“When there are many men without decency, there are always others who possess the decency of many men. These are the ones who rebel with terrible force against those who rob the people of their freedom, which is to rob men of their decency. In these men there are thousands of men, there is an entire people, there is human dignity.” -José Martí
The shadow of the Monroe Doctrine, proclaimed in 1823 by US President James Monroe, has loomed over Latin America for two centuries. Originally presented as a warning to European powers not to interfere in the affairs of the continent, it soon became the perfect pretext to justify US hegemony over its southern neighbours. The phrase summing up the doctrine, ‘America for Americans,’ ended up meaning ‘America for US interests’ in practice. It laid the foundations for an interventionist foreign policy that —in various forms, from military invasions to coups d’état orchestrated from Washington— sought to control the political, economic and social destinies of Latin American nations. In this scenario, Cuba not only became an emblematic case: it stood as a symbol of defiance.
The Cuban Revolution of 1959, led by Fidel Castro, was not simply an uprising against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista; it was also an explicit rejection of decades of economic and political subordination imposed by US neocolonial domination. Agrarian reform, the nationalization of foreign companies, many owned by US citizens or corporations, and the socialist orientation of the new government were perceived in Washington as a direct threat to its sphere of influence, a dangerous example, capable of inspiring other peoples. The empire’s response was swift: in 1960, President Eisenhower imposed the first trade sanctions; in 1962, under Kennedy, the embargo was tightened to become a total economic, commercial and financial blockade. Since then, the US has maintained a policy of systematic suffocation against the island, with the declared aim of forcing regime change.
But what exactly does this ‘embargo’ mean? Legally, this term is used in the US. It is called a ‘blockade’ in Cuba and much of the world because it goes far beyond a simple bilateral trade restriction. This network of laws, regulations and extraterritorial pressures prevents third countries from trading freely with Cuba, punishes foreign companies operating on the island and limits Cuban access to the international financial system. Laws like the Torricelli Act (1992) and the Helms-Burton Act (1996) further tightened these measures, especially after the fall of the USSR, when Cuba lost its main economic ally. The blockade not only prohibits the sale of US products to Cuba, it penalizes any entity in the world that trades with the island if it wishes to access the US market. It is, in essence, global coercion.
The human impact has been devastating. According to Cuban government estimates, during the blockade, cumulative losses exceeded $150 billion in 2022. But beyond the figures, what hurts are the everyday consequences: hospitals without essential medicines, factories paralyzed by a lack of spare parts, schools with limited resources, families separated by migration restrictions. Even so, Cuba has not collapsed. On the contrary, it has survived and, in many ways, even prospered thanks to a combination of popular resilience, state innovation and international solidarity.
One of the most powerful expressions of this solidarity is the annual vote in the United Nations General Assembly on the resolution demanding the lifting of the blockade. Since 1992, year after year, the vast majority of member countries, often more than 95 per cent, have voted in favour of Cuba. In 2025, for example, 187 nations supported the resolution; only the US and Israel opposed it. This almost unanimous support is not based on ideological sympathies, but on a basic principle of international law: the sovereignty of states and the prohibition of unilateral coercive measures. Countries as diverse as Germany, India, Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia agree that no country should impose its will through economic suffocation.
Despite its small size and limitations, Cuba has given the world much more than it has received. Its solidarity is not rhetoric: it is concrete action. Since the 1960s, Cuban doctors have been present in conflicts, epidemics and natural disasters around the world. During the COVID-19 pandemic, more than forty brigades from the Henry Reeve Contingent, named after an American volunteer who fought for Cuban independence, travelled to dozens of countries, including Italy and South Africa, to assist with health care. This tradition of medical cooperation has saved millions of lives and has been recognized even by organizations such as the World Health Organization.
The solidarity-based internationalism of the Cuban people and their government is reflected in two examples that are worth remembering.
First, the relationship between Cuba and South Africa is particularly revealing. Mandela, after being released from prison in 1990, did not travel first to Washington or London, but to Havana. There, in a historic speech, he publicly thanked Cuba for its decisive support in the struggle against apartheid. “Cuba’s assistance to the anti-colonial struggle in Africa is unprecedented,” Mandela said. “What other country has sent its sons to die in distant lands for the freedom of others?” He was referring to the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola (1987-1988), where Cuban soldiers helped defeat the South African army of the racist regime, thus hastening the end of apartheid. This feat was not an act of expansionism, but of ethical internationalism: Cuba acted out of principle, not geopolitical interests.
The second example occurred four years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of April 1986. Cuba was facing the beginning of the so-called ‘Special Period’ in March 1990; a deep economic crisis followed the collapse of the USSR. But, the island responded to a call for international aid with an unprecedented gesture: it welcomed the first 139 children from Ukraine, Belarus and Russia to offer them free medical treatment. In just three months, it transformed the Tarará resort, twenty kilometres east of Havana, into a comprehensive health complex thanks to the voluntary work of seven thousand Cubans. For more than two decades (1990-2011), Cuba provided free care to more than 26,000 patients affected by radiation, most of them minors, who received specialized care in endocrinology, gastroenterology and other critical areas. It was the only country in the world to organize a massive, systematic and completely free program for child victims of the disaster.
This act of solidarity takes on greater significance when considering the context: a small island nation, with barely eleven million inhabitants and subjected to a strict economic blockade, allocated scarce resources to save the lives of others precisely when they needed it most. While in the early years of the program, it received more than a thousand children annually, Cuba never made its aid conditional on political or economic concessions. The motto that guided this mission, ‘the right of the children of Chernobyl to live is priceless,’ was made reality through clean beaches, fresh air, balanced nutrition and specialized medical care that allowed thousands of children to recover their health alongside their families. This experience, almost invisible in the Western media, is one of the noblest examples of Cuban internationalism: a poor island that, in the midst of a siege, chose to share what little it had with those who needed it most.
