Washington’s Cuba Policy Is Self-Sabotage

Washington’s Cuba Policy Is Self-Sabotage

The U.S. blockade is destroying Havana’s chances of becoming stable and democratic.

A woman takes part in a demonstration against the U.S. sanctions on Cuba in Havana on April 7. Yamil Lage/AFP via Getty Images

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Since January, when the United States captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and cut Cuba off from the flow of Venezuelan oil that had long helped it function, Washington has pursued a “maximum pressure” campaign against Havana. The Trump administration hopes that sanctions and an effective fuel blockade can force Cuba’s leadership toward a negotiated economic and political opening that would turn the island into a dependent U.S. partner.

In one respect, the pressure has already paid off. On June 18, Cuba’s National Assembly approved some 175 measures that together amount to the boldest departure from the economic order of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Private banks will now be allowed to operate in Cuba, real estate and state-owned enterprises will be opened to private and foreign capital, Cubans abroad can invest in the country, and most price controls will disappear. President Miguel Díaz-Canel cast the overhaul as a defense of socialism rather than an abandonment of it.

Since January, when the United States captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and cut Cuba off from the flow of Venezuelan oil that had long helped it function, Washington has pursued a “maximum pressure” campaign against Havana. The Trump administration hopes that sanctions and an effective fuel blockade can force Cuba’s leadership toward a negotiated economic and political opening that would turn the island into a dependent U.S. partner.

In one respect, the pressure has already paid off. On June 18, Cuba’s National Assembly approved some 175 measures that together amount to the boldest departure from the economic order of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Private banks will now be allowed to operate in Cuba, real estate and state-owned enterprises will be opened to private and foreign capital, Cubans abroad can invest in the country, and most price controls will disappear. President Miguel Díaz-Canel cast the overhaul as a defense of socialism rather than an abandonment of it.

U.S. President Donald Trump might conclude that maximum pressure is working—and that he should tighten the screws on Havana to achieve further changes. Just days after the reforms passed, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sanctions on five Cuban entities, including the bank that handles most foreign business on the island.

Yet, as the humanitarian toll from the U.S. pressure campaign on Cuba mounts, Washington’s strategy may end up undermining its own interests. The same pressure that produced Cuba’s recent economic opening is steadily destroying the conditions that the island needs to succeed.

This month, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, held the Trump administration directly responsible for what he described as a humanitarian emergency in Cuba. According to his office, the survival rate for children with cancer has dropped from roughly 85 percent to 65 percent since the United States imposed fuel restrictions on the country in January. The resulting blackouts have destabilized the refrigeration and transport systems essential to medical supply chains.

Infant mortality has doubled since then to almost 10 deaths per 1,000 live births, Türk said, and only about a third of essential medicines are available in the country. Fuel shortages have also choked the island’s food supply, cutting production by a reported 60 percent and leaving pregnant women and small children most exposed to malnutrition.

By mid-May, daily blackouts in Cuba routinely exceeded 20 hours, hospitals were suspending surgeries, and millions of people lacked reliable access to clean water, according to Türk. He pointed out that sanctions designed to strangle entire sectors of an economy, with indiscriminate effects on the population—as is the case with U.S. sanctions on Cuba—are incompatible with international human rights law.

Beyond the immediate human suffering caused by the U.S. blockade of Cuba, Washington’s strategy is self-defeating. Hardship imposed by a foreign siege rarely translates into anger at a local government. Even when discontent does grow, it tends to feed hostility toward the United States. The Cuban government has also shown itself effective at suppressing dissent.

There is also a deeper, structural cost of the U.S. strategy. A productive future partnership between the United States and a stable Cuban government of any kind would rest on the foundations of a functioning society. But those foundations are precisely what the U.S. blockade is eroding.

A market economy needs banks that can extend credit to entrepreneurs and foreign investors willing to risk U.S. penalties for doing business on a sanctioned island. It also requires a stable workforce. Energy shortages and the collapse of basic services are counterproductive. They have accelerated emigration from Cuba, draining the island of its working-age population. (More than 1 million Cubans have left the island since 2021.) Childhood malnutrition risks diminishing per capita productivity for decades.

The longer U.S. pressure on Cuba persists, the closer it gets to economic ruin—making Havana  more vulnerable to radicalization and mass exodus and less capable of sustaining an orderly transition to democracy.

It appears that Trump hopes to replicate in Cuba the approach he used in Venezuela: replace Díaz-Canel with a more pliant figure who would be deferential to Washington. White House officials have talked about finding a “Cuban Delcy,” the Wall Street Journal reported, a reference to Venezuela’s interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez. To date, no such candidate has stepped forward.

Given the right conditions, Cuba might actually be better positioned than Venezuela to open up politically. Although Cuba lacks an organized opposition, it has the cohesion and institutional capacity to absorb the strain of a transition without collapsing. The U.S. siege is eroding precisely those capacities.

Cuba is a small, highly centralized island state and generally lacks organized crime and armed nonstate actors. In Venezuela, any transition to democracy is complicated by criminal networks and militias that could fill a power vacuum. Cuba, by contrast, has maintained low levels of violent crime by regional standards. To be sure, social tensions exist—but a sudden loss of state authority would be less likely to give way to armed internal strife.

Havana also retains the legacy of a functioning state. Despite ongoing economic collapse and mass emigration, it has real bureaucratic capacity in health care, education, and administration, alongside a near-universal literacy rate. These structures have declined but not vanished. In a sense, Cuba resembles the socialist states of Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, which had politically rigid systems with surprisingly capable institutions that later proved useful in democratic transitions.

None of this is an argument for U.S. intervention—quite the opposite. History suggests that external pressure rarely produces democratic outcomes and instead often strengthens authoritarian narratives of national siege. The U.S. strategy of tightening sanctions on Cuba may deepen hardship without meaningfully weakening the country’s ruling elite. If anything, decades of U.S. sanctions have hardened Havana’s resolve and handed it a convenient explanation for the failures of its own economic model. Foreign-imposed regime change would also taint a new Cuban government’s legitimacy, planting the seeds for a future backlash.

Cuba’s own history illustrates this dynamic. Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 on a wave of resentment built up over decades of overbearing U.S. influence on the island. Today, Washington risks adding another chapter to this pattern of heavy U.S. dominance followed by intense nationalist reaction. In trying to shape Cuba’s future, the United States may be sowing the seeds for the next Castro.

Havana has just begun the economic opening that Trump spent months demanding. For Washington to pocket that concession while continuing to strangle the island would be to risk squandering the chance for a more gradual—but ultimately more sustainable—transition to democracy. The sensible course would be to lift the blockade and ease the sanctions that hit ordinary Cubans hardest—so that fuel, food, and medicine can reach the island while it retains the human capital on which a recovery depends.

The United States would gain far more from engagement with Cuba than from siege, widening trade, repealing the Helms-Burton Act—the 1996 law that wrote the embargo into U.S. law and barred a president from lifting it without congressional action—and promoting investment and travel to Cuba. By letting political change emerge from within, whoever eventually governs the island will do so with genuine legitimacy rather than the stigma of foreign imposition.

Whatever Trump aims to do in Cuba, he should stop prolonging a morally unacceptable and entirely man-made humanitarian crisis. The blockade of Cuba is not only damaging to U.S. interests and the United States’ reputation across Latin America, but it also reduces the island’s chances of ever becoming a stable and prosperous nation.

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This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage of the Trump administration. Follow along here.

• U.S. Foreign Policy
• Economics
• Human Rights

Oliver Stuenkel is a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., and an associate professor of international relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo. X: @OliverStuenkel

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