As the widely acknowledged humanitarian crisis in Cuba intensifies, political figures and conservative pundits alike are blaming the island nation’s leadership, government, and socialist revolution, labeling Cuba a “failed state.” But in many of the columns, speeches, and comments, there is little or no mention of the 65-year economic warfare by Washington or the recent U.S. blockade that has choked off oil supplies from Cuba’s traditional trading partners.

Nor is there any mention of the accomplishments of the 1959 Cuban revolution, which took power away from the Yankees who had overseen a nation that was largely illiterate, in which only 56% of the population had access to electricity, and where rural medical care was practically non-existent. In every one of these areas and more, the Cuban revolutionaries transformed their society by prioritizing human needs over profit.

José R. Cabañas Rodríguez, Cuban ambassador to the United States from September 2015 to December 2020, analyzes the criteria that many use to define a “failed state” and suggests that those governing the Yankee ‘paradise’ take a look in the mirror.

The article below first appeared on the website Radio Havana Cuba. We republish it for the information of our readers. The headline and text below are from the original; the translation from the Spanish-language original, photos, and notes are by World-Outlook.

— World-Outlook editors

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The Recipe for a Failed State Is for Sale

By José R. Cabañas Rodríguez

Since the illegal U.S. actions against Venezuela on January 3 — and especially after the White House designated Cuba as an “unusual and extraordinary threat” on January 29 to justify actions against third parties that seek to maintain normal relations with the island — a new specialty in Cuban futurology has emerged.

The corporate press, which always accompanies the U.S. government in its foreign policy adventures, has presented various predictions about the pulse of the Cuban economy, claiming there is little time left before the final shutdown. Agencies such as EFE and Reuters, which appear to have headquarters in foreign capitals but in many cases act as a chorus for the tunes sung in Washington, have amplified the impact of punitive actions and try every day to cast more shadows over the lives of Cubans.

The number of so-called experts on Cuban issues has multiplied, particularly those who speculate on the course of bilateral relations between Cuba and the United States, without knowing the background to these relations and denying the existence of areas of common interest that have been ratified time and again. An even more implausible group is made up of others who once had an acceptable life within serious academia, but who now disguise Monroe Doctrine-style actions toward Latin America and the Caribbean as unique opportunities for change in the region.^[1]

A separate issue is related to the amount of speculation that has circulated about alleged secret negotiations taking place between Havana and Washington, frequently changing the names of the interlocutors, the venue for the exchanges, and the agenda, and creating much confusion among those who have sworn eternally that they have nothing to negotiate with what they call Castroism.

Another entertaining detail these days has been the profusion of predictions about how many drops of fuel still remain in the tanks of CUPET (Cuba Petróleos) and the coefficient used to calculate the days remaining until the “total blackout.” They began by predicting “oil for fifteen days,” but as time has extended beyond that date, they are now developing other scenarios, which are presumably more accurate.

Amid all this informational turbulence, which includes — we should also highlight — a great deal of solidarity and respect for the work of the Cuban Revolution, the intentional use of the term “failed state” in relation to the Caribbean caiman [a reference to the shape of the island of Cuba] has been revived. Therefore, it is useful to think about the meaning of this term and what lies behind these two words.

The various definitions that can be found agree that this refers to the supposed or real inability of a state, including all government institutions, to guarantee the security, development, and functionality of a country. In such a situation, widespread corruption and crime would arise — organized into cartels, power groups, and other social structures that would wield power outside the law, controlling specific regions of a territory.

Several sources agree that the use of this terminology emerged in relation to the internal situation in Somalia in 1990, which was used as a pretext for U.S. military intervention in 1992.

Paradoxically, the United States and NATO have used other arguments to destroy and occupy nations such as Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, which have become permanent failed states, never again able to organize themselves into a single, centralized political system based on legislation adopted by elected representatives.

The creators of this concept did not do so with a view toward ensuring the support of the United Nations system as a whole for a nation affected by climate change, pandemics, or other types of adversity that exceeded its intrinsic capacities. On the contrary, their aim was to justify a foreign military presence and, in the best of cases, a so-called humanitarian intervention (but intervention nonetheless) that would allow the presence, occupation, and domination of a territory by the forces and means of one or more foreign powers.

