Photo caption. Alfredo Sarabia Fajardo. From the series “Ensayo sobre la parábola del sembrado” (2009–2010). Courtesy of La Tizza.
“Faced with the terrible internal crisis and the highly unfavorable global balance of power in which Cuba finds itself today, the objection from liberals—and sometimes even from certain non-revolutionary leftists—is more than predictable: Why must Cuba appeal to others for its own survival? Shouldn’t Cuba be able to fend for itself? That question deserves to be subjected to rigorous dismantling, because it operates as a rhetorical trap that normalizes the violence of the blockade and blames the victim.”
— Josué Veloz Serrade
“The solidarity of all progressive forces of the world towards the people of Vietnam today is similar to the bitter irony of the plebeians coaxing on the gladiators in the Roman arena. It is not a matter of wishing success to the victim of aggression, but of sharing their fate; one must accompany them to their death or to victory.
“When we analyze the lonely situation of the Vietnamese people, we are overcome by anguish at this illogical moment of humanity.
“U.S. imperialism is guilty of aggression—its crimes are enormous and cover the whole world. We already know all that, gentlemen! But this guilt also applies to those who, when the time came for a definition, hesitated to make Vietnam an inviolable part of the socialist world; running, of course, the risks of a war on a global scale—but also forcing a decision upon imperialism. And the guilt also applies to those who maintain a war of abuse and snares—started quite some time ago by the representatives of the two greatest powers of the socialist camp.
“We must ask ourselves, seeking an honest answer: is Vietnam isolated, or is it not? Is it not maintaining a dangerous equilibrium between the two quarrelling powers?”
Ernesto Che Guevara, “Message to the Tricontinental,” 1966.
The perfect siege: when suffocation and politics are one and the same
The current energy crisis Cuba is facing is neither an act of nature nor a mere failure of infrastructure. It is the culmination of a geopolitical siege conceived with surgical precision over the course of nearly seven decades. What Cuba is experiencing today is the lethal convergence of a long-standing economic war—the decades-long blockade imposed on it by the U.S.—and a new international context in which the actors who should be balancing the scales have opted for what we might call a policy of minimal engagement.
Cuba faces not only the hostility of the Empire, but also the silent abandonment of those who, in theory, should be the most interested in opposing the unipolar order.
But before analyzing the geopolitical coordinates of the current situation, it is necessary to examine the psychological map underlying it. Because what is happening around Cuba is not merely a question of balance of power; it is also a problem of desire, of political phantoms, of what Freud called Verneinung0—or denial as a covert form of recognition. Those who today are abandoning Cuba indeed deny Cuba, but by denying it they validate it, and above all they validate what they deny to themselves. The blockade exists because Cuba still challenges the world, and because it remains an uncomfortable symptom within the global capitalist system. If Cuba posed no real threat, it would suffice to ignore it. The fact that it must be destroyed demonstrates that its mere existence remains intolerable for the Master’s order.
The question underlying these considerations may ruffle a few feathers, but it is unavoidable because it is necessary: what remains of international solidarity when, instead of concrete actions, the (so-called) beneficiaries of that solidarity receive only symbolic gestures? What does it really mean to support Cuba when the noose tightens with each passing day, and the suffocation draws ever closer to a point of no return? And, above all, what does it say about the political forces that proclaim their desire for a different world that they are capable of standing by and watching this suffocation without lifting a finger (and, in some cases, without even uttering a word)?
The undeclared abandonment of Cuba by its strategic partners
In these days of global tensions, tired topics of international relations are also being dusted off, such as peripheral realism—which describes the tendency of States to prioritize their immediate interests—trade, border stability, accommodation with the hegemon—over ideological or historical alliances when pressure from the Empire increases. However, peripheral realism is not sufficient to fully explain the current behavior of Russia and China toward Cuba. Something deeper is at work here: the renunciation of one’s own desire as a condition for survival within the system that one presumably wishes to transform.
