Under Siege & Still Standing: Cuba, Imperial Punishment, and Revolutionary Resistance
Since the U.S. imperialist invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, the Western media has been awash with the familiar chorus: Cuba is about to fall. Once again, pundits, think tanks, and editorial boards dust off an old script, announcing the imminent demise of the Cuban Revolution. Hardship is paraded as destiny; scarcity is reframed as failure; endurance is mocked as denial. The message is clear and rehearsed: history has run its course, and Cuba must submit.
This narrative is neither new nor accidental. It is the ideological handmaiden of aggression. It normalizes the violence of empire by erasing its fingerprints, recasting the predictable effects of an unrelenting siege as internal incompetence and dysfunction. It prepares public opinion not for understanding, but for acquiescence—acquiescence to sanctions, to coercion, to the erasure of Cuban sovereignty under the guise of “inevitability.”
Every few years, the ritual repeats itself. Cuba is “collapsing.” Cuba is “imploding.” Cuba must “change”—always in the direction of neoliberal restoration and U.S. tutelage. The cadence is constant because the objective is constant. What changes are the pretexts: the end of the Soviet Union, the tightening of sanctions, the pandemic, the global supply-chain crisis, the energy shock.
What never changes is the refusal to name the siege itself—the most comprehensive, long-term and constantly tightening system of economic warfare ever imposed on a small country—as the central fact shaping Cuban life. This is a grotesquely asymmetric fight of unprecedented dimensions in which the most formidable military power that has ever existed is demanding complete and utter submission.
When one asks Cubans—intellectuals and workers, party activists and government officials, friends navigating daily life under brutally difficult conditions—whether the project of national independence and socialist development can survive, the answers are neither evasive nor delusional. They are sober. There are no guarantees, they say. History offers none. The question will be resolved in the crucible of struggle. What they pledge is not certainty, but commitment: to defend what has been built, to struggle with clarity about what is at stake.
And what is at stake has never been ambiguous. Washington’s objective has always been singular: to reverse the emancipatory process initiated in 1959; to overthrow the Revolution; to eliminate socialism; to restore capitalism and U.S. domination. This is not conjecture—it is policy, stated and restated across administrations, codified in law, enforced through sanctions designed explicitly to “bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of government.” To speak of Cuban so-called “failure” without speaking of this is not analysis; it is propaganda.
The lie of inevitable failure performs a crucial ideological function. It transforms resistance into stubbornness, dignity into obstinacy, sovereignty into an anachronism. It asks Cuba to apologize for surviving. It insists that the only rational horizon is surrender—that the only future worthy of recognition is one in which Cubans renounce their right to make their own history and to choose their own social system. In this telling, the crime is not the blockade; the crime is defiance.
But Cuba’s history stubbornly refuses the script. A small island, subjected to more than six decades of economic warfare, has nonetheless eradicated illiteracy, built a universal health-care system, trained doctors for the world, and stood in solidarity with liberation struggles far beyond its shores. None of this is to romanticize hardship or deny real shortcomings and contradictions. It is to insist on context, on causality, on honesty. It is to reject the obscenity of blaming the victim for the injuries inflicted by empire.
Cuba today is enduring a systematic effort to strangle its economy and will— but it is resisting: it is a daily practice under conditions designed to crush hope. It is the insistence that sovereignty is not negotiable, that dignity is not for sale, that the future will not be dictated by those who have never accepted the island’s right to exist on its own terms.
The Western media’s obsession with Cuba’s “end” reveals less about Cuba than about empire’s impatience, and indeed about empire's own failure. After more than sixty-five years of failure to break the Revolution, the architects of the siege still cannot accept a simple truth: that history does not move according to their timelines, and that peoples under attack do not owe their oppressors capitulation.
Cuba’s fate will not be decided in editorials or think-tank reports. It will be decided, as Cubans themselves understand, in struggle—uneven, difficult, and uncertain, but resolutely their own. The Revolution has never promised inevitability. It has promised resistance. It has promised hope. And that, despite everything, continues.