This background must be taken into account when interpreting Donald Trump’s aerial babbling about Cuba being a “failed state” on every flight to Mar-a-Lago, or when reading the recent speech by an ultra-conservative intellectual published in a newspaper such as the Washington Post, bought and recycled by a billionaire, basing his conclusions on observations made by “witnesses” who have never visited the island.

But it would be worth testing such a construct for a moment, beyond the tiresome repetition of what is obvious and no one denies —  fuel and food shortages, high inflation, accumulation of waste in the streets, shrinking tourism, aging population, and other realities of Cuba today.

It is difficult to consider a failed state one that, despite the asymmetries that separate it from the world’s leading economy, has endured 67 years of all kinds of attacks, unilateral actions, blockades, embargos, hatred, and pressure. Not even Washington’s closest friends within NATO could afford such a luxury.

Without going too far back in the past, attempts are being made to label a small country that, almost solely on the basis of its own resources, was five times more efficient than the great hegemon in preventing fatalities resulting from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and in providing aid to 47 other countries.

They are trying to label as a failure the country that, in the face of the devastating Hurricane Melissa in 2025, evacuated 700,000 nationals and did not record a single fatality, the country that, in the midst of the circumstances described above, has been able to achieve dramatic (albeit still insufficient) changes in its energy matrix.^[2]

Despite the hefty budget available to anti-Cuban content creators, they have been unable to present, even with the use of artificial intelligence, images of armed violence in Cuban streets, prisons taken over by hitmen, coffins abandoned in the streets, corpses hanging from bridges, exterminated indigenous communities, or public parks ruled by drug users.

Cubans do not build barricades to ambush each other; on the contrary, they are building more solidarity than ever, block by block, even among most of those who live abroad and do not want to see their identity, history, culture, or family endangered.

Amid the “dead end” scenario that is being digitally constructed from abroad, the “failed” Cubans are busy organizing a Salsa Festival that will bring together hundreds of creators from various countries in the coming weeks, transforming an in-person international book fair into a virtual one in a matter of minutes, and reorganizing distance learning and health services.

The authors of the “failed state” theory could be encouraged to explore some of the realities of the country that finances their outbursts. Official U.S. sources report that more than half a million of their citizens sleep outdoors at least one night a year, that its prisons hold more than a quarter of the world’s prison population, that 27 million people have no health coverage — not even for a toothache, that 21% are illiterate, and that 54% read below a sixth-grade level. Which of them could answer why the death rate from preventable causes in the United States is 280 per 100,000 people when in “old Europe” it is 241 per 200,000?

If this question is difficult to answer, there are others: Why do U.S. citizens own more guns in total than all other countries combined? Why is the United States the only country in the world with more privately owned guns than its total population? There are some questions that may be easier to answer: Why is almost 50% of the water that flows through U.S. aqueducts contaminated? Why have 38% of U.S. citizens depended on the support of charitable institutions at some point in their lives?

All these figures, which are very significant, would be even more so if we narrowed our focus to specific states or communities within the so-called Union, which face situations of social imbalance comparable to the most backward areas of the world.

Cuba, dear professional and amateur observers, is not a failed state; it is a besieged state. Perhaps it would be useful to imagine what it would be like today without such harassment and also how other nations facing the same vicissitudes would have survived (or not).

We are once again faced with the predictions already made in the early 1960s and early 1990s regarding “the time Cuba has left.” The gamblers are once again presenting themselves as successful people who, this time, will be proven right. They would do well to be more modest, step down from their pedestals, and try to better understand the capacity for resistance and survival that is Made in Cuba.

José R. Cabañas Rodríguez is director of the International Policy Research Center (CIPI) in Havana and a former Cuban ambassador to the United States.

NOTES

[1] First articulated by then-president James Monroe in 1823, when nearly all Spanish colonies in the Americas had either achieved or were close to independence, the Monroe doctrine asserted that any further efforts by European powers to control or influence sovereign states in the region would be viewed as a threat to U.S. security. It represented the seeds of a policy that could be summarized as Latin America and the Caribbean being the “backyard” of the United States — an unabashed attempt at U.S. economic domination in the hemisphere and the mustering of military power to back that up.

[2] In just 12 months, Cuba has increased increasing solar power from 5.8% to over 20% of its total power generation. With equipment and financing from China, the expansion represents one of the fastest renewable energy transitions ever achieved by a developing country.

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