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When a government turns a tool into an automatic response to any problem, it stops using an instrument and begins to practice a reflex. That is exactly what happens with the United States sanctions policy, and the Cuban case once again demonstrates it starkly.
A recent article by Political reveals that the Trump administration is considering a total naval blockade to prevent oil imports to Cuba. The leak has set off alarm bells for being the most extreme expression of a long-rehearsed logic, which uses economic coercion as a weapon of “regime change,” even when the evidence shows that those who pay the price are not the governments, but the people.
The American political scientist Daniel W. Drezner defined it precisely in Foreign Affairs: The United States has turned sanctions into a “Swiss army knife” of its foreign policy, an instrument that applies to everything – nuclear proliferation, human rights, migration, geopolitical disputes – even though it is not designed to solve any of those problems structurally (https://shre.ink/5I2K). 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, generate the appearance of immediate action, and shift costs outside of US territory. But that comfort has a strategic price. They rarely achieve their political objectives and do generate massive collateral damage, which also erodes the international legitimacy of those who impose them.
In the Cuban case, the equation is especially transparent. An oil blockade does not “pressure” an abstract elite, but paralyzes ambulances, reduces surgeries, interrupts cold chains and the production of medicines, paralyzes the infrastructure to purify water, aggravates 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 (west of the island), have been reported with up to 40 hours without electricity.
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 percent of cases experienced negative health effects; almost 90 percent documented the deterioration of health systems (https://shre.ink/5IIT). Sanctions, even those that 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 is observed 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 sanctions promoted by the United States and concluded that they systematically increase social “misery,” measured in terms of food, life expectancy and education (https://shre.ink/5Iry). Paradoxically, sanctions justified in the name of human rights are, according to the analysis, those that generate the greatest setbacks and rarely achieve the invoked “regime change.”
Cuba is a paradigmatic example. Six decades of blockade have not produced the political result that Washington professes to seek, but they have contributed to a situation of structural vulnerability that today is intended to be exploited to the limit, even at the risk of provoking a regional humanitarian crisis, as recognized by the sources cited by Political.
To speak of a naval oil blockade is not to describe a “technical” measure, but rather a conscious political decision that chooses to cut off energy and logistics, knowing that the immediate effect will fall on daily life and that the suffering of the people will be reduced to “collateral damage” that is acceptable and useful to force geopolitical objectives. And when a monkey with a knife rules in the White House, there is no spectacle more profitable than the pain of injustice.
