Por Hamza Shehryar
Over the last few months, the violence and atrocities imposed upon the Cuban people by the United States’ commander-in-chief have escalated to apocalyptic proportions. Since returning to office, Donald Trump has been choking the Cuban people by ramping up to an unprecedented degree the United States’ tremendously cruel and illegal blockade on the island.
Since May 1, the US has begun to sanction foreign companies for simply maintaining economic relations with Cuba. This means international companies that are in no way linked to the US can face banking restrictions, exclusion from dollar transactions, economic retaliation, and can even have their assets frozen by the US for simply trading with Cuba. As a result, major European businesses have been cancelling contracts and services because the risks are too high.
Trump’s escalations are new, but their foundations have existed in some form since the embargo was first imposed in 1960, soon after Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and their comrades overthrew Fulgencio Batista’s brutal dictatorship to establish a socialist state. The Revolution put first and foremost the rights of the downtrodden, of the campesinos and landless workers, who were previously subjugated by immense tyranny under Batista’s US-backed regime; for it, the Revolution has faced the wrath of the sanctions regime, which has gradually escalated every year.
Among the latest steps in the American brutality on Cuba has been the US indicting and issuing criminal charges against Raúl Castro for shooting down two planes belonging to Miami-based, Cuban-born capitalists. These individuals were part of a terrorist group, Brothers to the Rescue, which sought to overthrow the Cuban government. José Basulto, the CIA agent and founder of the group, who had previously been involved in multiple plots to attack Cuba, including the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, infamously stated that he was “trained as a terrorist by the United States”. These charges against Castro, who is now 94 years old, came thirty years after the planes were shot down. They represent a renewed effort by Trump, his Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the rest of the administration spearheading the rapidly declining American Empire, to manufacture consent for an invasion.
In fact, it is remarkable that Trump’s escalation of an already heinous blockade has not yet dismantled the revolutionary government. The US president’s affinity for cruelty for cruelty’s sake has seen the island and its population of over 10 million suffer agonies previously unimagined. Cuba’s current crisis is a direct consequence of this intensified siege, which was further compounded by the illegal kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, whose government used to supply Cuba with the oil it is unable to produce domestically – until, of course, Maduro was deposed in yet another of Washington’s endless coups across Latin America.
As a result, there are now rolling blackouts for days on end. The entire island starves because there is nowhere near enough food to survive. People live in dilapidated, hollowed-out buildings that have not received repairs for decades. Cuban hospitals and their renowned healthcare system – the crowning jewel among the many achievements of the Revolution, which has inspired internationalists and socialists the world over – can no longer function due to a severe lack of resources and basic equipment. Surgeries have been indefinitely delayed. There are no ventilators, forcing doctors to hand-pump oxygen to newborn babies just to give them a chance to survive; they often do not. In March, the Cuban government estimated that there was a backlog of 96,387 people awaiting surgery, 11,193 of whom were children. Since the Revolution, Cuba has maintained some of the highest life expectancy rates (until recently, outpacing those of the US) and the lowest infant mortality rates in the region. These metrics are now collapsing too.
Due to the US’s targeted cruelty, the infant mortality rate has skyrocketed. A recent study by the Centre for Economic and Policy Research found that Cuba’s infant mortality rate rose from 4 per 1,000 live births in 2018 to 9.9 in 2025 – a 148 per cent increase. The authors concluded that US sanctions are “very likely the primary cause of the current economic and humanitarian crisis in Cuba”. The situation is apocalyptic. It reflects the grim reality that those under the fearsome boot of neocolonialism and imperialism find themselves in: a world built from the ashes of the charred bodies of women and children starved and then eviscerated in Gaza; a wretched Social Darwinism in which cruelty reigns supreme.
While the horrors the Cuban people are currently subjected to by Trump may be unprecedented in their severity, it bears repeating that they are only the continuation of the venomous siege imposed all the way back in 1960. It has been maintained by every single US administration since, barring a brief and insufficient detente under Obama. In 1960, when Castro and the 26th of July Movement successfully liberated the Cuban people from the yoke of a despot – backed, like so many Latin American dictators, by the imperialists – the US could not stomach it. Soon after, the CIA tried to overthrow the nascent revolutionary government, resulting in the infamously botched Bay of Pigs invasion on April 17, 1961. The plan was a spectacular failure. The invaders were contained almost as soon as they touched down. The US and the CIA had been profoundly embarrassed.
