DSA member Andrew Jarvis reflects on the human suffering caused by U.S. imperialism in Cuba.

Cuba is not facing a tragic accident. It is not a bureaucratic oversight. It is not a natural collapse of a failed system. It is the predictable engineered outcome of economic warfare carried out in full view of the world. The United States government understands the consequences. It understands the humanitarian cost. It understands who suffers. And it continues anyway. It continues because the American administration wants to. It continues because this is working exactly as they intend.

Across the island, the electrical grid is failing under catastrophic fuel shortages, and decades of deferred maintenance have been made worse by financial strangulation. Blackouts stretch for hours each day. Entire neighborhoods sit in darkness through suffocating heat. Refrigerators fail. Water pumps stop. Hospitals ration electricity. Food spoils overnight. Sleep becomes impossible. Daily life becomes a slow grind of exhaustion and improvisation. This is what slow death looks like when it is delivered through policy memos and Treasury Department designations.

Most recently, this crisis has worsened as repeated failures pushed the national electrical system toward collapse. This March, large sections of the island lost power simultaneously when the fragile grid failed again, leaving millions without electricity at once. In some provinces, outages now last up to twenty hours a day, turning basic survival into a daily logistical crisis. 

This crisis has intensified in early 2026 as fuel shortages deepen under enforcement pressure targeting oil shipments and financial channels. Tankers avoid delivery routes. Insurers refuse coverage. Banks block transactions. Suppliers refuse payment pathways. The result is a chokehold on energy access. Without fuel, power plants shut down. Without electricity, everything stops.

Fuel shortages have worsened as shipments from Venezuela decline under pressure from sanctions and production limits, while replacement suppliers face financial and insurance barriers tied to U.S. enforcement risk. Cuban officials have warned that oil deliveries have become increasingly irregular and, in some cases, absent for months at a time as shipping companies and insurers avoid the island rather than risk US-tied penalties. When diesel disappears, buses stop running. Garbage collection halts. Food distribution collapses. Agricultural harvests rot before reaching cities. In Havana and other urban centers, trash and waste piles grow in the streets as sanitation trucks sit idle without fuel. The streets smell like death because Washington decided they should.

Food scarcity is no longer intermittent. It is structural, it is relentless, and it is engineered. Rice, cooking oil, eggs, and flour arrive unpredictably. Milk is scarce. Protein is priced beyond reach. Families stand in line for hours, hoping supplies arrive before they run out. Without refrigeration during prolonged outages, food spoils in the tropical heat, turning scarcity into loss. Parents ration meals. Elderly residents skip eating altogether. Children go to bed hungry because the most powerful nation on earth decided a small island ninety miles away must be taught a lesson.

Hospitals operate under conditions that would trigger national emergency declarations in the United States. Medicines are scarce. Equipment sits idle, awaiting parts trapped in sanction- restricted procurement channels. Ambulances face fuel rationing. Doctors improvise care with diminishing supplies. Preventable deaths become more likely when electricity, medicine, and functioning equipment disappear simultaneously. Patients die from preventable deaths. The United States counts those deaths as acceptable collateral damage.

Meanwhile, inflation and currency collapse have eroded purchasing power. Informal dollar markets expand as the peso loses value. Those with access to remittances survive. Those without face empty shelves. Inequality widens in a society historically structured around social provision. The blockade creates scarcity and then blames the government for the scarcity. It is a perfect trap.

At the same time, the Cuban government is attempting to stabilize an economy under siege through reforms that could be seen as either a capitulation or rather as a strategic adaptation within a hostile global system. The island's economic czar has stated that nationals living abroad will be allowed to invest in and own private businesses in Cuba. Western media spins these policies as “embracing the market,” but that narrative hides the truth. US officials and media point to this and say that it is proof that Cuba's economy doesn't work or is nonfunctional, and these reforms prove that socialist or communist economic policies and governance are doomed to fail. That claim collapses the second you look at reality. This economy did not fail in a vacuum; it has been strangled by others. Fuel has been blocked, credit denied, transactions frozen, and then this suffocation is held as proof that this system doesn't work. 

The same line shows up in the investment story itself. Cuba has signaled for years that it is open to diaspora investment on the island; the real barrier has been the United States government.  U.S. Treasury and law enforcement restrict or just outright block the transactions that American officials claim Cuba refuses. Humanitarian aid can get delayed or denied. Even basic investments require navigating US licensing regimes. Much of the Cuban economy is tied to state entities, which US rules prohibit Americans from engaging with, effectively blocking large-scale investments in infrastructure, energy, and industry. The door to Cuba's economy thriving is not closed by the government in Havana; it is locked in Washington, and then Cuban nationals are blamed. 

