SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
collective punishment
‘Collective Punishment’: Israel Halts All Humanitarian Aid to Gaza in Retaliation for Iran Strikes
"Aid is not a political tool and should not be weaponized in this way," said an advocate at Save the Children. "The survival and needs of children in Gaza should not have to answer to airstrikes elsewhere."
Jun 08, 2026
In an act described as "collective punishment" against two million Palestinians, Israel announced that it would close off the main entry points for humanitarian aid into Gaza indefinitely in retaliation for strikes launched this weekend by Iran.
Iran launched missiles at Israel on Sunday in response to Israel's bombing of a densely populated Beirut suburb, which killed civilians and violated a June 1 agreement not to bomb Lebanon's capital.
In addition to retaliating with new strikes on Iran, Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) said on Sunday that “a number of necessary security measures have been implemented” following the missile fire, “including the closure of the crossings into the Gaza Strip, among them the Kerem Shalom Crossing and the Rafah Crossing, until further notice.”
COGAT claimed that closing the crossings "will not affect the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip" because "the substantial quantities of food that have entered the strip since the beginning of the ceasefire significantly exceed the nutritional needs of the population, according to [United Nations] methodologies."
That is not what actual UN reports say. The World Food Program (WFP) estimated in June that about 1.6 million people living in Gaza, more than three-quarters of the population, were "facing high levels of acute food insecurity" despite the entry of food parcels and other aid since the October 2025 "ceasefire" between Israel and Hamas.
In the first half of May, UN workers identified more than 2,000 cases of acute malnutrition among young children, according to a June report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
That same OCHA report said about 678,000 hot meals were delivered in May, down from 1.5 million per day in mid-March as a result of underfunding and due to Israel's closures and restrictions at certain entry points. The number of people receiving food parcels in May also dropped to about 820,000, down from 1.1 million in March. The rations that were distributed in May covered only about 75% of the average person's minimum daily caloric needs, while those distributed in March covered about 50%.
While the amount of aid entering the strip has increased since the ceasefire went into effect, UN data has never suggested that the amount entering "exceeds" the needs of Palestinians. Since the truce began, reports have consistently said the amount of aid entering the strip was only reaching part of the population, and that aid packages only contained part of the needed nutritional value, which did not meet the terms of the agreement.
Israel, which has been accused of using starvation as a "weapon of war" against Gaza by UN bodies and major human rights groups, previously closed all crossings into the strip at the start of its military assault against Iran in late February.
This not only halted the entry of food and medical aid but also blocked medical evacuations for sick and injured Palestinians, which were desperately needed due to Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s medical system. Even as entry points reopened in the following weeks, aid entry never returned to previous levels.
COGAT said on Monday that "the crossings will be reopened gradually, subject to an ongoing operational assessment and under security restrictions designed to ensure the safety of all personnel present at the crossings on both sides," though it provided no clear timeframe or indication of how much aid would be allowed in.
“Aid is not a political tool and should not be weaponized in this way. The survival and needs of children in Gaza should not have to answer to airstrikes elsewhere,” said Ahmad Alhendawi, Save the Children’s regional director for the Middle East, North Africa, and Eastern Europe in a statement on Monday.
“For nearly three years, Gaza has been pummelled so hard by Israeli airstrikes that nothing can grow there and people have been reliant on the already small amount of aid crossing the border—aid that was never enough and is now totally out of reach,” he added. “Children in Gaza have already been starved by design. They should not now be denied water, medicine, shelter, and the other essentials needed to survive. The Israeli authorities must re-open these crossings immediately, lift the siege, and facilitate the safe delivery of humanitarian aid at scale.”
With Israeli leaders openly stating their goal in recent weeks to expand the nation's occupation of Gaza despite the ceasefire, international observers have suggested that Israel was using the escalation of hostilities with Iran as an excuse to ramp up its brutal treatment of Palestinians, nearly 1,000 of whom have been killed in the strip since the ceasefire went into effect.
The US-brokered ceasefire agreement signed by Israel and Hamas in October required the “full entry of humanitarian aid and relief” into the strip.
"The guarantors of the ceasefire must step in and force Israel to reopen the crossings, resume and triple the aid amounts, and totally stop any attacks on Gaza now," said Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed. "This is their job. And they must uphold the ceasefire agreement."
Keep ReadingShow Less
The United States' Long War on Cuba
A US invasion would hardly inaugurate a new conflict. It would instead mark the bloodiest phase in a long, bipartisan war against Cuba for the “sin” of reclaiming national sovereignty.
May 15, 2026
In recent weeks and months, Washington has intensified its long-running campaign of collective punishment against the Cuban people. Escalating sanctions have further tightened the noose of a punitive US blockade that has strangled the island for more than half a century. The resulting “energy starvation” has deepened a manufactured crisis, threatening Cubans’ access to food, water, healthcare, fuel, electricity, and other basic human rights and needs, while intensifying the broader assault on the island’s sovereignty and development.
Since 2017, when the first Trump administration began dismantling the limited normalization measures introduced under former President Barack Obama, Cuba has once again been subjected to a regime of “maximum pressure” economic warfare. The consequences have been severe. These policies have degraded material conditions across the island, accelerated the exodus of more than 1 million Cubans, and imposed disproportionate suffering on the country’s most vulnerable populations.
This economic weapon, wielded by the ruling elites of the world’s largest financial and military power, has exacted particularly devastating consequences on mothers and children. During this period, the infant mortality rate rose from 4 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2018 to 9.9 in 2025. Put plainly, an estimated 1,800 Cuban infants died during these years who would have survived absent Washington’s intensified criminal sanctions. This is but one stark measure of the blockade’s profound brutality and inhumanity.