Meanwhile, within its borders, Cuba has achieved milestones that many rich countries have not. Its education system is universal, free and of high quality: the literacy rate exceeds 99 per cent, and thousands of engineers, scientists and teachers graduate every year. In health, it has one of the highest ratios of doctors per capita in the world and has developed its own vaccines against cancer, meningitis and SARS-CoV-2. Its biotechnology, despite the blockade, is admired globally. In culture, it has produced world-class writers, musicians, filmmakers and artists, many trained in public institutions accessible to all.
All of this has been built under constant pressure from an inhumane blockade. Let us imagine for a moment the reverse scenario: how long would countries such as Chile or Canada be able to resist if a similar blockade were imposed on them? Chile, dependent on imports for medicines, technology and processed foods, would see its health system collapse within weeks. Canada, although rich in natural resources, is deeply dependent on trade with the US and access to their technologies. Without the ability to purchase spare parts, medicines or even basic supplies under normal conditions, its economy would grind to a halt. The question is not rhetorical: it is an invitation to empathy. What Cuba has done is not ‘miraculous’; it is the result of a collective will forged in adversity. Of a dignified people.
During Trump’s first administration (2017-2021), the blockade was deliberately and cruelly intensified. He reversed the modest diplomatic advances made by Obama, reinstating travel restrictions, banning transactions with Cuban companies linked to the military sector—a category so broad that it encompassed hotels, airlines, and shops—and fully activating Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, allowing lawsuits in US courts against foreign companies operating on nationalized property in Cuba. Additionally, in January 2021, he included Cuba on the arbitrary list of ‘state sponsors of terrorism,’ a political move that made international financial transactions even more difficult for the island. These measures did not seek to ‘liberate the Cuban people,’ as their advocates claimed; they sought to choke them, in the hope that social unrest would lead to chaos. It did not happen. Cuban society, although burdened, did not fracture.
Today, in 2026, the blockade remains in place. This effort to suffocate a sovereign nation starkly reveals the logic of imperial power: when political arguments fail, you can resorted to the systematic dehumanization of eleven million people, reducing them to pawns in a game whose sole objective is submission. The blockade persists not for reasons of national security—Cuba poses no military threat—but because of domestic interests: the anti-Cuban lobby in Florida, the ideological narrative of the Cold War, and the US’ historical inability to accept that a small, poor country 145 kilometres away refuses to bow down. But, while the blockade continues, so does the resistance. Not armed resistance, but everyday resistance: the teacher who teaches with a broken blackboard, the doctor who invents a catheter from recycled materials, the scientist who designs a vaccine in a laboratory with power cuts, the children and young people playing sports or learning music. Not to mention the Latin American School of Medicine, which has offered free education to young people from more than 120 countries.
Cuba is not a perfect model: it has contradictions, mistakes and urgent challenges, like any nation. But its experience raises an uncomfortable question that overshadows all others: if it really were the ‘failed state’ that US rhetoric has painted for decades, why not lift sanctions and let the system collapse under its own weight? Such a collapse would be, for Washington, the ultimate victory: irrefutable proof that socialism cannot be sustained even on a small island. However, that opening never comes, because the underlying fear is not that Cuba will fail, but that it will succeed. Success here does not mean accumulating wealth or military power, but demonstrating that, even under economic anguish, it is possible to guarantee free university education, universal health care, an infant mortality rate comparable to that of developed nations, and a culture of international solidarity that transcends commercial interests. For the US establishment, that example is more dangerous than any missile: it undermines the narrative that without integration into the global capitalist market, human progress is impossible. A prosperous Cuba would be a crack in the hegemonic narrative; a Cuba that functions despite the blockade is a tacit invitation for other countries in the Global South to reconsider their economic subordination.
The blockade, then, is not only a punishment; it is also an act of ideological containment. The US does not fear a weak Cuba, but rather a resilient Cuba: a nation that, despite all the resources stacked against it, has trained doctors who save lives on every continent, scientists who develop their own vaccines, and a population that, despite exodus and hardship, has not erupted into civil war or surrendered to chaos. That kind of daily resistance, silent but firm, challenges the premise that US power is irresistible. That is why the blockade remains in place even though it has been completely ineffective in overthrowing the Cuban government: its real function is no longer to bring down a regime, but to prevent its existence from becoming a benchmark. Because if a blockaded island can sustain a public health network while the US cannot guarantee medical coverage for its own citizens; if it can send medical brigades to more than 160 countries while Washington makes its humanitarian aid conditional on geopolitical alignments; if it can keep alive a culture of debate and artistic creation under extreme scarcity… then the message is clear: there are other ways of organising community life. That is the fear that the blockade tries, unsuccessfully, to contain. In light of this, other questions about sovereignty, dignity and solidarity take on their full weight: what does sovereignty really mean in an unequal world? How can a country sacrifice its dignity for economic comfort? And, above all, what kind of solidarity are we willing to practice when those in power are watching us?
The story of Cuba’s struggle against the blockade is not just a chronicle of suffering; it is also a testament to what is possible when a society decides not to give up. And in a world increasingly fragmented by walls, sanctions and hatred, that lesson is more necessary than ever.
Juan Carlos Martínez is a poet and professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. This piece was published in Spanish on the author’s social media on Feb. 14, 2026.