Under this pressure and victim-blaming, survival itself begins to reshape the system. The blockade, financial restrictions, and trade barriers are chipping away at the planned economy by forcing the opening of the economy to private capital just to keep society functioning. What gets labeled as “market reform” is often coerced adaptation, a way to circulate resources in an economy that has been deliberately cut off from the world for years. This is the deeper function of the siege: to force the gradual reintroduction of capital logic into a socialist system. And yet even under that pressure, Cuba continues to adapt and hold the line, not collapsing, not surrendering, but resisting while being slowly squeezed.

This squeezing does not happen in a vacuum and it hurts the everyday people of Cuba, in their homes, their kitchens, their quiet calculations that families make every day about what they can afford to lose. It shows up in the empty shelves, stalled buses, nights without power,  and in the constant uncertainty of whether basic needs can be met. Over time, that pressure builds. It accumulates, and eventually it spills over. Public frustration has erupted into protests driven by these electricity shortages, food scarcity, and economic collapse. The protests themselves tell the truth. People are not demonstrating over ideology. They are not pawns in some Cold War nostalgia trip. They are demonstrating because the lights are out. The food is gone. Survival is becoming untenable. They are demonstrating because the United States is slowly squeezing the life out of their country, and the world is watching and doing nothing.

Migration has surged to historic levels. Hundreds of thousands have left in recent years, driven not by abstract political beliefs but by material reality. More than half a million Cubans have entered the United States since 2022 alone, one of the largest waves of migration in the island's modern history. When daily life becomes mathematically unsustainable, people move. They flee the siege. And then Washington uses their flight as justification for more siege. The cruelty is the point.

And still Washington tightens the vice.

The sanctions regime strengthened between 2017 and 2021 remains intact under the current administration of Donald Trump. Cuba remains on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. This is a joke. This designation functions less as a security measure than as a financial kill switch. Banks refuse transactions. Credit lines vanish. Insurance coverage evaporates. Shipping firms refuse deliveries. Even lawful commerce becomes impossible. The United States has weaponized the global financial system to starve an island of twelve million people.

Each year, the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly condemns the embargo. Each year, the United States ignores them. Humanitarian organizations warn of its consequences. Washington ignores them. Policy analysts across ideological lines acknowledge it has failed to achieve its stated goals. Washington ignores them. Still, it persists, sustained by domestic political calculations, by Cold War mythology, by the political convenience of appearing tough against a small island that cannot retaliate. Florida voters matter more than Cuban children. That is the calculation. That is the truth.

If Florida lost electricity for half the day for months, it would be a national emergency. If Texas hospitals could not obtain equipment due to sanctions, Congress would act overnight. If grocery shelves emptied week after week in Louisiana, it would dominate headlines. If Americans could not refrigerate their food, if American doctors had to choose who lives and who dies based on medicine shortages, if American parents had to explain to their children why there is no milk again, there would be rage. There would be a revolution.

Ninety miles away, these conditions are normalized as geopolitics. 

This is what imperial power looks like in the twenty-first century. Not invasion fleets but financial suffocation. Not blockades announced on the radio, but insurance denials and payment refusals. Not bombs but the slow violence of deprivation. Not shock and awe but gradual strangulation. Not death from above but death from the Treasury Department.

Sanctions do not fall on governments. They never have. They fall on diabetics without insulin. They fall on families without refrigeration. They fall on sanitation systems without fuel. They fall on children trying to sleep in apartments that never cool down. They fall on the old, the sick, the poor, the vulnerable. The powerful eat well. The connected find ways. The rest suffer. That is by design.

This is collective punishment deployed as policy. Collective punishment is a war crime. The United States has made it a strategy.

The stated goal is political pressure. The real effect is civilian suffering in the hope that desperation produces regime change. History shows the opposite. Isolation hardens governments while ordinary people absorb the pain. The Cuban government is still there. The Cuban people are the ones bleeding.

Economic siege produces suffering. Suffering produces migration. Migration is weaponized politically. The cycle justifies further siege. It is a machine. It runs on human misery. It runs on Cuban bodies.

What is happening to Cuba is not some unfortunate side effect of policy differences. It is part of a long tradition of punishing nations that refuse subordination to global capital and U.S. geopolitical dominance. The language shifts. The mechanisms modernize. The outcome remains the same. Compliance or die. Submit or starve. That is the offer.

The people living through this are not symbols. They are not props in someone's ideological theater. They are families searching for food. They are doctors improvising care. They are children studying by flashlight. They are the elders rationing medication in dark apartments. They are enduring conditions Americans would consider intolerable within days, within hours. They endure them for years. For decades. Because the United States decided they must.

This crisis is not inevitable. It is policy. And policy can change.

But policy only changes when people refuse to accept engineered suffering as normal. When people refuse to look away. When people refuse to allow economic warfare to be carried out in their name. When people get angry enough to do something about it.

So get angry. Get loud. Get organized. The blockade is not abstract. It is killing people right now. It is killing them slowly, so no one has to see the bodies. But the bodies are there. They are stacking up. And history will remember who held the knife.