The only “crime” of these children, like that of countless other Cubans, was being born in a country that continues to insist on its right to determine its own political and economic future outside the structures of hemispheric domination the United States has sought to impose across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the wider world. The infliction of such suffering has never been incidental to such policies. It has been, and remains, a central feature.
It is time to end the madness of US policy toward Cuba and recognize that Cuba is not a failed state, but a state subjected to a criminal siege.
The same has been true since 1959, as Washington has pursued a singular, near-fanatical obsession with reversing the Cuban Revolution and restoring the neocolonial shackles it once imposed on the island. Its aim has been not only to undermine Cuba’s social transformation and internationalist commitments, but to extinguish the example the revolution represented: that an alternative to US hegemony and capitalist underdevelopment was possible.
So despite recent threats to “take” Cuba, such rhetoric cannot be understood in isolation, nor should it obscure a fundamental reality: A US invasion would hardly inaugurate a new conflict. It would instead mark the bloodiest phase in a long, bipartisan war against Cuba for the “sin” of reclaiming national sovereignty from a Washington-backed lawless order that has sought to punish Cuba for its defiance and refusal to submit meekly to the dictates of empire.
Cuba Under the Shadow of US Empire
Cuba’s independence has long been imperiled by its proximity to and economic entanglement with the United States. Situated 90 miles off the coast of Florida, the island occupied a central place within the US imperial imagination. Throughout the 19th century, Washington elites viewed Cuba not as a to-be sovereign nation, but as an inevitable extension of their commercial and geopolitical ambitions, a “crown jewel” destined to be drawn into Washington’s orbit.
The opportunity arrived in 1898. Seizing upon Cuba’s nearly victorious war for independence from Spain, the US intervened not to end empire in the hemisphere, but rather to inherit it. Washington presented its action as a selfless mission to secure Cuban liberation. But for many across the region, the contradictions were unmistakable. The US, itself forged in the crucible of empire, with all the violence and exploitation that project entailed, went to Cuba not to secure freedom, but to replace Madrid with Washington as the imperial metropole of the Americas.
As early as 1829, Simón Bolívar warned that “the United States seemed destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of freedom.” Decades later, Cuban revolutionary José Martí issued a similar denunciation. In his 1891 essay "Our America," he called for “common cause” among oppressed peoples and warned against the threat of subordination to the rising power to the north. Martí also championed self-sufficiency over integration into an unequal global capitalist system, insisting that Cuba must “make wine from plantains. It may be sour, but it is our wine!” Having spent years in exile in New York, Martí sharpened that critique shortly before his death in 1895, writing “I lived in the monster and I know its entrails.”
History would soon vindicate these words. As the United States extended its “Manifest Destiny” to foreign shores, it repeatedly intervened across the hemisphere, seeking to transform it into a de facto protectorate. In doing so, Washington consistently sided with the interests of capital and local elites over the demands for popular sovereignty. In the decades that followed, the US invaded countries throughout the region, overthrowing democratic governments, crushing revolutionary movements, and backing brutal dictatorships.
In Cuba, this took the form of three lengthy military occupations spanning half of the island’s first 24 years of “independence,” from 1898-1902, 1906-1909, and 1917-1922. In each case, the objective was to uphold the neocolonial order established during the first occupation and rooted in US economic interests. Under this restrictive framework, the Cuban government was denied control over its foreign relations and domestic economic policy, compelled to cede territory to the US military, and forced to accept Washington’s unilateral right of intervention.
By the 1920s, this relationship had produced a profound dependence on exports, mainly sugar, to the United States while fostering a deeply corrupt system incapable of responding to the needs and aspirations of the Cuban people. The island’s land remained concentrated in the hands of American corporations and a domestic collaborationist aristocracy, while the state invested more heavily in repression than social development, constructing more barracks than schools. With the onset of the Great Depression and the collapse of the sugar economy upon which the country had been made dependent, popular discontent only intensified.
By 1933, the government of Gerardo Machado, which promised to transform Cuba into an island of stability for American investment while violently suppressing nationalist and anti-imperialist currents in Cuban society, had become untenable. Amid mounting unrest, Machado was deposed, and a revolutionary coalition under Ramón Grau San Martín emerged, seeking to challenge Cuba’s semi-colonial status. But the United States refused to recognize it. The resulting instability created conditions for the rise of one of the more conservative figures within the anti-Machado coalition, army officer Fulgencio Batista, who in 1934 deposed the short-lived government and consolidated de facto power in his own hands with the backing of Washington.
The Roots of the Cuban Revolution
Batista would directly or indirectly pull the political strings in Cuba for much of the next quarter century. Though his earlier rule adopted a more populist posture, culminating in his election to the presidency from 1940 to 1944, life improved little for Cubans. Corruption and dependence on foreign capital remained entrenched. And by 1952, Batista had seized power outright in a military coup, inaugurating an authoritarian regime backed by increased state violence.
It was Batista’s rise, coupled with decades of economic disparities, political repression, and social neglect, that created conditions that were ripe for revolution. Among those preparing to contest the suspended elections that year was a young lawyer named Fidel Castro. Batista’s closure of even the limited avenues for democratic change lent weight to John F. Kennedy’s later observation that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
For more than six decades then, Cuba has represented the “threat” of example: the possibility of building a more just and humane society in which the state serves the people and not the other way around.
Castro’s first revolutionary assault came soon after, with the attack on the Moncada Barracks on July 26, 1953. Though the attack failed, Castro’s arrest and trial gave him the opportunity to defend not his innocence, but the legitimacy of and need for revolution, delivering a two-hour speech that condemned the island’s entrenched inequalities and the regime that sustained them.
