Trump and Rubio are starving Cuban civilians and calling it strategy.
At Miami International Airport, a handyman named Arsenio García boards a flight to Havana carrying a melting cold pack of chemotherapy drugs—his sister’s lifeline, paid for entirely out of his own pocket, because the U.S. sanctions regime has made it nearly impossible for ordinary Cubans to get medicine any other way. That’s the actual human ledger of a policy Washington insists is about pressuring the Castros. The ledger says something else: we are waging economic war on a civilian population, and we’re doing it with the cold calculation that enough hunger, enough untreated cancer, enough infants without diapers will finally break the political order.
The architecture of daily survival has been reduced to a mule economy, where the dead weight of a broken grid is carried on an individual’s back. In Miami terminals, the squeak of plastic-wrapping machines underscores a logistics operation built entirely on informal desperation—a nail-salon technician preparing a rechargeable fan so her bedridden grandmother has a breeze, a handyman guarding a carry-on loaded with melted cold packs. The economic collapse has hollowed out a tourism economy that once kept the lights on, leaving families to measure their grief in grocery receipts rather than policy successes. The Miami-Havana cargo pipeline—three billion dollars a year in food, medicine, generators, and cash, nearly all of it paid for by Cuban-American families—is not a triumph of diaspora solidarity. It’s an indictment of a strategy that has moved from embargo to blockade, from diplomatic isolation to collective punishment, leaving a woman with ovarian cancer in Havana not relying on the health system Marco Rubio disdains, but on a brother in Miami who has already drained twenty thousand dollars of his own savings to keep her alive.
The policy is designed to produce exactly that kind of desperation, on the theory that desperation births revolution. It’s a bet the administration is making with other people’s lives. When Secretary of State Rubio tells Cubans that “those who control your country have plundered billions” and that’s why they have no electricity or fuel, he is describing real corruption while actively deepening the deprivation. His own department’s sanctions, layered onto a sixty-year embargo, have choked off oil imports, restricted remittance channels, and made the formal banking system so radioactive for Cuba-related transactions that banks have simply stopped processing them, pushing families into the physical-cargo pipeline. The result is a refrigerator spoiling in forty-five minutes of returning electricity, an elderly patient fanned by a piece of cardboard, a hospital running out of scalpels. That’s the policy.
Michael Walzer established long ago that punishing a population to extract political concessions from its rulers deliberately shifts the burden of coercion to the people most unable to absorb it. He permits the deliberate immiseration of civilians only under a “supreme emergency”—an existential threat to the blockading power. Cuba poses no such threat; it cannot project force against the United States, and no serious analyst pretends otherwise. The Trump administration’s siege is therefore not a close call. It’s a textbook case of collective punishment that falls outside any just-war framework that has ever been taken seriously. This is not a pressure campaign. This is starvation as statecraft.
Andrew Bacevich warned that the machinery of American power consistently confuses the application of pressure with the exercise of wisdom, assuming that isolation translates neatly into political obedience. The Cuba sanctions complex is a particularly durable piece of that machinery: it doesn’t require troops, it produces no body bags on the evening news, and it keeps an entire ecosystem of defense-contractor hawks, exile-hardliner lobbies, and congressional grandstanders in business decade after decade. Dwight Eisenhower recognized this same infection in the national security apparatus and left a farewell warning about a permanent-coercion reflex born of the military-industrial complex—a structure that elevates strategic pressure over the populations caught in its crossfire. The sanctions-industrial complex is its quieter twin, a permanent infrastructure of economic warfare that entrenches hostility because hostility serves its institutional interests.
It’s the same logic Athens used when it told Melos to surrender or be destroyed: we’re doing this for your own good. It didn’t work for Athens, and it hasn’t worked in Cuba for six decades. What it has done is turn a whole community in Miami into a privatized humanitarian relief agency for a government-made catastrophe.
Congress has the power to end this. The embargo is statutory; it can be unwound. The war-powers framework that has allowed the executive branch to wage economic warfare without legislative authorization can be reined in. The Constitution did not grant the presidency the right to starve a neighbor as a negotiating tactic. If the administration genuinely believes that regime change is the goal, let it come to Congress and make the case openly—with full disclosure of the civilian death toll, the malnutrition figures, the cancer patients who will die waiting for their brother’s next suitcase.
Trump and Rubio have made a deliberate choice to starve the Cuban people and call it strategy. I will not call it anything else. An 84-year-old grandmother fans herself with cardboard because there’s no electricity, and that, too, is the policy: a slow extraction of civilian life, hidden behind a label.