Over the last month, the U.S. government has intensified its decades-long aggression against Cuba. Oil shipments to the island from Venezuela have been cut off since Washington’s January 3, 2026, attack on that country. On January 22, the Trump administration threatened a full naval blockade of the island nation. And on January 29, Trump signed an executive order labeling Cuba an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States and declaring that Washington will impose punitive tariffs on any country trading oil with Cuba.

Isaac Saney is a Cuba specialist who coordinates the Black and African Diaspora Studies program at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. With roots in the African Nova Scotia community and the Caribbean, his teaching, research, and scholarship encompass Cuba, Africa, the Caribbean, Black Canadian history, the global Black liberation struggle, and reparations. A major area of his research is Cuba’s relationship with Africa.

In response to the latest escalation of Washington’s economic war on Cuba, Saney issued a statement that first appeared on January 30 on his Facebook page. It was subsequently published by the Cuban news service Radio Rebelde (Rebel Radio).

We publish Saney’s statement below for the information of our readers. The headline and text are from the original. Subheadings, the photo, and endnotes are by World-Outlook.

— World-Outlook editors

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Another Malicious Brazen Act of Economic Warfare: Trump’s Escalated Assault on Cuba and the World

By Isaac Saney

Donald Trump’s declaration that Cuba constitutes an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the national security and foreign policy of the United States is not merely false; it is a deliberate fabrication rooted in imperial ideology, Cold War mythology, and domestic political opportunism. The White House’s “Addressing the Threats to the United States by the Government of Cuba” is a cynical attempt to cloak decades-long U.S. hostility and aggression against Cuban sovereignty in the language of emergency, security, and morality — none of which withstand even minimal scrutiny.

The decision to impose punitive tariffs on countries that trade oil with Cuba constitutes a reckless, vindictive, and illegal escalation of Washington’s decades-long economic war against the Cuban people. This measure is not about “security,” nor is it about democracy or human rights. It is an act of economic warfare — extraterritorial in reach, collective in punishment, and imperial in intent.

By targeting third countries for engaging in legitimate, sovereign trade with Cuba, the Trump administration is once again asserting its claim to be judge, jury, and enforcer over the global economy. These tariffs trample international law, violate the principles of national sovereignty, and seek to coerce the international community into complicity with a policy that the overwhelming majority of the world has repeatedly and unequivocally rejected at the United Nations.^[1]

Cuba: A force for peace and dialogue

Trump’s specious claims about Cuba’s so-called “malign influence” collapse under even the most cursory scrutiny. Far from being a destabilizing force, Cuba has consistently acted as a force for peace and dialogue in international affairs. Moreover, the repeated claim that Cuba “hosts terrorists” has been thoroughly discredited. The U.S. government has never produced credible evidence that Cuba provides material support to terrorist organizations.

On the contrary, Cuba has been internationally recognized for its role as a mediator in peace negotiations, including hosting Colombian peace talks — an act praised by the international community that brought an end to more than half a century of civil. These negotiations — conducted in Havana at the request of the parties involved and with international backing — saved countless lives and earned global recognition, including praise from the United Nations and the international community. That Washington now vilifies Cuba for precisely this contribution to peace exposes the profound cynicism and bad faith underlying U.S. policy.^[2]

Trump’s assertion that Cuba “aligns itself with” Russia, China, Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah is a textbook example of imperial guilt-by-association. It deliberately conflates lawful diplomatic relations and limited cooperation with allegations of terrorism and malign intent — without presenting evidence.

Cuba, as a sovereign state, has the legal right under international law to conduct relations with any country it chooses.

The United States itself maintains diplomatic, economic, and intelligence relations with regimes that engage in systematic human rights violations, wars of aggression, apartheid practices, and mass civilian killings. The manufactured moral outrage directed at Cuba exposes the profound hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy.

The claim that Cuba hosts “Russia’s largest overseas signals intelligence facility” threatening U.S. national security is a recycled Cold War talking point long abandoned by serious analysts. Even U.S. intelligence assessments have acknowledged that Cuba lacks the strategic or technological capacity to compromise U.S. national security in this way. If intelligence cooperation between Cuba and other states constitutes a “national emergency,” then by that logic the United States — whose intelligence agencies operate across the globe — would be in a permanent state of international illegality.

This allegation functions not as a factual claim, but as a pretext — designed to rationalize escalation, sanctions, and economic warfare under the guise of defense.

U.S. ‘concern for human rights’ devoid of credibility

Trump’s sudden concern for human rights in Cuba is devoid of credibility. His administration openly embraces dictatorships, supports apartheid-like systems, arms regimes engaged in mass atrocities, and systematically attacks civil liberties and human rights within the United States itself.

Cuba is a country under constant siege, denied access to global markets, finance, medicine, fuel, and technology. The United States has no moral standing to posture as a “defender of human rights” while simultaneously enforcing policies designed to immiserate the Cuban population.