Lacan distinguished between demand and desire. Demand is what is explicitly requested; desire is what lies beneath and often cannot be articulated without cost. In their rhetoric, Russia and China demand an end to unipolarity, the construction of a multipolar world, respect for international law, and, in particular, for the sovereignty of each country. But their real desire, revealed by their actions rather than their words, is the gradual integration into the rules of the very system they claim to contest.
As bitter as it may be to hear, by abandoning Cuba, they are not simply being pragmatic; they are admitting that their real goal is not the transformation of the world order, but the negotiation of a more comfortable place within it.
Caught up in their own attritional conflicts—Ukraine for Moscow, Taiwan and the South China Sea for Beijing—both powers have adopted a defensive posture. Their support for Cuba has been reduced to speeches and statements in multilateral forums and the selective provision of ever-scarce resources, without structurally challenging the blockade. They do not send the necessary oil, they do not establish credit lines that circumvent secondary sanctions, they do not escort commercial ships carrying supplies to the island with their navies. If asked why, the answer—perhaps —would be that of the great conformist: the timing is not right, the financial and political costs are too high, one must be realistic.
But realism, in this context, is another form of premature capitulation. Perhaps deep down, these powers believe they are abandoning those who might fall first, not those who would be the last to fall—that is, themselves. They have reached their historical limit, and instead of pushing against it and breaking through it, they have normalized it. In doing so, they commit a strategic miscalculation that history has punished before. Every time a power allows the hegemonic order to destroy at no cost a weaker link in the chain, that order emerges strengthened and moves one step closer to subjugating those who believed themselves to be safe. By allowing the Empire to suffocate and destroy with impunity a sovereign project, they send a message to their own populations and other secondary actors: solidarity is a luxury we cannot afford; when your turn comes, you will be alone.
Latin America and the Caribbean: diplomacy of empty embraces
The stance of Brazil and Colombia is perhaps the most paradigmatic example of the political and moral bankruptcy of contemporary progressivism. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Gustavo Petro, two leaders who owe their political capital to the narrative of emancipatory social transformation and regional sovereignty—and not a little to the support and platform they have always found in Cuba—have opted for what we might call a kind of low-cost symbolism by making statements of moral support and calls for dialogue while maintaining a purely rhetorical presence in international forums. But while the words circulate, the suffocating structural conditions—the economic blockade, the lists of State sponsors of terrorism that include Cuba with utter disregard for the truth, and the commercial and financial sanctions—remain intact.
Everything unfolds as if a kind of identification with the aggressor were at work, by virtue of a mechanism whereby those subjected to a superior force unconsciously assimilate the values and logic of that power in order to survive. This is not a conscious betrayal but an adaptation that, over time, becomes constitutive of one’s own identity. Something of this is happening with certain progressive Latin American governments: they have incorporated the logic of the imperial playing field—its institutions, its markets, its values, its rules, its default ideology—to such an extent that they have become incapable of imagining political action that breaks with that field, even though they proclaim it necessary in their rhetoric.
Brazil and Colombia forget that if they were truly a strategic rearguard today, they would not be doing Cuba a favor, but rather fulfilling their own strategic necessity. If the United States continues to tip the balance in its favor in the region—as it does through its sanctions policy, its dominance of the International Monetary Fund, its control of the Organization of American States, and its influence over local right-wing forces—who will governments like those of Lula and Petro be able to count on when the reactionary tide hits them? In their prudence, they will have allowed the rearguard to die out—a rearguard they would desperately need in that scenario. In recent days, Lula stated that Brazil, too, could be invaded “any day.” To which we might add: “The more isolated you remain by your own choice, the greater the real likelihood that this will happen.”
The case of Venezuela is the most painful because it represents the mutilation of a project that was once the main pillar of regional solidarity. Today, Venezuela is de facto subject to the decisions of the United States.