Since then, the US has maintained and escalated its illegal blockade of Cuba, effectively preventing the island from trading normally with any nation that wishes to retain access to US markets. It stands as a textbook example of a rogue empire throwing its toys out of the pram when it does not get its way; only the toys it throws are murderous sanctions. The barbarity of this blockade is annually voted on in the United Nations General Assembly – an institution structured to ensure its impacts remain purely symbolic. Except for Israel and the United States, the rest of the world almost unanimously votes to end this barbarous siege every single year. Yet, regardless of the blockade, Cuba thrived in the years following the Revolution. It did so in ways that remain unprecedented.
Spearheaded by a government that prioritised the interests of working people rather than capitalists and landowners – and backed by the financial and political support of the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev – Cuba made monumental gains. To understand the sheer scale of these achievements, it is important to briefly examine the dire reality of pre-revolutionary Cuba.
Before 1959, the country was a regional sex-tourism hub governed by a corrupt dictator brought to power by a US-backed coup in 1952. In his landmark 1953 courtroom defence, History Will Absolve Me, a 27-year-old Fidel Castro laid bare this systemic violence, detailing how the vast majority of small farmers faced constant eviction, productive land lay concentrated in foreign hands, and public hospitals were reduced to tools of political corruption while thousands of children died annually from a total lack of basic sanitary and medical facilities. On January 1, 1959, Batista fled to the Dominican Republic, siphoning between $300 million and $400 million of public money into private bank accounts. Cuba was left completely destitute, yet amid this financial ruin, a new dawn began.
In the two-thirds of a century since, Cuba has stood as an example of egalitarian, progressive governance, despite the immense gravity of the embargo. Until recently, the country boasted a higher average life expectancy than the United States and a lower infant mortality rate. Since the Revolution, all medical care has remained entirely free, and Cuban doctors have played a monumental role in global healthcare missions. In 2015, Cuba became the first country in the world to successfully eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis.
This is merely the tip of the iceberg regarding the island’s biotechnology achievements, which include developing pioneering therapeutic vaccines for advanced non-small cell lung cancer, such as CIMAvax-EGF. When US sanctions prevented Cuba from acquiring foreign COVID-19 vaccines, domestic scientists developed their own native versions, fully inoculating nearly its entire population before subsequent viral waves could hit, and then exported these vaccines to several countries in the Global South. Michael Moore’s 2007 film Sicko documents Cuba’s massive strides in the field of medicine, contrasting them sharply with the parasitic, for-profit system inside the US.
Today, 23 medical schools educate both citizens and overseas students entirely free of charge. Consequently, Cuba has one of the highest doctor-to-patient ratios in the world: more than 8 per 1,000 citizens – more than double the rate in the US or the UK. On the educational front, the metrics are even more striking. In 1958, half of Cuba’s children did not attend school at all. Today, the nation boasts a literacy rate of 99.7 per cent. In fact, the literacy rate had already climbed to 96 per cent by 1962, as one of Castro’s immediate initiatives was a massive nationwide literacy drive.
The Revolution also turned this small island into a global Olympic powerhouse. Cuba holds more Olympic medals than any other nation in Latin America, despite a population of roughly 11 million. This sporting success stems directly from the state’s guarantee of free, universal access to specialised sports academies for every citizen. Even more progressive than these achievements is Cuba’s Family Code. It still stands as arguably the most progressive framework of civil law in the world, replacing abstract notions of parental custody with concrete “parental responsibilities” toward children, alongside sweeping protections for women and caregivers. It guarantees on-demand contraception, universal access to abortion, and fully subsidised gender-affirming healthcare for transgender individuals. Codified in 2022, these laws were developed over three years via direct democratic participation, undergoing thousands of neighbourhood meetings and public revisions before being approved by 67 per cent of voters in a high-turnout referendum.
