There is nothing easier than labeling and disqualifying. It puts an end to any discussion, any nuance, any attempt to understand what we are experiencing—and what we will experience.
The Media Observatory of Cubadebate has studied the main pejorative labels used by the Trump administration to refer to Cuba, and among them, the most common is “failed state.” It concludes that the power of this formula lies not in its analytical precision, but in its political usefulness. It turns a country’s complex crisis into a simple verdict—“there is no state, therefore change must be forced”—and shifts the public debate from the legitimate question (are sanctions legal and effective?) to another, more insidious one (how do you manage a collapse?).
When Washington calls Cuba a “failed state,” it is not reporting on a country or assessing its social cohesion or historical identity: it is attempting to delegitimize the Cuban state in order to discipline the entire nation. Donald Trump and Marco Rubio, who have made a particular contribution to perfecting the use of public powers as an instrument for crime, theft, and blackmail, seek to normalize economic siege as if it were a “responsible” response to an alleged institutional vacuum.
Under this logic, the scarcity and precariousness of daily life in Cuba are interpreted as “internal failure,” while the cumulative impact of more than six decades of unilateral coercive measures, now pushed to the extreme, is hidden. The narrative functions as a revolving door in which the deterioration caused by sanctions feeds the label, and the label legitimizes policies that further aggravate that deterioration.
Now, a failed state, in the strict sense, does not protect its population, does not exercise a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, does not guarantee the rule of law, and does not maintain basic services. That is why it is important to distinguish between fragility and failure. There may be sectoral weaknesses—energy, supply, transportation—and yet still have a functional state. In Cuba, that threshold has not been crossed.
First, the country meets the classic requirements of a state (according to the Montevideo Convention): a permanent population, defined territory, effective government, and the capacity to engage internationally. The subtext that “it has ceased to be a state” is neither legally nor politically tenable.
Second, what characterizes state collapse is not scarcity, but the emergence of parallel authorities that control territories, collect taxes, administer their own justice, and impose rules of circulation. In Cuba, there are no armed or political actors with territorial or fiscal control that replace the state. There is no internal armed conflict, sustained insurgency, cartel war, or capture of territories. The “law of the jungle” does not prevail.
Third, there is administrative continuity and implementation capacity.
Even under stress, ministries, civil registry, education, and health systems operate; public health and civil protection campaigns are carried out; illicit markets are regulated and prosecuted. A truly collapsed state cannot sustain these chains of command, provision, and control.
Fourth, Cuba retains effective foreign policy capacity. It maintains bilateral and multilateral relations with more than a hundred countries, participates in international organizations, negotiates agreements, and deploys missions abroad. This agency is not symbolic; it is a material indicator of state functioning, not of “vacuum” and “collapse,” as the Miami gossip mills repeat.
Fifth, the capacity for institutional support in the face of energy, financial, or logistical shocks is visible. The response on the island is not state dissolution, but adaptation. We see this when contingency and territorial coordination structures are activated, in the priority that essential services—health, water, basic food, communications—continue to have, and in the administrative reorganization of scarce resources through regulated distribution and social protection mechanisms.
This week, for example, the creation of a new joint venture between the Ministries of Public Health and Transportation (Transmed) was announced, which will allocate a fleet of minibuses to transport medical personnel and patients requiring special treatment to hospitals in Havana, amid the fuel blockade decreed by Trump.
The adequacy of these responses in a context of severe material crisis and economic suffocation is debatable, but their existence and implementation belie the picture of paralysis and state vacuum that Washington repeats ad nauseam.
That is why Cubadebate rightly concludes that labels such as “failed state” are not reliable analytical categories, but rather propaganda tools to maintain sanctions, isolation, diplomatic pressure, and scenarios of induced “transition.”
They do not describe, they prescribe.