The state imprisoned Castro and his fellow revolutionaries before commuting their sentences under popular pressure in 1955, after which they went into exile. From Mexico, joined by Che Guevara, they began plotting their return to Cuba and the overthrow of the regime. By late 1956, they had landed in Cuba and launched their insurgency from the Sierra Maestra mountains. Just two years later, Batista fled the country on New Year’s Day 1959, carrying with him as much as $300 million in siphoned state funds and ill-gotten gains amassed at the expense of the Cuban people, while leaving behind the ruins of a regime stained with the blood of as many as 20,000 Cubans.
Counterrevolution in the Caribbean
In 1959, the new leadership inherited a desiccated country picked over by the buzzards of foreign capital and a corrupted local elite. The Cuban revolutionaries set out to overcome these conditions and construct a more just social order, one capable of guaranteeing a basic standard of living long denied to the Cuban population through the misappropriation of the island’s wealth and resources.
The earliest measures included agrarian reform, universal education, a national literacy campaign, expanded healthcare, urban reforms that opened pathways to homeownership for working-class Cubans, and anti-discrimination laws aimed at dismantling entrenched racial hierarchies. Crucially for the trajectory of US-Cuban relations, the revolution also nationalized parasitic foreign-owned and privatized industries.
The new Cuban government was initially met with a degree of popular appeal and favorable media coverage in the United States, further amplified by Fidel Castro’s April 1959 visit to the country, during which he sought to explain the revolution to American audiences. While in Washington, Castro even met with Vice President Richard Nixon, but the Eisenhower administration quickly soured on the revolutionary government and soon resolved to see it fail.
The concern was not Cuba itself, but what the revolution might represent. As State Department official J.C. Hill warned that year, “there are indications that if the Cuban Revolution is successful other countries in Latin America and perhaps elsewhere will use it as a model and we should decide whether or not we wish to have the Cuban Revolution succeed.”
By October 1960, that decision had effectively been made with the imposition of a blockade on the island. The logic underpinning this economic declaration of war was made explicit in a memo by State Department official Lester Mallory. Recognizing that Castro retained widespread popular support, Mallory concluded that the most effective means of undermining him was the deliberate immiseration of the Cuban people. The memo called for the denial of “money and supplies” to the island in order to produce “hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.”
In April 1961, Washington escalated its campaign by backing a direct military assault on the island. Yet the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion did little to temper the obsession with unseating Castro. In the aftermath, consensus hardened across the Kennedy administration that “US policy toward Cuba should aim at the downfall of Castro.” What followed was an expansive campaign of covert warfare involving sabotage, assassination plots, and support for anti-communist exiles.
Among the proposals considered were plans to manufacture consent for military escalation through false provocations. One suggestion was to “develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area… pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States… [which] would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.” Other proposals called for false flag attacks on the US navy and the shooting down of a civilian airliner that would then be blamed on the Cuban government.
This single-minded fixation did little to advance US objectives. Instead, it pushed Cuba further toward the Soviet Union, which offered the island an economic and political lifeline in the face of Washington’s blockade and escalating campaign of destabilization. It was within this context that Castro declared the Marxist-Leninist character of the Cuban Revolution in 1961. The relentless threats to the island also fostered a profound and understandable sense of siege within the Cuban government itself.
Ultimately, Washington’s Cuba policy, combined with what Kennedy privately described as the “goddamned dangerous” deployment of US missiles in Turkey, helped create the conditions for the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, bringing the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust and revealing the extent to which the US was willing to risk a senseless, largely self-imposed global catastrophe in defense of the maintenance of its empire.
The Persistent “Threat” of Example
Despite this long war against Cuba, the Cuban government and people have not abandoned their revolutionary project. They have continued to build socialism and a new social order toward what Che Guevara described as the construction of “new [people]”: human beings whose motivations, commitments, and social relations are not governed by opportunistic self-interest at the expense of others, but by solidarity and a shared sense of collective humanity.
Cuba has consistently sought to demonstrate this commitment on the world stage. One of Fidel Castro’s earliest acts of foreign policy was the support of those seeking to liberate the Dominican Republic from the brutal US-backed dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. In the decades that followed, Cuban soldiers and advisers would play major roles in liberation struggles across Africa, including in Algeria, the Congo, Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau.
For those living in the belly of the beast, we bear a clear moral and political responsibility to stand alongside the Cuban people, those on the island, to oppose the violence being carried out in our name.
Cuba’s foreign interventions proved especially consequential in the struggle against South African apartheid and white minority rule in Southern Africa. It was this material solidarity that led Nelson Mandela to declare during his 1991 visit to Havana that “the Cuban people hold a special place in the hearts of the peoples of Africa,” traveling to Cuba shortly after his release from prison.
But Cuba’s principal export to the Third World has not been bombs to take lives, as in the case of the United States. It has sent doctors to provide life. Since 1960, Cuba has dispatched more than 600,000 medical professionals to over 160 countries. In doing so, Cuba has advanced not only the principle and practice that healthcare is a human right, but a vision of education and foreign policy rooted in both science and conscience.
For more than six decades then, Cuba has represented the “threat” of example: the possibility of building a more just and humane society in which the state serves the people and not the other way around. It is time to end the madness of US policy toward Cuba and recognize that Cuba is not a failed state, but a state subjected to a criminal siege. It is not a sponsor of terrorism, but the victim of sustained US aggression.
For those living in the belly of the beast, we bear a clear moral and political responsibility to stand alongside the Cuban people, those on the island, to oppose the violence being carried out in our name. Cuba, like all those confronting US empire, deserves not the “freedom” of the grave that Washington has so often offered the world, but a true freedom rooted in justice, self-determination, and respect for human life and dignity.