The severity of the sanctions regime, and the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores, have achieved their objective: to subjugate the Venezuelan State, force it to negotiate from a position of weakness, and reduce its capacity for international influence. Venezuela can no longer help Cuba because it can barely help itself. If the Empire could defeat Venezuela, which possesses the world’s largest oil reserves, what hope does a much smaller country like Cuba have without that resource? And yet the governments of the region are not drawing the correct conclusion. Instead of uniting to break the siege, they scatter, negotiate separately, and fall one after another.
Some of the small countries that benefited from Cuban solidarity—doctors in their rural areas, teachers in their schools, humanitarian brigades in the midst of their natural disasters—are now turning their noses up and turning their backs. In international relations, this is what is called bandwagoning: the tendency of weaker actors to align themselves with the strongest when they perceive that their historical benefactor is in retreat. It is a cruel but predictable logic.
What they fail to understand is that their long-term survival does not depend on their ability to please the Master, but on the existence of a sovereign regional ecosystem. By turning their backs on Cuba, they are helping to dismantle the only fabric of solidarity that could protect them when they are next in line. It is the logic of “I’ll save myself” that inevitably leads to “We’ll all go down.” Anyone who chooses to save themselves ends up isolated and, eventually, subjugated. In the end, death awaits them all the same, but a lonely death, without the dignity of having fought alongside others.
The myth of self-sufficiency as a rhetorical trap
Faced with the terrible internal crisis and the highly unfavorable global balance of power in which Cuba finds itself today, the liberal objection—and sometimes even that of a certain non-revolutionary Left—is more than predictable: Why must Cuba appeal to others for its own survival? Shouldn’t Cuba be able to fend for itself? That question deserves to be subjected to rigorous dismantling, because it operates as a rhetorical trap that normalizes the violence of the blockade and blames the victim.
One of the myths of the contemporary global system is that of autarky. No country is an island—not even the islands themselves. The United States cannot stand on its own; it depends on a global network of military bases, on the dollar as the primary reserve currency imposed on the world under the Bretton Woods agreements, and on the fearmongering inspired by its aircraft carriers and overwhelming air power, as well as on supply chains that it systematically exploits. China cannot stand on its own; it depends on African and Latin American raw materials and on global markets for its industrial overproduction. Russia cannot stand on its own; its energy power is nothing without the gas pipelines and without buyers willing to pay for its military technology.
Dependence is not the exception in the international system; it is a structural rule. What varies is the type of dependence and the margin of autonomy that can be built within it. A country like Luxembourg enjoys high standards of living because it is embedded at the heart of the imperial bloc. A country like Cuba has to survive amid a fierce and tenacious blockade imposed by imperialism. The appropriate question, then, is not why Cuba is not self-sufficient, but why a level of self-sufficiency is demanded of Cuba that is not demanded of anyone else. That asymmetrical demand is not innocent; it is a cowardly rhetorical trap that places the island in an ontologically impossible position, only to later present its impossibility as evidence of its failure.
A treacherous and insurmountable double bind is imposed on Cuba. On the one hand, it is subjected, as a subject, to requirements it cannot meet; on the other, it is blamed for failing to meet them. The neurotic subject produced by this double bind cannot escape because the trap is inscribed in the very language used to address it. Cuba is trapped in that language: if it resists, it is a dictatorship that makes its people suffer; if it negotiates, it is yielding to imperial blackmail; if it asks for help, it is a failed State incapable of sustaining itself on its own. There is no way out within the Master’s discourse, because the Master’s discourse is not designed to offer a way out, but to trap.
The Empire’s methodology: suffocate, blame, and then negotiate
Nothing we have described occurs in a vacuum. It responds to a methodology of U.S. imperialism in its negotiations with sovereign actors who refuse to capitulate. The historical script has remained unchanged and has been executed time and again with minimal variations.
