Cuba’s achievements in the face of a criminal blockade are astounding, but the island’s future if the United States succeeds in crushing it looks bleak.
Originally published in Morning Star.
A few weeks ago, Donald Trump told reporters that he expects the Cuban government to be gone by the end of the year. He called Cuba “a failed country” and added: “Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years, doing something. And it looks like I’ll be the one that does it.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has declared that “Cuba has consistently posed a threat to the national security of the United States” — a standard preamble before regime-change operations.
The Department of Justice has unsealed a federal indictment against 95-year-old Raul Castro for events that took place 30 years ago, and in which Cuba acted in a completely legal and just manner.
Meanwhile, the USS Nimitz carrier strike group has entered Caribbean waters. And in the Caribbean and Pacific, the US Navy has over the last few months killed almost 200 people and destroyed 57 vessels in what are, by any reasonable definition, extrajudicial executions.
It is clear that the US is escalating its economic, diplomatic and military pressure on Cuba to unprecedented levels, with a view to getting rid of the Cuban Revolution once and for all.
What alternative future does Washington propose for Cuba?
It helps here to recover a concept developed by the late Marxist historian Michael Parenti.
In his 1997 book Blackshirts and Reds, Parenti pointed out that for the entire history of actually-existing socialism — in the Soviet Union, in China, in Vietnam, in Cuba, in Korea and elsewhere — there has never been a single example of a socialist project that’s been allowed to develop in peace, to pursue its own development model.
Every socialist state has existed in a context of imperialist encirclement; socialist states have faced invasion, sabotage, blockade, embargo, assassination attempts, sanctions, coup attempts, proxy wars.
Parenti argued that you cannot judge any of these societies without taking that into account.
To compare really-existing socialism with an imaginary, abstract socialism that would have been allowed to develop in peace is intellectually dishonest. The socialism that actually exists is, in his phrase, siege socialism. It is shaped and distorted by the conditions under which it has been built.
Cuba today is the canonical example of siege socialism. It’s very literally under siege. The US blockade — 64 years old and counting — is now the most comprehensive economic siege in modern history.
Over the last couple of years, fuel imports have been cut by 90 per cent. Parts of the country are now experiencing blackouts of up to 20 hours a day. Hospitals are operating on emergency generators.
Medicines, basic foodstuffs, replacement parts, fertilisers — all are being squeezed by a sanctions regime purposely designed to bring about hunger and poverty, and to generate discontent against the government.
And yet, under that siege, socialism continues to deliver for the Cuban people. Cuba has a life expectancy of 78 years and an infant mortality rate of around five per thousand — both better than the US. A literacy rate above 99 per cent, and an education system that produces doctors in such abundance that Cuba exports more medical personnel worldwide than the WHO, UNICEF and Medecins Sans Frontieres combined.
When hurricanes hit the Caribbean, Cuba invariably experiences the lowest death toll in the region: last year Hurricane Oscar killed seven people in Cuba and 235 in Haiti, despite hitting Cuba first and harder. This is what a basic orientation towards the needs of the people, rather than profit, can do.
The standard Washington framing for a post-socialist Cuba is something along the lines of a thriving market democracy, a haven for tourists and a consumer utopia where people cheerily drive their Teslas to the nearest polling station to vote for one of several neoliberal pro-US parties. But there is absolutely no historical evidence that supports the viability of that vision.
It would be more instructive to compare Cuba with Haiti, which has been subjected to non-stop US intervention and interference for over a century and is today, by pretty much every metric, a humanitarian catastrophe.
Or to compare Cuba with the Dominican Republic, with Guatemala, with El Salvador — countries that suffered the kind of regime change Trump is now threatening Cuba with, and that have spent the decades since exporting their populations northwards because life at home became unliveable.
We can also compare Cuba today with pre-revolutionary Cuba — the Cuba of Fulgencio Batista, where Havana was a mafia gambling capital and a brothel for North American tourists, where illiteracy and child malnutrition were endemic, where much of the country was racially segregated, where the US Marines came and went as they pleased and the presidents were chosen in Washington.
That is the Cuba the US is trying to bring back. A playground for the rich, a colony in all but name. That is what Trump’s talking about when he says he wants the Castro regime gone.
So Cuban socialism is very much worth saving. Can it be saved? It can. The Cuban people are extraordinarily resilient and committed to defending their sovereignty and their revolution. Furthermore, Cuba is not alone.
China is now Cuba’s largest energy and infrastructure partner, and a major source of food and medicine. This week, Chinese and Cuban officials met in Beijing for talks on agricultural co-operation, framed around a “Cuba-China community of shared future.”
The same day, the first 15,000 tonnes of a 60,000-tonne Chinese rice donation arrived in Havana — what Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez called “a new display of solidarity and brotherhood.”
On top of that, China is financing 92 solar parks across the island by 2028, projected to cover roughly half of Cuba’s daytime electricity demand.
Once Cuba generates its own power from the sun, the central weapon of the energy blockade begins to crumble.
China’s diplomatic backing is also worthy of note. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning declared this week that “China firmly supports Cuba in safeguarding its sovereignty, security and development interests” — the second such statement in a week.
Meanwhile Russia, Vietnam, Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Mexico and Brazil are all providing practical solidarity to Cuba, along with campaign groups such as Britain’s Cuba Solidarity Campaign. If Cuba can hold the line through this period, the multipolar world taking shape on the other side will be a far more hospitable environment for projects like the Cuban Revolution.
That is why Cuba must survive the present. The alternative has nothing to do with freedom or democracy.
It is the Miami exile establishment, the return of the old oligarchy, the carve-up of every public asset by foreign capital. We have seen what that looks like in Yeltsin’s Russia, or in Libya after Nato’s regime change war.
Rosa Luxemburg coined the phrase “socialism or barbarism” in 1916, in the middle of the first world war, as a general statement about humanity’s choices. In the Caribbean in 2026, it is a concrete question on the table.
Cuba has stood for 67 years as a beacon of hope for the oppressed and exploited around the world. It has been a source of inspiration for generations of activists, a symbol of resistance against imperialism, a model of what a different kind of society can look like.
The whole world must stand with Cuba now, in its hour of need. We must demand an end to the blockade, an end to sanctions, an end to threats. We must support Cuba’s right to self-determination, to sovereignty, and to development on its own terms.
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