We must therefore demand an end to the blockade on Cuba. We must reject any further military escalation. We must call for Cuba’s removal from the state sponsors of terrorism list. And we must support the restoration of Cuban sovereignty over the occupied territory at Guantánamo Bay.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Join the Growing Movement to End Deadly Sanctions
The cruelty of the blockade on Cuba reveals the heavy humanitarian toll of Unilateral Coercive Measures.
Apr 28, 2026
This spring people have been raising awareness of the harms caused by Unilateral Coercive Measures, UCMs or “sanctions”. Sanctions have become the “go-to” foreign policy tool of the United States government, now impacting a quarter of the global economy and one-third of the world’s population. These measures cause an average of 564,000 deaths around the world annually—comparable to the toll from armed conflict—mostly among children under 5 years old.
On April 22 Congress held a briefing on “Humanitarian Impacts of Economic Sanctions, Cuba as a Case Study,” with three outside experts: Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic Policy, co-author of the largest study ever conducted on the impacts of sanctions on mortality; David Paul, co-founder of the SanctionsKill campaign, retired nurse practitioner, and co-author of a letter from health workers to Congress about child deaths from sanctions; and Danny Valdes, co-founder of Cuban Americans for Cuba, who shared the perspective of bi-national families impacted by the longstanding and escalating US blockade of Cuba.
Economist Weisbrot said that 71% of the world’s broad economic sanctions are imposed by the United States. These unilateral measures violate international law by deliberately targeting civilian populations for collective punishment in the hope of bringing about regime change, and may even constitute war crimes. In addition to his global study, Weisbrot has compiled research that found US sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry caused the worst depression in world history outside of wartime, leading to 40,000 excess deaths in just one year, from 2017-2018. And current data on Cuba shows a strained health system and deteriorating health indicators, such as a doubling of infant mortality over the past eight years due to the tightening of the US blockade.
David Paul painted a devastating picture of life in Cuba under escalated coercive measures, especially the fuel blockade which is causing massive power outages and disrupts transportation, the production and distribution of food, refrigeration, water and sanitation, and the operation of ambulances and lifesaving medical equipment. He said this is not an embargo, but an actual blockade of the island. “People in the US government make the false claim that ‘Cuba can buy all the medicines wherever they want.’ It’s a total lie, when in reality all their banking transactions are blocked. [The US] will threaten and punish any corporation—domestic or international—or government, that trades with you. But you are free to buy!”
One parent asked, “Why is the president of the United States deciding whether my son lives or dies?”
More pregnant women are starting prenatal care late and suffering from malnutrition, which results in premature births and low birth weights. More babies are at risk of dying from congenital malformations because of the shortage of functioning diagnostic equipment like ultrasounds needed to detect them. Half of all essential medicines are no longer available in the country, as Cuba cannot even import the raw materials needed to keep its pharmaceutical industry afloat. Children are dying from treatable cancers due to lack of medicines, and physicians are hand-pumping ventilators for their patients when the lights go out. Heartbroken Cuban doctors tell parents, “We know what medicine your daughter needs to treat her cancer, we know where it is, but we can’t get it because they won’t sell it to us.” One parent asked, “Why is the president of the United States deciding whether my son lives or dies?”
Valdes reported an exponential deterioration of conditions on the island between his visits in October 2025 and March 2026, due to the lack of fuel, such as health problems caused by uncollected garbage in the streets of Havana. He says that some blame Cuba exclusively for these troubles, but one cannot deny the role played by US policy. Cuban Americans are impacted because they cannot easily visit relatives or efficiently send them remittances, which can make the difference “between eating and not eating; between accessing medicines and going without.” He noted that the Florida International University poll, running since 1991, reports that 52% of Cuban Americans support the embargo, yet 70% also support the sale of medicine to Cuba. This shows they are not actually in favor of maximum pressure policies.
The host of the briefing, Congresswoman Delia Ramírez (D-Ill.), is a strong proponent of respectful and constructive US foreign policy. She is a leading co-sponsor of H.Res. 1056, which calls for a reset of US relations with Latin America and the Caribbean, including the end of all unilateral economic sanctions. The congresswoman indicated that from Presidents James Monroe to Donald Trump, US interventionism has left a legacy of destruction and distrust, which never leads to peace and democracy.
Congress is gaining awareness of these injustices. A growing number of lawmakers are working to curtail the threat of military force against Cuba, and several signed a statement condemning the ongoing blockade and have endorsed legislation to end it. Some even use the proper terminology, calling for an end to “coercive economic measures.” Are they finally listening to the demands of the American people to end the longest blockade in history? Ever more people are moved to act. During its Congressional Advocacy Day on April 15, Doctors Against Genocide insisted that Cuba be allowed to import medical supplies and pushed legislation to lift the blockade.
We must take advantage of this moment to grow the movement to expose the human cost of sanctions and work to end them. Popular education materials are available on the SanctionsKill website, such as the Sanctions Toolkit. A recent webinar titled “Sanctions Undermine Children’s Right to Health” uses Cuba and Venezuela as case studies to illustrate these impacts and propose a new approach to human rights, such as the Peoples-Centered Human Rights framework.
As stated in the Letter calling on Congress to end child-killing sanctions, “Imposing collective punishment on the innocent is morally reprehensible. It must stop.” Join the fight to end Unilateral Coercive Measures by contacting AmericasWithoutSanctions@gmail.com, a project of the SanctionsKill campaign.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'We're Literally Starving Them': GOP Senator Gloats That Iranians 'Can't Feed Themselves' Because of Trump Blockade
One foreign policy analyst said the senator was effectively admitting that “we’re literally committing crimes against humanity.”
