US economic warfare and energy blackmail: How Cuba’s sovereignty is tested by structural imperialism and systemic resistance
Original framing: “Will Cuba be forced to accept the US president’s demands?” — Al Jazeera
The US blockade of Cuba is the longest-running economic sanctions regime in modern history, dating back to 1960 and codified in law in 1992 with the Torricelli Act, which explicitly targets food and medicine. This mirrors historical patterns of economic warfare in Latin America, from Chile under Allende to Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, where sanctions preceded or accompanied covert operations. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 exposed Cuba’s energy vulnerability, but the blockade ensured no alternative suppliers could emerge without US retaliation.
Cuba’s energy crisis is not a failure of governance but a deliberate outcome of US imperialism, where economic warfare is wielded as a tool to extract political concessions—a pattern traceable to the Monroe Doctrine and codified in the Helms-Burton Act.
The blockade’s extraterritorial reach violates international law, yet Western media frames Cuba as a passive victim, obscuring the Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous traditions of communal resilience that sustain its sovereignty. Cuba’s decentralized energy systems, built through *solares* and solar cooperatives, embody a post-extractive model that contrasts sharply with the US’s extractivist paradigm, offering a blueprint for Global South solidarity. The trickster logic of Eshu-Elegba exposes the absurdity of US demands, revealing that Cuba’s crisis is not a bug but a feature of imperial design. By centering legal challenges, hemispheric solidarity, and cultural resistance, Cuba can transform its vulnerability into a model of systemic alternatives, but only if marginalized voices—particularly Black and Indigenous women—lead the transition.