Then there is the historical commitment to supporting anti-colonial movements abroad undertaken, paradoxically to many Western analysts, at immense domestic cost for zero material gain. Angola could not have successfully liberated itself from the ruthlessness of warlord Jonas Savimbi and the apartheid South African army that financed him without direct Cuban military support. Apartheid South Africa itself, which engaged Cuban and Angolan MPLA forces directly, saw its regional hegemony shattered far more rapidly because of this intervention. The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, where Cuban and MPLA forces decisively defeated South African units, became the turning point that triggered the eventual fall of apartheid domestically and secured true liberation for both Angola and Namibia. Cuba also sheltered Black liberation activists wanted by Washington, including Nehanda Abiodun and Assata Shakur, and met every demand for their return, and every bounty, with silence.
The bottom line is that Cuba quickly transformed from a playground for Western elites, defined by inequality, racism, poverty, and systemic privatisation, into a genuine model of progressive governance, all while navigating a merciless embargo that inflicts severe annual shortages. However, as is the case for any state that successfully defies Washington, this defiance was met with extreme structural retaliation. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, conditions turned dire. While the fall of the Berlin Wall is consistently framed in Western media as a triumphant, historic moment of breaking chains, for the majority of the Third World, the unravelling of the USSR was a catastrophe.
The blow was felt mostly acutely in countries that relied directly on Soviet trade to bypass US sanctions. Cuba was brutally hit, forcing the government to open its doors to international tourism just to survive. This economic restructuring rapidly gave rise to class dynamics and inequalities alien to the original socialist project, forcing a population liberated from the ignominy of serving foreign elites thirty years prior to perform once again for wealthy holiday-makers just to secure basic goods. Jon Alpert’s documentary Cuba and the Cameraman captures the heartbreaking reality of this shift and the alienation it caused.
Yet, the revolutionary core was never entirely extinguished. Cuba successfully navigated the worst of this so-called Special Period, and by the turn of the century, conditions began to stabilise. By restructuring its economy around tourism and medical exports, and by developing new trade relationships with Russia, China, and Venezuela, Cuba managed to establish a new equilibrium. It never fully recovered the material security of the pre-1989 era, but it preserved its sovereignty, its internationalist commitments, and its socialist infrastructure.
From 2015 onwards, under the Obama administration, Washington and Havana entered a historic detente. The US finally removed Cuba from its State Sponsors of Terrorism list, and Barack Obama visited the island, meeting directly with Raúl Castro. This loosening of the economic noose led to an immediate, tangible improvement in daily living conditions for ordinary Cubans. However, soon after, American voters decided to elect Donald Trump as president.
Upon entering the Oval Office, Trump immediately terminated the thaw, reinstated Cuba onto the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, and tightened the economic chokehold. When Joe Biden took office in 2021, he conspicuously refused to restore relations to the Obama-era baseline, maintaining the economic pressure right up until his departure. His pathetic eleventh-hour removal of Cuba from the terrorism list was instantly reversed by Trump on his first day back in power.
Since then, Trump and Marco Rubio have escalated the blockade to unprecedented, asphyxiating levels. The recent US illegal operation in Venezuela and the kidnapping of Maduro have stripped Cuba of its primary source of oil. Unable to produce its own petroleum, the island’s energy grid is collapsing, leaving its people to suffer under apocalyptic conditions. An invasion may follow when a deal to end the war with Iran is formally signed. Structurally, there is little to stop it.
Having somehow, against all odds, persevered through unparalleled historical trials – be it the Bay of Pigs invasion, the October Crisis, the Special Period, and everything in between – it now seems that the sustained escalation of unfettered barbarity by Washington’s vilest administration may be too much for the island to weather. Left without the leadership of the Castro brothers, the Soviet Union, or Venezuelan oil, the Cuban Revolution faces its most existential threat yet. It may finally collapse under apocalyptic conditions that make the hardships following the collapse of the Soviet Union pale in comparison.
Or it might not.