Apr 23, 2026
A Republican US senator proudly declared that President Donald Trump's blockade of Iranian ports is "starving" Iranians on Wednesday, in yet another piece of counterevidence to the idea that the president's war there is meant to "liberate" the people.
"We have this embargo working, this blockade, and we're literally starving them," said Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) during an interview on Newsmax. "Both financially, and they can't feed themselves either, very long."
During the same interview, Marshall said Trump must “take everything into consideration” to finish the war against Iran and compared the decision Trump must make to "President [Harry] Truman’s decision on dropping the bomb, and D-Day for President [then-Gen. Dwight] Eisenhower.”
The comments came after Trump announced that he would extend a two-week ceasefire while continuing his naval blockade of Iranian ports, enacted as a counter to Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has caused chaos and inflation across the global economy.
It was yet another 180-degree spin from Trump, who just days before had issued another genocidal threat to "blow up" the "whole country" of Iran, including civilian infrastructure, if it did not capitulate to his demands in a ceasefire agreement, which was roundly condemned by international organizations as a pledge to commit war crimes.
The Iranian population suffered tremendously under Trump's "maximum pressure sanctions" before the war, which fueled 58% food inflation year over year in September 2025.
The war launched by the US and Israel in February has only heightened the pain: Last month, Iran's inflation rate hit a record 72%, and the cost of its staple food basket soared to 134% compared with the previous year.
More than 750,000 jobs had been lost as of last week, and the United Nations Development Program predicted that Iran's economy could contract by as much as 10% as a result of the war. In just 40 days of war, the UNDP found that 3.5-4.1 million Iranians have fallen below the poverty line.
Trump's blockade of Iranian ports has tightened the noose even more, cutting off about 90% of the nation's maritime trade.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the blockade immediately affected nearly a million tons of grain and oilseeds. Prices for commodities like rice, which have already increased sevenfold in recent months, are expected to soar even further.
While Iran is much larger and more self-sufficient than Cuba, the blockade mirrors the economic warfare Trump has waged against the island in what he has said is an effort to force its leadership from power or outright "take" it for the US.
The blockade of fuel shipments to the island enacted through tariff threats has paralyzed its economy and resulted in rolling blackouts that have disrupted hospital care, agriculture, and every other facet of daily life for the Cuban people, drawing condemnation from United Nations human rights experts, who have called it a "serious violation of international law" and an act of "extreme unilateral economic coercion."
The Trump administration and its cheerleaders in Congress have not been shy about their goal for sanctions in Iran—to inflict suffering upon the people of Iran in hopes that they will rise up and overthrow their governmen. But Marshall's declaration that Trump was trying to "starve" Iran was seen by critics as an even more explicit endorsement of collective punishment than most.
Dylan Williams, the vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, said it confirmed that Trump was pitching "genocide as a tactic in Iran."
In less than two months, at least 1,700 civilians have been killed, including more than 250 children, according to the US-based Human Rights Activist News Agency. More than 26,000 people have been injured, according to the Iranian Health Ministry.
The international affairs researcher Derek Davison wrote that by cheering a policy he said was "literally starving" Iran, Marshall was basically saying: "We're literally committing crimes against humanity. It's awesome."
Keep ReadingShow Less
After Visit, US Lawmakers Say ‘Cruel Collective Punishment’ of Cuba Must End Immediately
Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Jonathan Jackson described Trump's blockade of the island as "effectively an economic bombing of the infrastructure of the country that has produced permanent damage."
Apr 06, 2026
After returning from a delegation trip to Cuba, US Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Jonathan Jackson on Sunday renewed calls for President Donald Trump to end his illegal fuel blockade of the island, which they described as "cruel collective punishment."
The pair of progressive lawmakers were the first to visit the island since Trump imposed the blockade in January in a bid to cripple the island's economy as part of an effort to overthrow its government, or, in the president's words, "take" the island.
Almost no oil has been allowed to enter for more than three months, which Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Jackson (D-Ill.) described as "effectively an economic bombing of the infrastructure of the country—that has produced permanent damage."
"We witnessed firsthand premature babies in incubators, weighing just two pounds, who are at tremendous risk because their ventilators and incubators cannot function without electricity," they said. "Children cannot attend school because there is no fuel for them or their teachers to travel. Cancer patients cannot receive lifesaving treatments because of a lack of medications."
"There is a water shortage because there is little electricity to pump water," they continued. "Businesses have closed. Families cannot keep food refrigerated, and food production on the island has dropped to just 10% of the people’s needs."
The oil blockade is an escalation of more than 60 years of punitive economic warfare by the US against Cuba, imposed through an embargo that has limited Cuba's ability to trade with the rest of the world and hampered its economic development to the tune of trillions of dollars.
Jayapal had previously visited Cuba in February 2024 on a trip with other members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Since her last time in Havana, she said, "There's such a big difference."
"So many of the streets of this beautiful city were deserted. People were already lining up for food," she said in an interview with the Cuban outlet Belly of the Beast. "I don't think that any American wants to create this kind of devastation for the Cuban children, for the babies, for the moms, for the people."
She said the phrase "collective punishment," while accurate, almost felt "too technocratic" to describe what she witnessed.
"We are strangling the Cuban people," Jayapal said.
The United Nations General Assembly has voted 33 times to call for the end of the embargo since 1993.
In February, a group of UN experts condemned Trump's fuel blockade as "a serious violation of international law and a grave threat to a democratic and equitable international order" and an "extreme form of unilateral economic coercion."
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel has acknowledged having talks with Trump in recent weeks in order to negotiate an end to the embargo and threats of further aggression.
