mercenaries under US aircover. The mission proved a disaster, and the mercenaries were routed within three days.
For Cubans, the defeat suffered by US imperialism at the Bay of Pigs remains a potent symbol of resistance. For a wealthy, right-wing Cuban diaspora in Miami, it remains seared in their collective memory as a shameful defeat not yet avenged. This constituency is an important bulwark for Trump’s MAGA movement, espousing a virulent anti-communism decades after the collapse of the USSR.
After a brief thawing in US-Cuba relations during the Obama administration, Trump’s first administration took a more belligerent stance. Trade sanctions and travel bans resumed. In 2021, the US State Department re-added Cuba to its list of state sponsors of terrorism, depriving Cuba of access to humanitarian aid, business, investment and trade, according to the Washington Office on Latin America.
Trump and Rubio’s determination to achieve regime change in Havana is not solely ideological. It is also bound up with US geopolitical interests in a world in which inter-imperial rivalries have deepened.
In his second term, Trump outlined a National Security Strategy that seeks to revive the Monroe Doctrine, declaring all of the Western Hemisphere within the US’s sphere of influence. In the nineteenth century, US intervention in Latin America served to ward off rival European powers. In the twentieth century, it was to undermine the influence of the Soviet Union. Today, the US is engaged in a great power rivalry with China. And in the eyes of the Trump administration, Latin America is once again a key battleground.
Venezuela proved an easy first target. After months of military build-up in the Caribbean, and the sinking of dozens of fishing boats, killing at least 115 fishermen, the US kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from Caracas in the middle of the night. While the pretext was a “war on drugs”, the reality soon became clear when Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodriguez, pledged to reduce oil royalties and hand control of oil exports to US companies. Venezuela has the largest crude oil reserves in the world.
Under an agreement signed by former presidents Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez in 2000, Cuba and Venezuela agreed to exchange doctors and medical personnel for oil. Cuba also trained Venezuelans at the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana. However, the Trump administration has now killed this agreement, imposing trade sanctions on any country that “directly or indirectly sells or otherwise provides any oil to Cuba”.
In a 29 January executive order justifying the move, Trump declared that Cuba “has taken extraordinary actions that harm and threaten the United States” by aligning with “numerous hostile countries, transnational terrorist groups, and malign actors”. Without evidence, Trump asserted that “Cuba hosts Russia’s largest overseas signals intelligence facility” and provides a haven for “transnational terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah and Hamas”. With rank hypocrisy, Trump also declared that Cuba “supports terrorism and destabilises the region through migration and violence”.
So far, every former Cuban trade partner has buckled, devastating Cuba’s economy. Mexico, which late last year replaced Venezuela as Cuba’s largest supplier of oil, has bowed to US pressure and ceased sending tankers, sending 800 tons of aid instead. Canadian and Russian airlines that carried tourists to Cuba have now ceased operating, due to a lack of aviation fuel, and are instead repatriating travellers.
Even before the fuel embargo was imposed, Cuba’s tourism industry was in disarray due to prolonged power cuts, fuel scarcity, and a shortage of basic goods and services. According to Cuba’s National Office of Statistics and Information, the island received only 1.8 million international visitors in 2025, an 18 percent decline compared to 2024. Excluding the pandemic years, this is the lowest tourist intake since 2003. At its height, in 2017, tourism generated US$3.1 billion for Cuba’s economy.
Deprived of tourist dollars and oil for transport, the Cuban government has drastically cut spending on health, education and other basic services, such as garbage collection and sanitation. Cuba’s health system was once the envy of developing countries. During the pandemic, Cuban life expectancy exceeded that of the United States; infant mortality rates had long been lower. Cuba was once the only Latin American country recognised by UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, as having eliminated child malnutrition.
Staple foods are now in short supply. According to a recent Economist article, a carton of 30 eggs costs 2,800 pesos, more than a month’s salary for low-paid workers. A kilo of rice costs 650 pesos and a kilo of beans 350 pesos, together worth about ten days’ earnings for the low-paid.
A new pandemic of mosquito-borne and respiratory disease has spread rapidly due to uncollected garbage and unsanitary water, and a health system unable to cope. According to the Spanish daily El País, there is a 70 percent shortage of basic medicines. Doctors estimate that the physician-to-patient ratio has declined from one per 350 inhabitants in the 1980s to roughly one per 1,500 today.
For 60 years, Cuba sent medical missions around the world, providing essential medical care in impoverished countries. Today, more than 24,000 Cuban doctors are working in 56 countries, mostly in Latin America and Africa. Such missions have been branded “forced labour” by the Trump administration, which is putting pressure on countries to end bilateral agreements with Cuba, further depriving the country of revenues.
Cuba’s thirteen universities have been forced to close, and many primary and secondary schools have also shut because teachers and students can’t access public transport.
Unless US policy is reversed, Cuba will enter a state of famine.
“Cuba is a failed nation”, Trump told reporters on Air Force One on 16 February. “And they should absolutely make a deal, because it’s a—it’s really a humanitarian threat. We’ll see how it all turns out, but Cuba and us, we are talking. In the meantime, there’s an embargo. There’s no oil. There’s no money. There’s no anything.”
This is gangster capitalism. Trump is starving Cuba to create “a humanitarian threat” and then demanding the Cuban government “negotiate” on Trump’s own terms. Yet the Trump administration shows no desire to talk to the Cuban government. “Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall”, Trump told reporters the day after US special forces kidnapped Maduro in January.
We have seen this play out before. In the 1990s, half a million Iraqi children died because of US sanctions on the country. “We think the price is worth it”, declared Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in a 60 Minutes interview in 1996. Today, a similar humanitarian catastrophe is playing out in Gaza, aided and abetted by Washington.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has described the situation as “unfair”. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres is “extremely concerned”. But their words won’t feed Cuban children.
Capitalist governments won’t come to the Cuban people’s aid, but an international solidarity movement must. Just as we have marched to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza, we must march to stop an American genocide in Cuba.
