The Deliberate Strangulation of Cuba: A Blueprint for Neo-Colonial Domination in the 21st Century

Introduction: A Pattern of Imperial Aggression

The recent actions by the Trump administration against Cuba are not an isolated incident but represent the latest chapter in a long and sordid history of U.S. hegemony over the Western Hemisphere. Having effectively neutralized Venezuela through a comprehensive campaign of sanctions and political subversion, Washington has now turned its full attention to its oldest regional adversary. The strategy is chillingly clear: replicate the Venezuelan model of systematic economic dismantling to force Cuba into submission. This article argues that this policy is a quintessential example of neo-colonialism, leveraging economic pressure, migratory flows, and a distorted humanitarian narrative to undermine the sovereignty of a nation that has steadfastly resisted American domination for over six decades.

The Factual Backdrop: From Venezuela to Cuba

The article outlines a deliberate sequencing of U.S. foreign policy. Following the capture of Nicolás Maduro and the severing of Venezuelan oil and financial support to Cuba, President Trump issued a public ultimatum to Havana: “make a deal … before it is too late.” This threat is directed at an island already in the grips of its deepest economic crisis in decades. The core of Cuba’s vulnerability lies in its energy dependency. For years, Venezuela supplied Cuba with roughly 50,000-55,000 barrels per day of subsidized crude oil, a critical arrangement that stabilized Cuba’s balance of payments. This lifeline has been abruptly cut. The consequences are catastrophic: widespread power blackouts, paralyzing transport and manufacturing, and hyperinflation that prices basic necessities out of reach for ordinary Cubans. Current assistance from Mexico is insufficient to bridge this massive energy deficit.

The Political Context: Memory as a Weapon

The U.S. policy towards Cuba cannot be understood outside of the historical context of the 1959 Revolution, which overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship. This event was perceived in Washington not merely as a political shift but as a profound affront to American authority in its supposed “backyard.” The subsequent decades of embargo, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Cuban Missile Crisis cemented Cuba’s status as a symbolic problem. The brief period of normalization under President Barack Obama, which treated Cuba as a normal state, has been completely reversed under Trump and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. The article correctly identifies that U.S. policy is now driven by a “politics of memory” heavily influenced by the Cuban-American exile community in Miami, where anticommunism has become a powerful ideological and electoral force. Rubio’s rhetoric, described as “eschatological,” frames Cuba as perpetually on the brink of capitalist redemption, a narrative that perfectly aligns with Trump’s preference for spectacle and coercive action.

The Weaponization of Migration and Economic Theory

A particularly insidious aspect of this strategy is the weaponization of migration. As the U.S.-induced economic pressure devastates Cuba, hundreds of thousands of Cubans are forced to leave the island in search of survival. This exodus is a rational response to manufactured scarcity. However, upon reaching the U.S. border, the causality is deliberately erased. The migration is reinterpreted not as a consequence of U.S. policy but as “proof” of people “fleeing communism.” This manufactured proof then becomes a mandate for further aggression, creating a vicious, self-justifying cycle: hardship justifies pressure, pressure generates migration, and migration legitimizes further restriction and pressure.

This political circuit is given a veneer of academic legitimacy through the selective citation of economic theories, notably the work of economist George J. Borjas on the Mariel boatlift. The article brilliantly exposes how Borjas’s contested findings—which claimed the influx of Cuban migrants depressed wages in Miami, contradicting David Card’s earlier work—are stripped of their nuance and transformed into an authoritative alibi for restriction. As John Maynard Keynes warned, these “defunct” economic ideas, severed from their context, become dangerous tools of authority. In this case, they provide a technocratic justification for a politically motivated policy of strangulation.

A Firm Critique: This is Neo-Colonialism in Action

From the perspective of the Global South, and in firm opposition to imperialism, the U.S. strategy against Cuba is a textbook case of 21st-century neo-colonialism. It embodies everything that nations like India and China rightly reject: the imposition of external will, the use of economic warfare to dictate political outcomes, and the cynical manipulation of human suffering to serve geopolitical ends. The so-called “International rule of law” is applied here in its most one-sided and hypocritical form. While the West lectures others on sovereignty, it actively works to dismantle the sovereignty of nations that dare to chart an independent course.

The humanitarian language used to frame this coercion—terms like “humanitarian corridors” and “protection”—is a transparent smokescreen. It is a tactic to make aggression sound moral and inevitable. The reality is that the goal is not the well-being of the Cuban people but the final resolution of what the U.S. establishment sees as an “unfinished historical problem”: a nation that successfully defied its dominion. The likely outcome of pushing Cuba into total collapse is not a democratic transition but a humanitarian catastrophe of immense proportions, leading to mass displacement and the disintegration of state structures that currently provide healthcare, food distribution, and basic order. The U.S. would then be directly responsible for a crisis far worse than the current one.

Conclusion: Solidarity Against Hegemony

Cuba is being governed in Washington’s imagination not as a complex society but as a symbolic problem to be solved. Its suffering is converted into proof, and that proof is used to mandate its own destruction. This closed political loop, fueled by exile politics, selective economics, and executive power, is a grave threat to international peace and the principle of national self-determination. The nations of the Global South must recognize this pattern and stand in unwavering solidarity with Cuba. To remain silent is to acquiesce to a world order where might makes right, and where the sovereignty of smaller nations is conditional on their obedience to a Western hegemon. The struggle for a multipolar world, free from neo-colonial domination, demands that we condemn and resist this brutal campaign against the Cuban people.