The Cuban government has taken actions that the lawmakers described as "signs that Cuba is changing." It has released more than 2,000 prisoners, announced economic reforms to allow more involvement of American businesses, and allowed the FBI to investigate Cuban troops' lethal shooting of five armed Cuban exiles as they approached in a speedboat in February.
While hardly softening his threats to Cuba, which he continued to insist was “finished,” Trump last week allowed a Russian oil tanker to dock on the island without incident and deliver around 700,000 barrels of much-needed oil.
But the lawmakers said it's not enough. Jackson, noting the "generosity" of Cuba as a provider of medical treatment around the world, said the US must allow food and fuel to be allowed to return to the island "so that the Cuban people can continue to rise."
Jayapal said that when they spoke with Diaz-Canel, he expressed "a real desire for a real negotiation" with the US, but that he also expressed "sadness" and "frustration" at what was being done to his country.
"These kinds of sanctions, embargoes, they don't get to the government. They hurt the people," Jayapal said. "Perhaps the American people don't understand the violence of an economic sanction versus the violence of dropping a bomb."
Jackson—whose father, the late Rev. Jesse Jackson, took many trips to Cuba during his life—described America's treatment of the nation’s people as a “crucifixion.”
"Americans would not want to see what I saw in that hospital," Jackson said, describing a malnourished baby named Alejandro, whom he said was "fighting for life."
Due to the intermittent power surges caused by the lack of fuel, he said, "We didn't know when the incubator was going to start working."
"That's an act of war," he said. "We have to put an end to that."
He added that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, himself a Cuban-American who has long sought to bring about regime change, "should come before the Congress and explain his policy."
In late March, Jayapal introduced legislation that would block Trump from conducting military action against Cuba without congressional authorization. She said she'd continue to push for bills to block Trump from launching a war and to push for sanctions relief.
The Trump administration has portrayed its economic warfare as part of an effort to "liberate" the Cuban people from an oppressive government.
But the lawmakers, who met with wide swaths of Cuban society—including business and religious leaders, humanitarian groups, and civil society organizations—said that "Cubans across the political spectrum," including anti-government dissidents, expressed similar feelings.
"Across all sectors, there is agreement," they said. "This illegal blockade must end immediately."
Keep ReadingShow Less
US Sanctions on Venezuela Continue: Corporate Beneficiaries and a Targeted Society
Under a hybrid system of sanctions and licenses, control is maintained and money is made.
Mar 25, 2026
In the wake of Washington’s January 3 military attack and then problematic détente with Caracas, corporate media suggest a meaningful shift in Venezuela policy, implying relief for a country long subjected to economic coercion. However, far from dismantling the sanctions regime, the US has merely adjusted its application through licensing mechanisms, leaving the core structure of coercive measures fully intact.
Reuters reported, “US lifts some Venezuela sanctions,” followed by news of sanctions being further “eased.” Both NBC News and ABC News likewise reported sanctions “eased,” while the Financial Times wrote that Washington “relaxes sanctions.” Reuters later found that “US waives many of the sanctions,” and the Los Angeles Times noted “targeted relief from sanctions.” The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) described a “huge easing of sanctions.”
Not a Single Sanction Has Been Rescinded
In fact, there is no evidence of any revocation of executive orders, removal of Venezuela-related sanctions authorities, and certainly no formal termination or suspension of Washington’s sanctions regime.
At a February 21 meeting I attended in Venezuela, Anti-Blockade Vice Minister William Castillo described sanctions as a “policy of extermination.” These measures, “the most cruel aggression against our people,” had been renewed the day before by President Donald Trump. To do so, he had to certify the original mistruth first fabricated by Barack Obama in 2015: that Venezuela poses an “extraordinary threat” to US national security.
As grave as the direct US military aggression has been—including 157 fatalities since last September in alleged drug interdictions of small craft in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific—the body count from the coercive economic measures has been far higher.
Castillo cited 1,087 measures imposed by the US and another 916 by its echo, the European Union. These unilateral coercive measures have a corrosive effect on popular support for the government, which is precisely the purpose of this form of collective punishment, illegal under international law.
In 2023, Castillo described Washington’s economic aggression as a means to destroy Venezuela without having to invade. The Bolivarian Revolution’s successful resistance, including positive GDP growth while under siege, suggests why the US felt compelled to escalate with a military incursion on January 3, killing over 100 and kidnapping the country’s lawful head of state and his wife.
In Castillo’s words, the US escalated from “a war without gunpowder… against the civilian population” to an actual one. As grave as the direct US military aggression has been—including 157 fatalities since last September in alleged drug interdictions of small craft in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific—the body count from the coercive economic measures has been far higher. Former United Nations Special Rapporteur Alfred de Zayas estimated that sanctions have caused over 100,000 excess deaths.
There is even a literal playbook on how to apply sanctions to inflict “pain” on civilians for “maximum effectiveness.” The author of The Art of Sanctions is Richard Nephew, a former US State Department senior official in the Biden administration who was responsible for implementing such policies.
Licenses vs. sanctions
What has happened in practice is a much more limited form of relief under the sanctions regime. The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) has issued broad licenses allowing certain dealings primarily with Venezuela’s state oil (PDVSA) and gold (Minerven) sectors.
OFAC licenses carve out limited exceptions principally benefiting US and other foreign corporations, not necessarily the Venezuelan people. Activities are authorized that would otherwise be illegal under US law, even though such activities are lawful under international law. They come with conditions, limits, and reporting requirements and can be revoked at any time.
In practical terms, sanctions remain in place, although certain transactions are temporarily allowed under strict licensing rules. “The result is a hybrid scheme in which formal sanctions and operational licenses coexist, enabling limited flows of economic activity,” according to Misión Verdad.