First, the negotiating table as a trap. The imperialists sit down to negotiate not to reach agreements, but to buy time. While their counterpart places hope in the diplomatic channel—and believes the Other is susceptible to being convinced—the Empire continues to impose sanctions, strengthening the internal opposition, and laying the groundwork to achieve the crucial objectives of its regime-change agenda. The gesture that Lacan would identify as perverse: the promise that structures the bond only to perpetuate dependence.
Secondly, the demand for unilateral concessions. The Empire never negotiates in good faith; it always does so from a position of absolute strength. It demands that the other party yield first, demonstrate a willingness to change, and dismantle its defensive structures as a gesture of goodwill. Every concession made by the weaker party is interpreted as a sign of further weakness and met with increased pressure in the form of threats and blackmail. The mechanism is sinister in its logic: the more one yields, the more one must yield. Negotiation becomes a process of progressively eroding sovereignty
Third, if the imperialists do not get what they want, they invade or destroy. When dialogue does not produce complete surrender, they move to the next phase: direct invasion—Guatemala, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Iran; coup d’état—Chile, Honduras, Bolivia; low-intensity war—Nicaragua; or systematic economic destruction—Cuba, Venezuela, Iran. Diplomacy is merely the prelude to aggression.
Those who, in good faith, are urging Cuba to negotiate with Washington either ignore or pretend to ignore this structure. Cuba is not being pushed to the table to engage in dialogue; it is being pushed to the table to surrender on the most unfavorable terms possible.
The humanitarian crisis as a weapon of war
The humanitarian aid arriving in Cuba today—shipments of food, medicine, and generators—is vital for alleviating immediate suffering. But in political terms, it functions as a palliative that risks depoliticizing the crisis. It is the ventilator placed on a comatose patient: it keeps the patient alive, but does not repair the injury that has left them in a coma. The patient needs life-saving surgery, not the perpetuation of the emergency.
The blockade is not just a set of sanctions; it is a mechanism of attrition designed to provoke an implosion from within. Offering humanitarian aid, however valuable it may be, without breaking the economic, commercial, financial, and now energy blockade is like bailing water from a ship that has sprung a leak following an enemy attack.
The leak is permanent; and the pumping, exhausting. The strategic objective of the blockade is what in military terminology is called fourth-generation warfare or regime change by suffocation—it is to deny the blockaded State any capacity to meet the basic needs of its population, so that the population itself ends up overwhelming its government. There is nothing accidental about this strategy: it is a deliberate policy that has been documented and applied with varying degrees of intensity for more than six decades.
The blackout is not just the absence of light; it is a pedagogy of fear, a lesson the Master imparts day after day. Every hour without electricity, every line to get food after an exhausting, demoralizing wait, every doctor, pharmacy, or hospital that runs out of supplies is a reminder of the cost of resistance. It is the enjoyment of power in its cruelest form—not the enjoyment of destroying the enemy in one fell swoop, but the enjoyment of watching them slowly degrade, of turning their lives into a permanent demonstration that resistance leads to suffering. It is painful to acknowledge, but the greatest cruelty of the blockade is not its force; it is its slowness.
The narrative of the failed State, or when the victim is always to blame
This brings us to the most perverse aspect of the entire operation: the construction of a narrative that reverses causality. The Empire does not merely destroy. It also constructs the discursive framework to make the destruction seem deserved or inevitable.
A State denied the ability to import food, medicine, fuel, and spare parts; whose international finances are blocked; which is prevented from accessing sources of credit; that is subjected to a relentless media war from which the international “critical” or “radical” Left—which reproaches the Cuban “regime” for its democratic deficits—is both a beneficiary and an accomplice; that is punished for trading with whomever it chooses: that State will, by definition, face enormous difficulties in functioning as it would, with varying degrees of efficiency, under normal conditions. Then, when those difficulties manifest—blackouts, shortages, migration—the imperial chorus and its local spokespeople, along with that same disloyal and opportunistic international Left, say: look, it’s a failed State; “undemocratic” socialism doesn’t work. In this way, what is the result of external aggression is presented as an internal failure.
