On Jan. 29, the Trump administration declared Cuba “an unusual and extraordinary threat” and imposed an energy blockade on the small energy-importing island nation. U.S. coercive measures have ranged from economic pressure and threats to invasion and kidnapping of the elected president of a sovereign country. Only a single fuel shipment has arrived in Cuba in the past three months.
Each day the news in Cuba includes an announcement of the estimated demand for electricity and the available quantity. For April 16 it reads, “The estimate for the schedule of maximum demand is an available 1,158 MW (megawatts), with a maximum demand of 3,000 MW for a deficit of 1,842 MW.”
The United States has, at the same time, made successful attempts to cut off sources of income for Cuba, including attacks on Cuba’s international medical program that have forced many countries in the Caribbean to end the very programs that brought otherwise unavailable health care to poor people and remote areas.
What does that mean in terms of daily life for the people of Cuba?
- There are periods without electricity almost every day. Without electricity, maintaining a water supply is difficult or impossible as most people have electric water pumps to get the water from the mains to the house.
- Transporting and storing food is difficult.
- Those who are in vulnerable situations and most in need of social services, such as centers for elders and programs for pregnant women, are at risk.
- Hospitals face challenges ranging from how to maintain refrigeration of blood products, medications and vaccines to the immediate emergencies presented by ventilators and other life-maintaining equipment such as dialysis machines that run on electricity. More than 96,000 patients are currently awaiting surgeries, including thousands of children.
- With no transportation, how do you get around? How do you get to work? How do you get to school? How do you get your children to school?
- There is a huge forest fire in the western province of Pinar Del Rio, and there are not sufficient resources to control it.
- Hospitals and pharmacies run out of medication. People who need daily medication like blood-pressure control medication, and who have been receiving it from the Cuban health system for years despite the blockade, are running out and unable to get what they need.
- Children with leukemia have a curable disease but only if the medication needed to maintain them in remission is available on schedule. Now this is not always possible.
- The neonatal mortality rate, which had been lower than that of the United States, has more than doubled and is still climbing.
Cuba has been working on renewable energy sources and in one year went from 3% renewable sources to 10%. But conversion of energy systems requires enormous front-end investment, and part of the U.S. government strategy is to cut off sources of income for Cuba and eliminate foreign investment.
This is a war against Cuba, because that is what the more than 650 unilateral coercive economic measures are—a form of siege warfare, the collective punishment of a whole civilian population.
The violence and threats of violence are accompanied by a media narrative that attempts to justify this and make it plausible and ordinary. Rhetoric about “failed states” and “countries in turmoil” are used as an attempt to de-legitimize governments and countries. As so-called mainstream media and large social media sites become increasingly right wing under monopolistic billionaire ownership, alternative media become important as the only dissenting voices to the government disinformation tales.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has called on “all countries”—but, of course, it is the United States that imposes unilateral coercive economic measures—to cease using these siege warfare tactics that affect people in a bad and indiscriminate manner. “Political objectives cannot justify actions that violate human rights.”
Within the United States, organizations have spoken out against the cruelty of the current blockade measures. In April of this year at its national convention, the National Lawyers Guild unanimously approved an emergency resolution expressing its opposition to U.S. unilateral coercive measures against Cuba, including the Executive Order 14380, and calls upon the establishment of negotiations based on mutual respect and the recognition of sovereignty.
The resolution recognizes Cuba and the United States as sovereign states and members of the United Nations, and underscores the binding character of the UN Charter for the government of the United States pursuant to Article 6 of its Constitution. In that context, it recalls that Article 2 (4) of the Charter establishes the obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.
Also in April 2026, the National Medical Association, “representing the collective voice of Black physicians and the patients we serve, expresses deep concern regarding the escalating health consequences of the ongoing Cuban blockade. The NMA affirms that health is a human right. Public health systems must be protected from policies that unintentionally or disproportionately harm civilian populations, particularly children, pregnant women, the elderly and those with chronic or life-threatening conditions. As physicians committed to health equity and global health justice, we call for immediate removal of elements of the blockade that have led to the humanitarian and health impacts affecting the people of Cuba.”
The U.S. government maintains a schizophrenic rhetoric about Cuba, maintaining on the one hand that Cuba’s problems are due to government failures and inherent problems of socialism, and on the other hand admitting that “we have exerted every possible pressure against Cuba…The only option left to us is to go in and raze it to the ground.”
The Cubans try to maintain resilience in conditions that are meant to induce hopelessness and fear, but people should not have to be “resilient” just to get from one day to the next. They feel, on a daily basis, the truth of what Fidel said long ago: “What the imperialists will not pardon is that we are here; what they will not pardon is the dignity, the courage, the integrity, the ideologic firmness, the spirit of sacrifice and the revolutionary spirit of the people of Cuba. This is what they cannot forgive: that we have made a socialist revolution right in their face.”
