A man pulls a cart carrying drinking water during a power outage in Havana, Cuba, in August.Ramon Espinosa/The Associated Press
Mark Entwistle is a former ambassador of Canada to Cuba and a senior fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
The Trump administration is conducting two wars of choice.
In one, the U.S. and Iran trade missile attacks about which the world hears regularly. The other is the silent economic war of attrition against Cuba.
The intolerable humanitarian crisis in Cuba worsens daily: blackouts lasting 20 hours a day, critical shortages of everything, harmful disruptions to medical care and education. There is virtually no fuel to run the economy and provide necessities of life to the population. Cuban officials report a continuing rise in infant mortality.
The Cuban people are largely abandoned in a sea of global turbulence.
The Cuban government has missed opportunities to transform its economic model to promote greater prosperity. There are unquestionably Cubans who have had individual rights violated by the Cuban state and have suffered personally. These are legitimate critiques and grievances.
The American narrative about Cuba, frozen in time since the Cold War, is flawed. The current Cuban crisis is not caused solely by failures of the Cuban government. The far-reaching U.S. embargo has done great damage to Cuban economic development. That has been its express rationale since at least 1960, and to claim otherwise is to attempt to gaslight the public.
But the human cost of the current crisis renders irrelevant such abstract debate about interpretations of Cuban history.
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Two things have happened that differentiate this moment from the previous 66 years of the U.S. embargo against Cuba.
First, the Trump administration has designed new forms of economic coercion that go well beyond the legacy embargo that targeted individual foreign companies.
It has now weaponized the threat of tariffs on entire countries whose companies might supply oil to Cuba, intimidated global banks and targeted the Cuban economy in its entirety, in addition to the military and intelligence apparatus.
This economic attack skirts the edge of international humanitarian law since there is no armed conflict per se. Such law has yet to catch up to this kind of multifaceted economic attack where the real effects resemble those in an armed conflict zone. Although not a violation of the letter of the law, the current American total pressure campaign against Cuba willfully ignores the spirit of, for example, Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that prohibits collective punishment of an entire people for the perceived wrongdoing of responsible individuals.
The campaign also raises serious questions about whether it violates international prohibitions on threats of force and coercive interference in another state’s internal affairs. Those questions are harder to dismiss when Cuba has not attacked the United States and poses no demonstrable direct national security threat.
Second, the timeline has shifted profoundly. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has now admitted that pressure on Cuba could increase and continue for another two-and-a-half years until January, 2029, the putative end of the Trump administration.
This changes everything. Supporters of the U.S. total-pressure campaign, including influential Cuban-American political leaders, have believed the bombast – that the U.S. government would now finally “get the job done” and overthrow the Cuban government. The collateral harm done to Cubans living on the island would be a necessary temporary sacrifice.
That was the deal. But it is now clear that the cavalry is not coming.
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The Trump administration will continue to press a knee to the neck of the Cuban economy to steadily asphyxiate it, hoping to cause such intolerable hardship to everyday Cubans that they somehow rise and overthrow the government.
No matter how long it takes. “Mission accomplished” can then be declared without really having had to do “anything.” That seems still to be the cynical plan.
A strategic risk is that, after having destroyed the Cuban economy, creating conditions for a failed state 90 miles from Florida and fuelling further migration, a distracted Trump administration walks away, unwilling to take on the harder and costlier work of building an inclusive new political system.
Is there a point when the means no longer justify the ends? How much longer can the purposeful inflicting of harm be ethically tolerated?
Supporters of the Trump administration’s economic war on Cuba now carry a moral burden. Unless this U.S. government changes course, abandons a strategy of collective punishment, prioritizes protection of innocent civilians, ceases to “rent” its foreign policy to the agenda of a special-interest group, and starts to dismantle its decades-old embargo to allow American and other companies to legally do legitimate business in Cuba as they do around the world, history will not absolve it.