When a government turns a tool into an automatic response to any problem, it stops using an instrument and starts practicing a reflex. That is exactly what happens with the United States’ sanctions policy, and the Cuban case demonstrates this once again in stark terms.
A recent Politico article reveals that the Trump administration is considering a total naval blockade to prevent oil imports to Cuba. The leak has set off alarm bells because it is the most extreme expression of a long-tested logic that uses economic coercion as a weapon for “regime change,” even though evidence shows that those who pay the price are not the governments, but the people.
The American political scientist Daniel W. Drezner defined it precisely in Foreign Affairs: the United States has turned sanctions into a “Swiss Army knife” of its foreign policy, an instrument that is applied to everything—nuclear proliferation, human rights, migration, geopolitical disputes—even though it is not designed to solve any of these problems structurally (https://shre.ink/5I2K). The result is the use and abuse of economic coercion as a substitute for diplomacy, multilateralism, or simply political realism.
Drezner warns that sanctions are attractive not because they work well, but because they are easy to impose, create the appearance of immediate action, and shift the costs outside of the United States. But this convenience comes at a strategic price. They rarely achieve their political objectives and instead generate massive collateral damage, which further erodes the international legitimacy of those who impose them.
In the Cuban case, the equation is especially clear. An oil blockade does not “pressure” an abstract elite, but rather paralyzes ambulances, reduces surgeries, disrupts cold chains and the production of medicines, cripples water purification infrastructure, exacerbates food insecurity, and multiplies blackouts. This is not an ideological hypothesis, but a documented fact. In recent days, for example, cities like Colón, in the province of Matanzas (western Cuba), have reported power outages of up to 40 hours.
A systematic review of medical and public health studies spanning 30 years, published by the University of Toronto in 2023 under the eloquent title “The Violence of Non-Violence,” concluded that, under external coercive measures, 100 percent of cases experienced negative health effects; nearly 90 percent documented the deterioration of healthcare systems (https://shre.ink/5IIT). Sanctions, even those Washington calls “smart,” disrupt supply chains, block payments, increase the price of medicines, and reduce hospital capacity, with disproportionate impacts on children, the elderly, and the chronically ill. That is precisely what is happening in Cuba today.
Political scientists Bryan Early and Dursun Peksen demonstrate something similar in a study published in Global Studies Quarterly (2022). They analyzed more than four decades of US-imposed sanctions and concluded that these systematically increase social “misery,” measured in terms of food, life expectancy, and education (https://shre.ink/5Iry). Paradoxically, sanctions justified in the name of human rights are, according to the analysis, the ones that generate the greatest setbacks and rarely achieve the invoked “regime change.”
Cuba is a paradigmatic example. Six decades of blockade have not produced the political outcome that Washington claims to seek, but they have contributed to a situation of structural vulnerability that is now being exploited to the limit, even at the risk of provoking a regional humanitarian crisis, as acknowledged by the very sources cited by Politico.
To speak of a naval oil blockade is not to describe a “technical” measure, but a conscious political decision that chooses to cut off energy and logistics, knowing that the immediate effect will be on daily life and that the suffering of the people will be reduced to acceptable and useful “collateral damage” for forcing geopolitical objectives. And when a monkey with a knife is in charge at the White House, there is no spectacle more profitable than the pain of injustice.
Original article by Rosa Miriam Elizalde, La Jornada, January 28, 2026.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.