Causality is thus reversed; the blockade is not the cause of the crisis; the crisis is proof that the “regime” is incompetent. It is the same logic of abuse: the subject’s hands are tied, they are beaten for hours, and then they are accused of being unable to defend themselves. That mechanism has a name: projection. The aggressor projects onto the victim the responsibility for what is done to them; in this way, they externalize their own guilt and keep their image of order and civilization intact.
The category of “failed State” is not descriptive; it is performative. Labeling Cuba a failed State does not condense a reality; it constructs a reality that justifies abandonment and, eventually, intervention. It is the concept that makes possible what comes next: “Haitianization,” as Claudio Katz put it recently. Reducing the island to such a state of degradation that it becomes a showcase of horror, a permanent demonstration of what happens to those who dare to choose a sovereign path.
The message is perverse in its transparency: look what happens if you dare to be free.
Except that a failed State does not withstand more than 65 years of the most encompassing and insidious blockade ever imposed by the U.S. on any country. A failed State does not achieve or maintain for decades an infant mortality rate lower than that of the United States. It does not train doctors who save lives around the world. It does not maintain a universal education system, a science of its own—capable of conceiving and producing its own vaccines—nor is it capable of fostering a vibrant culture. And the examples of the Cuban “anomaly” in positive terms could easily be multiplied. What the Empire calls a failed State is, in reality, a State under assault that refuses to surrender and perish. That is the uncomfortable truth. And that is precisely the reason for imperial fury. Cuba does not, in fact, fail. Cuba persists. And that persistence is intolerable.
What options have been left to Cuba?
Having analyzed the coordinates of the siege, one question becomes unavoidable: what options does the Cuban political leadership truly have? Or to be more precise: what options have been left to it?
The first is negotiation under suffocating conditions.
This is what the well-meaning recommend—those who wish for and advise that Cuba engage in dialogue and negotiate with the United States. But negotiating with an empire that has its foot firmly planted on our neck is not dialogue; at best, it can lead to a conditional surrender. Cuba has demonstrated a willingness to engage in dialogue on numerous occasions throughout the history of its Revolution, but always from a position of sovereign dignity. To sit down to negotiate today without first breaking the energy blockade and at least easing the economic, commercial, and financial blockade that has been in place for so long is to accept the terms of the choker, to accept any onerous clause and any humiliating condition in exchange for a breath of fresh air. The result would be a normalization that would amount to the gradual dismantling of the revolutionary project, as occurred in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but with the aggravating factor, in Cuba’s case, of having the Empire just 90 miles away.
The second option is heroic but solitary resistance.
This is what Cuba has practiced for decades: innovating, resisting, seeking openings, diversifying relations. But that option, which was viable when there was a socialist bloc willing to sustain the flow of resources, today faces a concrete material limit. Heroic resistance without a rearguard eventually turns into agonizing resistance. Not because the Cuban people have lost the will to resist, but because will alone does not turn turbines or fill empty shelves.
The third option is the one the Empire envisions as its preferred scenario: implosion.
An explosion triggered by the accumulation of suffering, amplified by opposition networks funded from abroad, that would allow for a humanitarian intervention or an agreed-upon transition. That is not an option for Cuba; it is the trap being set for it.
The fourth option—and the only one that would truly change the situation on the board—does not depend on Cuba.
It depends on those who claim to support Cuba moving from words to deeds. It depends on them sending the necessary oil, escorting their ships loaded with supplies, and seeking out and testing concrete mechanisms to break the blockade that extends from fuel to credit. It depends on asking Cuba what needs to be done and then doing it.
There are no more metaphors or euphemisms left. Either oil or suffocation. Either ships loaded with supplies for Cuba or the blockade. Either action or complicity.
The lessons of history that the world prefers to forget
Forgetting is not passive. Forgetting is an act: the active repression of that which, if remembered, would compel us to act differently. The international community conveniently forgets historical parallels, because remembering them would render the current stance untenable.