This flexible arrangement of sanctions combined with licenses allows US and other foreign corporations to make a profit off of the coercive system. Under sanctions alone, the targeted people overwhelmingly suffer but, secondarily, US and other corporations are shut out. Under this hybrid system, control is maintained and money is made.
However, most foreign investors are reluctant to make important investment decisions when there is uncertainty, especially given Mr. Trump’s mercurial reputation. A temporary license does not provide the security that corporations normally require. Recuperating the Venezuelan oil industry would necessitate “a gigantic investment.” Such investments will be unlikely if Venezuela is sanctioned, the licenses notwithstanding.
Media Framing and Blaming
Meanwhile, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and “First Combatant” Cilia Flores remain in a New York City jail, reportedly in solitary confinement.
Regarding what happened on January 3, corporate media sources overwhelmingly use relatively anodyne terms such as “downfall,” “removal,” or “ouster,” rather than the more pointed “kidnapping” or “abduction.” When the legality of this clearly illegal act of war is questioned by either the media or by the Democrats, it is mainly confined to whether President Trump required congressional approval.
Likewise, application of international law regarding the illegality of unilateral coercive measures is largely absent from media coverage. Where legal issues appear, they tend to address mechanics (e.g., the US-controlled fund arrangement), rather than whether sanctions themselves violate international law.
Acting President Delcy Rodríguez views ending interference by foreign actors in Venezuela’s internal affairs as a precondition for credible elections.
When media outlets express concern about Washington’s restrictions, it is often that easing them would “reward Maduro loyalists.” While the plight of the Venezuelan people may be acknowledged, the blame is mainly attributed to corruption and economic mismanagement, with little if any opprobrium for sanctions.
As former political science professor at the Universidad de Oriente Steve Ellner (pers. comm.), notes, corruption and mismanagement do exist. But the overwhelming factor has been the sanctions regime. The blockade targeted Venezuela’s oil industry—at one point accounting for 99% of foreign-exchange earnings—forcing the country out of normal dollar-denominated markets and into black markets to survive.
What Alfred de Zayas dubs the “human rights industry” similarly exhibits a convenient blind spot regarding sanctions. WOLA, for example, advocates “addressing the complex humanitarian emergency.” Yet the NGO strongly opposes sanctions relief for the people, because the coercive measures are such an effective “pressure” tool on the leadership.
Former WOLA staffer David Smilde is preoccupied with “restoring” American-style democracy by imposing pressure on the “regime.” He argues, “The democratic transition in Venezuela… requires the support of international organizations.”
In contrast, acting President Delcy Rodríguez views ending interference by foreign actors in Venezuela’s internal affairs as a precondition for credible elections. In particular, she calls for the US “blockade and sanctions against Venezuela [to] cease.” With sanctions still in place, the US remains the biggest obstacle to free and fair elections in Venezuela.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Rubble of Gaza and the Ghosts of Tokyo
The WWII firebombing of Tokyo marked the crossing of a moral Rubicon from which the US has yet to return, setting the precedent for the normalization of the deliberate annihilation of urban centers as an acceptable instrument of modern warfare.
Mar 10, 2026
Amid the so-called “ceasefire,” as imperial grifters and disaster capitalists jockey to remake Gaza in their image and in accordance with their own interests, the genocide has not abated. In its current phase, while the killing continues daily, its defining feature is the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, in whole or in part. From the outset, Israel has pursued this objective through a policy of urbicide: the systematic annihilation of Gaza City, Khan Younis, Rafah, Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya, and Deir al-Balah.
Palestinians remain steadfast in their refusal to be erased. Yet Israel’s assault has rendered Gaza nearly uninhabitable. This devastation cannot be easily dismissed with antiseptic euphemisms such as “collateral damage,” a term long employed to sanitize the mass slaughter of civilians. Intent can be inferred from actions, and policy from sustained patterns of conduct.
Even setting aside the relentless stream of genocidal rhetoric, the campaign bears all the hallmarks of design. That Israel commands one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world further erodes the pretense that those killed were unintended casualties rather than the victims of deliberate targeting, or at least a wanton indifference to civilian life.
Still, denial persists. US Ambassador Mike Huckabee recently suggested that Israel has exercised extraordinary restraint. The record tells a different story. More than 81% of structures in Gaza are damaged or destroyed. Little has been spared: homes, hospitals, markets, and schools. In the first 16 months alone, Israel killed at least 75,000 Palestinians, precipitating a 34.9-year collapse in life expectancy in Gaza. This is a demographic shock rivaling or exceeding those witnessed in Bosnia and Rwanda. The true toll, with countless bodies entombed beneath the rubble, certainly surpasses the official numbers.
The early architects of aerial Armageddon sought not only the obliteration of cities but also the erosion of the longstanding principle of civilian immunity.
We have not seen such systematic urban destruction since World War II. Gaza, a captive enclave with a besieged population that is nearly half children and one of the most densely populated places on Earth, has endured six times the explosive tonnage equivalent of the Hiroshima bomb. This comparison has not been lost on observers, from A-bomb survivors to Holocaust historians.
Yet Hiroshima and Nagasaki then, and Gaza today, would have been largely unimaginable without the firebombing of Tokyo that preceded it 81 years ago. On the night of March 9-10, 1945, American bombers turned a “paper city” into a hellish inferno, incinerating some 100,000 Japanese civilians in the single most destructive air raid in history. The attack did more than raze Tokyo; it marked the crossing of a moral Rubicon from which the US has yet to return, setting the precedent for the normalization of the deliberate annihilation of urban centers as an acceptable instrument of modern warfare.
