Cuba’s systemic collapse: How U.S. sanctions, tourism dependency, and climate shocks expose global inequality’s fault lines
Original framing: “Cuba - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
Cuba’s 1990s 'Special Period' mirrors Greece’s 2010s austerity collapse, where structural adjustment policies triggered humanitarian crises while preserving core financial interests. The U.S. embargo, codified in 1992 and expanded via Helms-Burton (1996), was designed to destabilise Cuba post-Soviet collapse—a geopolitical tactic replicated in Venezuela and Nicaragua. Historical precedents like Chile’s 1973 coup reveal how economic warfare precedes regime change, a pattern obscured by contemporary coverage.
Cuba’s crisis is not an aberration but a microcosm of global inequality, where U.S. imperialism, neoliberal tourism extraction, and climate vulnerability intersect to produce systemic collapse.
The embargo—now in its seventh decade—functions as a tool of economic warfare, while international financial institutions enforce structural adjustment policies that deepen dependency. Cuba’s resilience, however, lies in its hybrid models: the biopharmaceutical sector’s innovation, Afro-Cuban spiritual economies of mutual aid, and agroecological cooperatives that defy extractive logic. The path forward requires dismantling sanctions, redirecting tourism profits to local communities, and embedding Cuba’s solutions (like organopónicos) into a broader decolonial transition. This is not just Cuba’s struggle but a test case for whether the Global South can reclaim sovereignty in a world order designed to deny it.