For decades, the United States supported Chiang Kai-shek’s regime in Taiwan with financial resources, weapons, and a naval fleet, even when it was already clear that he had been defeated in the Chinese Civil War. They did so because Taiwan served as a strategic aircraft carrier against communist China. The Empire supports its allies to the very end because it understands that loyalty to its own is a condition of its own power. But Cuba’s allies do the opposite: they abandon it when the political cost of supporting Cuba outweighs the benefit of not doing so. Today,no one seems to understand that Cuba is the rearguard of the entire world. Some may see it as a political corpse in the making and behave accordingly.
The Spanish Republic is the most accurate reminder of the situation currently unfolding in Cuba. Instead of supporting the struggle of the Spanish Republican forces against fascism, the Western democracies—led in this case by France and England—chose to become signatories of the Non-Intervention Committee while Germany and Italy sent troops, aircraft, and artillery to Franco’s forces. The United States, for its part, promoted the arms embargo. Non-intervention was the elegant name under which complicity was concealed. The Republic was thus abandoned, suffocated, and finally defeated.
The result? Forty years of Franco’s dictatorship. But the world paid an even higher price: the impunity with which fascism triumphed in Spain emboldened Nazism, reinforced fascist impunity, and contributed to the outbreak of World War II. The abandonment of the Republic was not unintentional; it was a deliberate decision with catastrophic consequences. Today, some progressive governments practice the same policy and adopt the same stance of non-intervention regarding Cuba, while the Empire exercises its permanent intervention through the blockade. The necessary lessons were not learned . Forgetting is productive and allows for repetition.
What the Empire forgets: The people do not surrender
And yet, in the face of this bleak panorama, there is a counterpoint that classical geopolitical analysis tends to underestimate. Cuba has something that no blockade can strangle: it has the peoples of the world more than it has the States. It has solidarity movements across the continents able to gather, organize, and prepare aid shipments in. With the living memory of millions of people who know what Cuba has given to the world and are not willing to allow it to be reduced to rubble in silence.
States calculate, weigh costs, assess risks, and consider sanctions. The people, when organized and aware, act out of conviction.
Interstate solidarity is fragile because it depends on governments, electoral cycles, and shifting alliances—alliances that are now defunct. The solidarity of the people is slower, harder to organize, but once activated it cannot be sanctioned by the IMF or coerced by NATO.
There is no other country in the world that has a network of solidarity movements as widespread, persistent, and deeply rooted across multiple generations as Cuba. That human fabric is a strategic asset that does not appear on any balance sheet of the kind typically compiled by the conventional wisdom of States, governments, international organizations, think tanks, and the media.
The Cuban diaspora as a reverse fifth column
There is one factor that the Pentagon seems to overlook, perhaps because it does not fit into its analytical models: the demographic composition of Cuban immigration to the United States has changed significantly in recent decades. The Cubans who arrived in Miami in the 1960s were the exclusively white, bourgeois elite fleeing the revolution—former landowners, upper-class professionals, and figures from the old Batista regime. They were the fiercest lobby against the Revolution, the driving force behind the blockade, and the social base of the hardline exile movement.
Today, the majority of Cubans settling in the United States are economic migrants, having arrived by raft or via third countries, with family members still on the island, with intact emotional and cultural ties, and with a much more nuanced and complex view of Cuban realities.
If the Empire dared to invade Cuba, the bombs would fall on the hometowns of those economic migrants, on their parents and grandparents, on their siblings. Does anyone really believe that thousands upon thousands of Cuban Americans—their children and grandchildren—who have nothing to do, neither in their upbringing nor in their aspirations, with the so-called “historic exile” in Miami would enthusiastically welcome such a war against Cuba?
The political calculation must be the opposite: what the Empire might face in Miami would not be a united and unanimous rearguard, but a potential fifth column within its own borders—a community ready to raise its voice and perhaps even rebel from within the very heart of the Master..