If there is a single nation that has consistently defied the calculus of probability, it is Cuba. Even today, Trump is reportedly frustrated that the island and its government have not yet buckled amidst the violence of this intensified blockade; he cannot fathom why 11 million people are not in open revolt. Unlike the fractured political landscape in Venezuela, there remains a deep, popular baseline of support for the sovereignty and dignity that the island’s people have sacrificed so much to maintain. All things considered, it is a remarkable feat of collective endurance. We also know that the island’s defence apparatus has spent decades preparing for a direct US assault, drawing up asymmetric guerrilla tactics to resist an imminent attack, echoing the precise strategic spirit of the Argentine doctor who played such a monumental role in the birth of the Revolution.
Furthermore, it is highly improbable that a surgical operation akin to the kidnapping of Maduro would succeed in Havana. Even if the US security state manages to secure a pliant asset like Delcy Rodriguez within the ranks, it is very unlikely that such a figure would be tolerated by the public or the party apparatus. Should a Batista-like proxy be forcefully imposed upon the island, it would almost certainly ignite an all-out civil war. I cannot predict what the coming months will bring; I can only watch, hope, and offer solidarity, fully aware that the situation is acutely perilous.
Yet, even if the worst comes to pass – even if the American Empire, upon which the sun is now firmly setting, finally achieves the singular objective it has spent more than six decades engineering and completely unravels the Cuban government, dismantles socialism on the island, and reduces it to yet another capitalist vassal state in Latin America carved up for libertarian charter cities like Próspera – the spirit of the Cuban Revolution, much like that of the October Revolution, will remain immortal. What it achieved for the downtrodden around the world, whom it liberated from both physical and psychological shackles, can never be erased from historical memory.
Angola will not be unliberated. Namibia won’t be recolonised. Apartheid will not return to South Africa. The movies won’t be unmade. The novels won’t be unwritten. The internationalism, fervour, love, and solidarity won’t be gutted. The guerrilla tactics and revolutionary optimism won’t vanish. They will remain, like the defiant images and murals of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro that adorn spaces around the world, firmly rooted in the minds of those who dream of a better world. The fight against the forces that leech the world of its beauty to turn it into misery, all in the name of endless accumulation, will continue. And it will always remember the Cuban revolutionaries who defined it. Who showed the wretched of the earth, the darker peoples, that resistance would never be futile.
Hamza Shehryar is a writer and journalist. He covers film, culture, and global politics.
 |
Over the last few months, the violence and atrocities imposed upon the Cuban people by the United States’ commander-in-chief have escalated to apocalyptic proportions. Since returning to office, Donald Trump has been choking the Cuban people by ramping up to an unprecedented degree the United States’ tremendously cruel and illegal blockade on the island.
Since May 1, the US has begun to sanction foreign companies for simply maintaining economic relations with Cuba. This means international companies that are in no way linked to the US can face banking restrictions, exclusion from dollar transactions, economic retaliation, and can even have their assets frozen by the US for simply trading with Cuba. As a result, major European businesses have been cancelling contracts and services because the risks are too high.
Trump’s escalations are new, but their foundations have existed in some form since the embargo was first imposed in 1960, soon after Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and their comrades overthrew Fulgencio Batista’s brutal dictatorship to establish a socialist state. The Revolution put first and foremost the rights of the downtrodden, of the campesinos and landless workers, who were previously subjugated by immense tyranny under Batista’s US-backed regime; for it, the Revolution has faced the wrath of the sanctions regime, which has gradually escalated every year.
Among the latest steps in the American brutality on Cuba has been the US indicting and issuing criminal charges against Raúl Castro for shooting down two planes belonging to Miami-based, Cuban-born capitalists. These individuals were part of a terrorist group, Brothers to the Rescue, which sought to overthrow the Cuban government. José Basulto, the CIA agent and founder of the group, who had previously been involved in multiple plots to attack Cuba, including the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, infamously stated that he was “trained as a terrorist by the United States”. These charges against Castro, who is now 94 years old, came thirty years after the planes were shot down. They represent a renewed effort by Trump, his Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the rest of the administration spearheading the rapidly declining American Empire, to manufacture consent for an invasion.
In fact, it is remarkable that Trump’s escalation of an already heinous blockade has not yet dismantled the revolutionary government. The US president’s affinity for cruelty for cruelty’s sake has seen the island and its population of over 10 million suffer agonies previously unimagined. Cuba’s current crisis is a direct consequence of this intensified siege, which was further compounded by the illegal kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, whose government used to supply Cuba with the oil it is unable to produce domestically – until, of course, Maduro was deposed in yet another of Washington’s endless coups across Latin America.
