Break the blockade - Hands off Cuba

On January 29, Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14380, declaring Cuba an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security and foreign policy, and announcing a new national emergency framework aimed at cutting oil supplies to the island. The executive order claims Cuba hosts Russia’s largest overseas signals intelligence facility, deepens cooperation with China, and provides a permissive environment for ‘terrorist’ groups.

 

The US aims to bring Cuba to its knees by starving it of fuel. After the seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro & Cilia Flores on January 3 and the subordination of Venezuela to US demands, the United States moved to cut oil flows into Cuba, first via Venezuela and then by coercing Mexico, using the embargo as a deadly instrument of regime change.

 

Trump’s sanctions regime targets entire populations, treating mass suffering as leverage. Today in Cuba, public transportation and aviation have stopped; hospitals have cancelled operations; schools cannot function, and even basic food distribution is not possible from one end of the Island to the other. On March 16, the entire Cuban electricity grid went down due to lack of fuel. Shamelessly, Trump and Marco Rubio point to the resulting collapse as proof that the Cuban government has “failed,” and float a “friendly takeover” as if capitulation were a gift to Cuban people.

 

The US has been using negotiations as blackmail. Trump’s method is to create intolerable conditions and then demand total surrender, whether in Gaza ceasefire talks, pressure on Mexico, the coercion of Venezuela, the assault on Iran, or the current siege of Cuba. Cuban President Miguel Díaz Canel has said his government is willing to talk only “from a position of equals, with respect for our sovereignty, our independence, and our self-determination.” That demand for equality is precisely what Trump and Rubio refuse to do.

 

When we read the policy of sanctions and embargo alongside Trump’s National Security Strategy of November 2025, where a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” is advanced, the Western Hemisphere appears as a geopolitical priority where “outside influence” must be rolled back and “strategic locations” secured. Cuba is being targeted because its assertion of independence defies this hemispheric order.

 

Today, Cuba is also being woven into a broader escalation of violence that includes open war. On February 28, the United States and Israel launched an unjustifiable war against Iran. It is no accident that US hawks are signalling Cuba as a next move. In early January, after the US operation in Venezuela, Marco Rubio warned on NBC that Cuba is “in a lot of trouble,” adding, “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned.” Lindsey Graham followed with the same message in cruder terms: “You just wait for Cuba.” Then, on March 16, Trump spoke to reporters saying, “I believe I will have the honour of taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it – I think I could do anything I want.”

 

By now, the world has learned what US “talks” mean: either capitulation or strangulation.

 

Trump desperately wishes this lethal siege to be the final move within the longer war of the US on Cuban sovereignty. The US has been trying to break Cuba for 67 years. A declassified 1960 State Department memo by Lester Mallory recommended denying “money and supplies” to Cuba to reduce wages and provoke “hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of government.” The full embargo was formalised under Kennedy in 1962. Over decades, Washington tightened the screws through measures designed to punish not only Cuba but any third party that dares to trade with it, including the extraterritorial machinery of Helms Burton in 1996. As can be seen, humanitarian disaster is an intended outcome. Trump 2.0 has finessed this strategy to its extreme, turning sanctions and embargo into a deadly collective punishment instrument.

 

That is why “Hands off Cuba” is a working-class demand. When fuel is cut off, hospitals cannot conduct vital surgeries, public transportation collapses, food distribution breaks down, and the basic social reproduction of life becomes impossible. These conditions weaken popular struggles. Lethal sanctions shrink the space for popular organisation and independent working-class politics. Cuba’s 2021 protest wave emerged amid shortages and crisis, and it included working class organizations that criticized the government from the left. We support the Cuban working class in their fight which is why it is crucial to oppose the US embargo which suffocates the working-class capacity to develop an independent voice and to win material gains.

 

Cuba’s future belongs to people in Cuba. It does not belong to Trump, Marco Rubio, or an imperialist doctrine that treats the Caribbean as a privatized US lake. Today, it is vital to build an anti-war movement that challenges Trump’s economic and military warfare and demands the immediate end to the embargo and sanctions. A victory for Trump would only benefit the capitalist class and the far-right in the US and in the Western Hemisphere, including Latin America. A victory for Trump would strengthen the US imperialist control over the Caribbean as a strategic region for global capitalism. Hands off Cuba, hands off Venezuela, hands off the Western Hemisphere, and hands off Iran.

 

A number of groups from around the world including the Progressive International have organized Nuestra América Convoy to Cuba to break the blockade. Find out more here.