That is what purely conventional analysis—the kind that works with cold categories, institutions, alliances, interests, and resources—is incapable of seeing. What escapes those categories is the libidinal dimension of politics: love, grief, belonging. No people are a purely geopolitical variable. Every person comes from a place they consider sacred, from symbols with far greater power to rally people than any hardship or prosperity. And when bombs fall on those places and those symbols, rational calculation dissolves into something older and more powerful.
Iran and Vietnam: Lessons from Asymmetric Resistance
Iran’s resistance against imperialism has shown us the way: wherever one person falls, others will appear ready to take up arms and defend the homeland. The notion of the homeland is not a worn-out rhetorical figure: homeland is the name by which every person internalizes the defense of the place where they were born as an inalienable value, which has made resistance against aggression—which could leave them with nothing sacred to cultivate and defend—an idea of themselves and a political affection stronger than fear.
Cuba is a nation in arms not because of forced conscription, but because of the historical consciousness accumulated over sixty-seven years of siege.
Vietnam taught us that a war is not decided solely on the battlefield.
The 1968 Tet Offensive was a tactical defeat for the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army, which suffered heavy losses and failed to hold the positions they had captured . But it was a strategic political victory: it demonstrated that they could strike anywhere in the country, including the centers of South Vietnamese power, and shattered Washington’s narrative that the war was on the verge of being won. From that point on, American public confidence in the war began to crumble. Wars are not won by occupying territory; they are won by wearing down the invader’s political will. And that will, in liberal democracies with public opinion and periodic elections, has a measurable limit in coffins and approval ratings. In Cuba, with its complex geography and a population prepared for decades for territorial defense, that scenario could be repeated.
An invasion of Cuba would not be the surgical operation against Grenada or the walk in the park in Panama. It would be a bloody and protracted quagmire, lasting years and costing thousands of American lives.
The paradox of preventive isolation: dying alone so as not to die together
At this point, we must examine the underlying mechanism that leads the powers that should be vying for true multipolar order to abandon Cuba. A superficial answer would be limited to a cost-benefit analysis: supporting Cuba comes at a price in terms of secondary sanctions, tensions with Washington, and commercial risk. But that explanation is insufficient, because the abandonment is not merely rational; it has a dimension of satisfaction, of relief, that perhaps only psychoanalysis can illuminate.
Those who today are abandoning Cuba are not only calculating their own narrow interests; they are also, in a way, renouncing their own desire for transformation. The abandonment of Cuba is the renunciation of the possibility of another world. It is the unacknowledged acceptance that the Master’s order is the only possible order, and that global capitalism is the insurmountable horizon of history.
There is in that renunciation something of what Marcuse called repressive desublimation, which is the integration of the subject into the system through the promise of small satisfactions that neutralize the radical impulse. Progressive Latin American governments, the BRICS, American and Western European left-wing parties, solidarity organizations that today look the other way: all have found, in one way or another, their niche within the order. They have obtained their share of recognition, their space for comfortable dissent, their permitted or simply tolerated gestures. And in that process, they have ceased to see Cuba as a mirror of what they could be, instead viewing it as an uncomfortable reminder of what they have ceased to be, but above all of what they never were.
Because Cuba still challenges all of us: that is what is unbearable. It is not that it is a failure, but that it is a constant question, directed at all those who, at some point, believed that another world was possible and then decided that such drive was too costly. Cuba asks them: at what exact moment did you decide that capitalist normality was preferable to the struggle? At what exact moment did you give up on your desire? That question is the deep-seated reason for the abandonment.
By abandoning Cuba, they are not escaping their own fate; they are merely postponing it and, in doing so—and despite themselves—ensuring that, when it comes, they will find themselves in utter solitude. They are digging their own grave under the pretext of not getting their hands dirty with the soil in which the Empire will dig the pit to bury Cuba. For whoever chooses to save themselves in a collective storm ends up isolated and ultimately subjugated. The Master, once the current rebel has been eliminated, does not make peace with those who stood idly by—silent and deaf but not blind witnesses—but adds them to the list of the next in line. To legitimize his own existence, the Master needs new victims at all times.