As a result, there are now rolling blackouts for days on end. The entire island starves because there is nowhere near enough food to survive. People live in dilapidated, hollowed-out buildings that have not received repairs for decades. Cuban hospitals and their renowned healthcare system – the crowning jewel among the many achievements of the Revolution, which has inspired internationalists and socialists the world over – can no longer function due to a severe lack of resources and basic equipment. Surgeries have been indefinitely delayed. There are no ventilators, forcing doctors to hand-pump oxygen to newborn babies just to give them a chance to survive; they often do not. In March, the Cuban government estimated that there was a backlog of 96,387 people awaiting surgery, 11,193 of whom were children. Since the Revolution, Cuba has maintained some of the highest life expectancy rates (until recently, outpacing those of the US) and the lowest infant mortality rates in the region. These metrics are now collapsing too.
Due to the US’s targeted cruelty, the infant mortality rate has skyrocketed. A recent study by the Centre for Economic and Policy Research found that Cuba’s infant mortality rate rose from 4 per 1,000 live births in 2018 to 9.9 in 2025 – a 148 per cent increase. The authors concluded that US sanctions are “very likely the primary cause of the current economic and humanitarian crisis in Cuba”. The situation is apocalyptic. It reflects the grim reality that those under the fearsome boot of neocolonialism and imperialism find themselves in: a world built from the ashes of the charred bodies of women and children starved and then eviscerated in Gaza; a wretched Social Darwinism in which cruelty reigns supreme.
While the horrors the Cuban people are currently subjected to by Trump may be unprecedented in their severity, it bears repeating that they are only the continuation of the venomous siege imposed all the way back in 1960. It has been maintained by every single US administration since, barring a brief and insufficient detente under Obama. In 1960, when Castro and the 26th of July Movement successfully liberated the Cuban people from the yoke of a despot – backed, like so many Latin American dictators, by the imperialists – the US could not stomach it. Soon after, the CIA tried to overthrow the nascent revolutionary government, resulting in the infamously botched Bay of Pigs invasion on April 17, 1961. The plan was a spectacular failure. The invaders were contained almost as soon as they touched down. The US and the CIA had been profoundly embarrassed.
Since then, the US has maintained and escalated its illegal blockade of Cuba, effectively preventing the island from trading normally with any nation that wishes to retain access to US markets. It stands as a textbook example of a rogue empire throwing its toys out of the pram when it does not get its way; only the toys it throws are murderous sanctions. The barbarity of this blockade is annually voted on in the United Nations General Assembly – an institution structured to ensure its impacts remain purely symbolic. Except for Israel and the United States, the rest of the world almost unanimously votes to end this barbarous siege every single year. Yet, regardless of the blockade, Cuba thrived in the years following the Revolution. It did so in ways that remain unprecedented.
Spearheaded by a government that prioritised the interests of working people rather than capitalists and landowners – and backed by the financial and political support of the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev – Cuba made monumental gains. To understand the sheer scale of these achievements, it is important to briefly examine the dire reality of pre-revolutionary Cuba.
Before 1959, the country was a regional sex-tourism hub governed by a corrupt dictator brought to power by a US-backed coup in 1952. In his landmark 1953 courtroom defence, History Will Absolve Me, a 27-year-old Fidel Castro laid bare this systemic violence, detailing how the vast majority of small farmers faced constant eviction, productive land lay concentrated in foreign hands, and public hospitals were reduced to tools of political corruption while thousands of children died annually from a total lack of basic sanitary and medical facilities. On January 1, 1959, Batista fled to the Dominican Republic, siphoning between $300 million and $400 million of public money into private bank accounts. Cuba was left completely destitute, yet amid this financial ruin, a new dawn began.
In the two-thirds of a century since, Cuba has stood as an example of egalitarian, progressive governance, despite the immense gravity of the embargo. Until recently, the country boasted a higher average life expectancy than the United States and a lower infant mortality rate. Since the Revolution, all medical care has remained entirely free, and Cuban doctors have played a monumental role in global healthcare missions. In 2015, Cuba became the first country in the world to successfully eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis.