The “accusation” that Cuba “destabilizes the region through migration” is a stunning inversion of cause and effect. Cuban migration is not the product of Cuban aggression; it is the direct consequence of U.S. policy — namely, the economic strangulation imposed through the blockade, extraterritorial sanctions, and financial prohibitions designed explicitly to “bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow.”

To weaponize the humanitarian consequences of U.S. coercive policies as evidence of Cuban malignancy is morally indefensible. It is akin to setting a house on fire and then blaming the occupants for fleeing the flames.

The declaration of a U.S. “national emergency” with respect to Cuba is a legal fiction designed to circumvent constitutional constraints and international law: a crude instrument of economic warfare.

The claim that Cuba — a small, economically besieged Caribbean nation subjected to over six decades of U.S. economic warfare — poses a threat to the world’s largest military and economic power is patently absurd.

The United States spends more on its military each year than the next several countries combined, maintains over 750 military bases worldwide, and exercises overwhelming dominance across every domain of warfare. Cuba, by contrast, has no capacity — military, economic, or technological — to threaten the territorial integrity, political stability, or security of the United States.

‘Extraordinary threat’ is Cuba’s refusal to submit to U.S. domination

This “threat” narrative is not evidence-based; it is ideological. It recycles the same logic that justified the Bay of Pigs invasion, Operation Mongoose, biological warfare, hundreds of assassination attempts against Cuban leaders, and a comprehensive blockade universally condemned by the United Nations. What Trump labels an “extraordinary threat” is, in reality, Cuba’s enduring refusal to submit to U.S. domination.^[3]

Trump’s declaration tells us far more about the United States than about Cuba. It exposes an empire unwilling to tolerate defiance and determined to punish any nation that insists on charting its own path.

Cuba does not threaten the United States. What it threatens is the long-standing assumption that U.S. power is absolute, unquestionable, and eternal. And it is precisely this refusal to kneel — not any genuine security concern — that Trump seeks to criminalize under the fraudulent banner of a “national emergency.”

But what, fundamentally, is it that Washington seeks to destroy? What is the society that the U.S. government is so zealously committed to undermining?

Cuba is a society in which universal education and healthcare are not privileges reserved for the wealthy but fundamental human rights. It is a society that affirms housing, food security, and access to culture as social responsibilities rather than market commodities. Within its limited resources — and despite the relentless external pressures imposed by the United States — the Cuban state has consistently sought to translate these aspirations into lived realities for its people.

In Cuba, there are no homeless children abandoned to the streets, forced to survive in a brutal, dog-eat-dog social order so characteristic of profit-driven, capital-centered societies. There is no normalization of mass deprivation alongside obscene wealth.

Cuba’s ‘offense’ is its socialist project outside U.S. control

At its core, Trump’s declaration is not about “security,” “terrorism,” or “democracy.” Cuba’s real offense is not violence or destabilization, but its persistence as a socialist project outside U.S. control. This is precisely what makes Cuba intolerable to Washington: resistance and the enduring example of an alternative social project.

The objective of U.S. policy is unmistakable. It is to overturn the Cuban people’s revolutionary process and to discredit socialism — not only in Cuba, but as a viable alternative on the world stage. The tariffs on oil trade are simply the latest weapon in a broader campaign of economic strangulation and destabilization designed to induce hardship, scarcity, and despair.

This campaign constitutes collective punishment in its purest form. It targets every facet of Cuban life: healthcare systems deprived of fuel and supplies, schools and universities strained by shortages, food production undermined, transportation paralyzed, and infrastructure pushed to the brink. To claim concern for the Cuban people while deliberately engineering such suffering is not hypocrisy — it is cruelty.

All countries must unequivocally reject the U.S. economic war against Cuba. Silence or rhetorical disapproval is no longer sufficient. Each and every country must take immediate, concrete action to counteract the effects of this illegal blockade, defend the right of countries to engage in sovereign trade, and uphold international law against U.S. imperialist diktat.

At stake is not only Cuba’s right to self-determination, but the right of all nations to chart their own paths free from coercion and punishment. To acquiesce is to normalize economic warfare. To resist is to affirm the principles of sovereignty, solidarity, and justice that must underpin any genuine international order.

NOTES

[1] Every year since 1992, except for 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the United Nations General Assembly has passed overwhelmingly a non-binding resolution that condemns the ongoing impact of the U.S. embargo and declares it in violation of the Charter of the United Nations and of international law.

[2] The Colombian peace talks took place between the government of Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC–EP) aimed at ending a decades-long conflict. Formal negotiations began in September 2012 and were primarily held in Havana, Cuba. The talks culminated in the Final Peace Agreement between the Government of Colombia and the FARC-EP; Cuba and Norway were guarantor nations for the agreement.

[3] Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs) was where counterrevolutionary forces — organized and backed by the U.S. government — landed in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Cuban Revolution in April 1961. Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces, alongside mobilizations of most of the island’s the population, succeeded in crushing the invading forces three days later.

Operation Mongoose was an extensive campaign of terrorist attacks against civilians and other covert operations carried out in Cuba by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. U.S. president John F. Kennedy authorized it on November 30, 1961. It was a secret program aimed at toppling the Cuban government.

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