Solidarity as a strategic necessity and an act of dignity
This analysis has not focused on a series of isolated tactical errors, but on a profound ethical crisis within global progressivism. We have lost sight of the fact that solidarity is not a moral luxury reserved for good times, but a strategic necessity and, at the same time, the very definition of what it means to belong to a political project that aspires to something more than merely managing the existing order.
Cuba is not just Cuba: it is living proof that it is possible to resist for decades the siege of the world’s greatest imperial power and keep alive a revolutionary project of social justice, a distinct culture, and an inalienable dignity.
This is no proof that the Cuban model is perfect: if it proves anything, it is that the alternative to global capitalism is neither automatic chaos nor failure, for it is possible and worthwhile to build something different and even better. By destroying Cuba, the Empire is not eliminating a military threat; it is eliminating a proof, erasing an example. It seeks to demonstrate that outside of capitalist normality, no sustainable life is possible.
Those who today betray Cuba are betraying themselves. Not in a metaphorical sense, but in a strategic one. A world order that claims to be multipolar but fails to protect the most vulnerable when the Master tightens the screws is not an alternative order; it is a decentralized extension of unipolarity, a system in which the ritual invocation of multipolarity is a rhetorical exercise in futility. Those who today betray Cuba are telling the Global South: “If you don’t have oil or a geographical position vital to us, don’t expect anything in return.” In doing so, they are depriving themselves of genuine allies and leaving themselves at the mercy of a world where, in the end, only brute force counts: a world where they too, however powerful, are vulnerable.
When the Empire looks at Cuba, it sees a small island that it can blockade and suffocate with almost no consequences. What it does not see—or what it does not want to see—is that this island is a dormant volcano sitting atop a global tectonic fault line.
Cuba is not just its geography; it is its history, its example, the dream of millions of people who, in some corner of the world, still believe that another world is possible. And as long as that dream exists, as long as there is a people who embody it through their daily resistance, the Master’s order will not have been irreversibly consummated. There will always be a crack. There will always be some unanswered question.
If one day the Empire were to forget the lessons that Vietnam taught yesterday and that Iran is teaching today, if it were to forget that peoples do not surrender and were to dare to invade Cuba, it would discover that war is not won with aircraft carriers. It is won by a people’s ability to say “no” even if it costs them their lives. And that “no” from Cuba, multiplied by millions both on and off the island, will be the grave not of yet another act of aggression by the Empire, but of an imperial illusion that will never again be able to take root.
Meanwhile, the battle these days in Cuba and for Cuba is a different one. It is the battle for daily life, for fuel, for electricity, for food, for hope. And in that battle, the peoples of the world could also, alongside Cuba, have the final say. Not to replace the States, but to force them to act. To remind them that history judges. That the judgment on those who abandoned the Spanish Republic was severe and permanent.
Cuba calls for concrete actions. It calls on those who claim to support it to ask what needs to be done and to do it. If they did so, it would not be a gesture of charity, but of consistency. Enough with statements. Enough with messages of support that end up being an excuse for inaction.
Cuba does not have to provide the answer to that question. Cuba has already given its answer through 67 years of Revolution and resistance. The answer must come from those who claim to want a different world order. It is they who must prove themselves, not Cuba. The very ones who signed declarations and sent messages of support. The very ones who possess oil and other resources that Cuba desperately needs and could supply without impoverishing themselves, yet refuse to do so; or who hold a seat and a vote at the United Nations but use them only to abstain.
Whose side are you on? The side of those waiting for governments to make up their minds, or the side of those who are already taking action? The side of those sending messages of support, or the side of those sending or delivering supplies and deciding to confront the Empire’s designs once and for all?