This is merely the tip of the iceberg regarding the island’s biotechnology achievements, which include developing pioneering therapeutic vaccines for advanced non-small cell lung cancer, such as CIMAvax-EGF. When US sanctions prevented Cuba from acquiring foreign COVID-19 vaccines, domestic scientists developed their own native versions, fully inoculating nearly its entire population before subsequent viral waves could hit, and then exported these vaccines to several countries in the Global South. Michael Moore’s 2007 film Sicko documents Cuba’s massive strides in the field of medicine, contrasting them sharply with the parasitic, for-profit system inside the US.
Today, 23 medical schools educate both citizens and overseas students entirely free of charge. Consequently, Cuba has one of the highest doctor-to-patient ratios in the world: more than 8 per 1,000 citizens – more than double the rate in the US or the UK. On the educational front, the metrics are even more striking. In 1958, half of Cuba’s children did not attend school at all. Today, the nation boasts a literacy rate of 99.7 per cent. In fact, the literacy rate had already climbed to 96 per cent by 1962, as one of Castro’s immediate initiatives was a massive nationwide literacy drive.
The Revolution also turned this small island into a global Olympic powerhouse. Cuba holds more Olympic medals than any other nation in Latin America, despite a population of roughly 11 million. This sporting success stems directly from the state’s guarantee of free, universal access to specialised sports academies for every citizen. Even more progressive than these achievements is Cuba’s Family Code. It still stands as arguably the most progressive framework of civil law in the world, replacing abstract notions of parental custody with concrete “parental responsibilities” toward children, alongside sweeping protections for women and caregivers. It guarantees on-demand contraception, universal access to abortion, and fully subsidised gender-affirming healthcare for transgender individuals. Codified in 2022, these laws were developed over three years via direct democratic participation, undergoing thousands of neighbourhood meetings and public revisions before being approved by 67 per cent of voters in a high-turnout referendum.
Then there is the historical commitment to supporting anti-colonial movements abroad undertaken, paradoxically to many Western analysts, at immense domestic cost for zero material gain. Angola could not have successfully liberated itself from the ruthlessness of warlord Jonas Savimbi and the apartheid South African army that financed him without direct Cuban military support. Apartheid South Africa itself, which engaged Cuban and Angolan MPLA forces directly, saw its regional hegemony shattered far more rapidly because of this intervention. The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, where Cuban and MPLA forces decisively defeated South African units, became the turning point that triggered the eventual fall of apartheid domestically and secured true liberation for both Angola and Namibia. Cuba also sheltered Black liberation activists wanted by Washington, including Nehanda Abiodun and Assata Shakur, and met every demand for their return, and every bounty, with silence.
The bottom line is that Cuba quickly transformed from a playground for Western elites, defined by inequality, racism, poverty, and systemic privatisation, into a genuine model of progressive governance, all while navigating a merciless embargo that inflicts severe annual shortages. However, as is the case for any state that successfully defies Washington, this defiance was met with extreme structural retaliation. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, conditions turned dire. While the fall of the Berlin Wall is consistently framed in Western media as a triumphant, historic moment of breaking chains, for the majority of the Third World, the unravelling of the USSR was a catastrophe.
The blow was felt mostly acutely in countries that relied directly on Soviet trade to bypass US sanctions. Cuba was brutally hit, forcing the government to open its doors to international tourism just to survive. This economic restructuring rapidly gave rise to class dynamics and inequalities alien to the original socialist project, forcing a population liberated from the ignominy of serving foreign elites thirty years prior to perform once again for wealthy holiday-makers just to secure basic goods. Jon Alpert’s documentary Cuba and the Cameraman captures the heartbreaking reality of this shift and the alienation it caused.
Yet, the revolutionary core was never entirely extinguished. Cuba successfully navigated the worst of this so-called Special Period, and by the turn of the century, conditions began to stabilise. By restructuring its economy around tourism and medical exports, and by developing new trade relationships with Russia, China, and Venezuela, Cuba managed to establish a new equilibrium. It never fully recovered the material security of the pre-1989 era, but it preserved its sovereignty, its internationalist commitments, and its socialist infrastructure.
From 2015 onwards, under the Obama administration, Washington and Havana entered a historic detente. The US finally removed Cuba from its State Sponsors of Terrorism list, and Barack Obama visited the island, meeting directly with Raúl Castro. This loosening of the economic noose led to an immediate, tangible improvement in daily living conditions for ordinary Cubans. However, soon after, American voters decided to elect Donald Trump as president.
Upon entering the Oval Office, Trump immediately terminated the thaw, reinstated Cuba onto the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, and tightened the economic chokehold. When Joe Biden took office in 2021, he conspicuously refused to restore relations to the Obama-era baseline, maintaining the economic pressure right up until his departure. His pathetic eleventh-hour removal of Cuba from the terrorism list was instantly reversed by Trump on his first day back in power.
Since then, Trump and Marco Rubio have escalated the blockade to unprecedented, asphyxiating levels. The recent US illegal operation in Venezuela and the kidnapping of Maduro have stripped Cuba of its primary source of oil. Unable to produce its own petroleum, the island’s energy grid is collapsing, leaving its people to suffer under apocalyptic conditions. An invasion may follow when a deal to end the war with Iran is formally signed. Structurally, there is little to stop it.
Having somehow, against all odds, persevered through unparalleled historical trials – be it the Bay of Pigs invasion, the October Crisis, the Special Period, and everything in between – it now seems that the sustained escalation of unfettered barbarity by Washington’s vilest administration may be too much for the island to weather. Left without the leadership of the Castro brothers, the Soviet Union, or Venezuelan oil, the Cuban Revolution faces its most existential threat yet. It may finally collapse under apocalyptic conditions that make the hardships following the collapse of the Soviet Union pale in comparison.
Or it might not.
If there is a single nation that has consistently defied the calculus of probability, it is Cuba. Even today, Trump is reportedly frustrated that the island and its government have not yet buckled amidst the violence of this intensified blockade; he cannot fathom why 11 million people are not in open revolt. Unlike the fractured political landscape in Venezuela, there remains a deep, popular baseline of support for the sovereignty and dignity that the island’s people have sacrificed so much to maintain. All things considered, it is a remarkable feat of collective endurance. We also know that the island’s defence apparatus has spent decades preparing for a direct US assault, drawing up asymmetric guerrilla tactics to resist an imminent attack, echoing the precise strategic spirit of the Argentine doctor who played such a monumental role in the birth of the Revolution.
Furthermore, it is highly improbable that a surgical operation akin to the kidnapping of Maduro would succeed in Havana. Even if the US security state manages to secure a pliant asset like Delcy Rodriguez within the ranks, it is very unlikely that such a figure would be tolerated by the public or the party apparatus. Should a Batista-like proxy be forcefully imposed upon the island, it would almost certainly ignite an all-out civil war. I cannot predict what the coming months will bring; I can only watch, hope, and offer solidarity, fully aware that the situation is acutely perilous.
Yet, even if the worst comes to pass – even if the American Empire, upon which the sun is now firmly setting, finally achieves the singular objective it has spent more than six decades engineering and completely unravels the Cuban government, dismantles socialism on the island, and reduces it to yet another capitalist vassal state in Latin America carved up for libertarian charter cities like Próspera – the spirit of the Cuban Revolution, much like that of the October Revolution, will remain immortal. What it achieved for the downtrodden around the world, whom it liberated from both physical and psychological shackles, can never be erased from historical memory.
Angola will not be unliberated. Namibia won’t be recolonised. Apartheid will not return to South Africa. The movies won’t be unmade. The novels won’t be unwritten. The internationalism, fervour, love, and solidarity won’t be gutted. The guerrilla tactics and revolutionary optimism won’t vanish. They will remain, like the defiant images and murals of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro that adorn spaces around the world, firmly rooted in the minds of those who dream of a better world. The fight against the forces that leech the world of its beauty to turn it into misery, all in the name of endless accumulation, will continue. And it will always remember the Cuban revolutionaries who defined it. Who showed the wretched of the earth, the darker peoples, that resistance would never be futile.
Hamza Shehryar is a writer and journalist. He covers film, culture, and global politics.
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