The End of the Peace and the Emergence of Air Power
The road to Tokyo began in the trenches. At the turn of the 20th century, war was largely conceived of as a conflict between conventional armies. Consequently, civilians comprised only 5% of the dead. The First World War marked a dramatic escalation, raising that figure to more than 15% of violent deaths. By World War II, civilians constituted roughly 65%. In Gaza today, more than 80% of those killed are civilians.
The initial leap in destructiveness, as the mechanized mass killing of World War I left vast swaths of the globe strewn with mutilated bodies of a lost generation, produced contradictory responses. For many, the senseless slaughter made clear that armed conflict could no longer be seen as politics by other means. Whatever rationales states historically invoked to sanctify organized violence collapsed, as war waged with modern technology revealed itself to all parties as little more than industrialized murder-suicide.
In the aftermath of this carnage arose a wave of internationalist political utopianism. The nascent League of Nations promised a forum in which states could resolve conflicts through diplomacy. The 1925 Geneva Protocol sought to ban the worst excesses of the recent war, prohibiting chemical and biological weapons. The 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact went further, renouncing war altogether. To many, it seemed conceivable that it truly had been the war to end all wars.
Collective punishment against civilians succeeds only in making war more horrific and criminal while failing to render it significantly shorter.
Yet such sentiments soon yielded to geopolitical realities and to a mounting conviction that future wars could not be prevented, only won. For a new generation of military strategists, the stalemate of the trenches was less a cautionary tale than a technical problem to be solved. As Italian General Giulio Douhet insisted, the answer was air power. Bombers could fly over the front lines, shatter societies from above, and deliver decisive victory.
The early architects of aerial Armageddon sought not only the obliteration of cities but also the erosion of the longstanding principle of civilian immunity. If noncombatants could not be targeted outright, then the definition of “civilian” had to be stretched to the point of incoherence. Military planners justified this shift with a perverse claim that targeting civilians was the humanitarian path, since swift, concentrated destruction would supposedly end wars more quickly.
As US Army Air Forces General Curtis LeMay later put it, in war “you’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting.” Others insisted that in a total war there were in effect no civilians. If workers contributed to the war effort, willingly or not, directly or indirectly, they could legitimately be struck in their factories or “dehoused” in their homes.
In less crude terms, with the veneer of scientific theory to legitimize the practice, a cadre of defense intellectuals advanced the idea that “morale,” or the collective will to fight, could itself be treated as a target. Yet as historian Ran Zwigenberg makes plain, morale was an imprecise and nebulous concept, and merely served as “another abstraction that allowed for the indiscriminate killing of civilians.” The “psychological science” behind it, the claim that societies possess a breaking point, rested on little empirical evidence.
This conclusion was not borne out in Britain, where Nazi bombing during the Blitz failed to break resistance. Its validity was further undermined after the war by the findings of the US Strategic Bombing Survey. Ultimately, as Robert Pape concluded in Bombing to Win, bombing civilians has rarely, if ever, proved decisive in compelling governments to concede or collapse and, if anything it stiffens resolve. In short, collective punishment against civilians succeeds only in making war more horrific and criminal while failing to render it significantly shorter.
The Shattering of the Bombing Taboo
Washington was slow to embrace this descent into unrestrained aerial warfare. This was a practice that in the 1920s and 1930s, became increasingly commonplace: Britain in Iraq, Italy in Abyssinia and Spain alongside Nazi Germany, and Japan in China. Such campaigns were widely condemned for what they were, a fundamental breach of the laws of war.
Some prescient observers recognized where this trajectory would inevitably lead. Leo Szilard, who would soon serve as a central catalyst in the development of the atomic bomb, warned even before such a weapon was feasible that the logic of aerial bombardment pointed toward catastrophe. “The discoveries of scientists,” he cautioned, “have given weapons to mankind which may destroy our present civilization if we do not succeed in avoiding future wars.”
It was in Japan that the US would most fully embrace its identity as a “bombing country” (having bombed more than 30 countries since 1945).
But the clearest expression of American opposition came from President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself. On the first day of World War II, he called on the warring parties to renounce the “inhuman barbarism” that was “the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities.” Even months into the fighting, he doubled down, emphasizing that the United States has long “pursued a policy of wholeheartedly condemning the unprovoked bombing and machine gunning of civilian populations from the air.”
Yet with the US entry into the war, Washington quickly disregarded this prior prohibition, joining the British in bombing German industrial cities. The campaign, justified as retaliation for the Blitz, during which the Nazis killed 43,000 civilians, would inflict more than 10 times the fatalities. As John Gordon of the Sunday Express wrote approvingly, “Germany, the originator of war by air terror, is now finding that terror recoiling on herself with an intensity that even Hitler in his most sadistic dreams never thought possible.”
Given the wartime mobilization and the existential stakes, it is perhaps unsurprising that there was little opposition to these Allied tactics. But it was not nonexistent. A small transatlantic coalition of pacifists and religious leaders under the banner of the Bombing Restriction Committee, issued a series of pamphlets condemning the immorality and strategic shortsightedness of the campaign. They warned if the Allies resorted to the tactics of the Nazis, they risked replicating in victory the very methods they claimed to be fighting to defeat.
Among those who called attention to the perilous precedent being set was the American theologian, John Ford. Responding to the claim that virtually everyone in an industrial society constituted a legitimate military target, Ford pointed out that in an average city such as Boston at most a quarter of the population could plausibly be said to work in war industry. The vast majority were therefore incontrovertibly protected under international law. “Even in the most totally war-minded country in the world,” he insisted, “certainly innocent civilians far outnumber those whose status could be considered doubtful.” Phrases such as “military necessity,” he warned, had consequently become little more than “a mere catchword, and a cloak for every sort of excess.”
Yet the drumbeat of war drowned out dissent over the means in pursuit of the end of the war. From generals and government officials to Walt Disney and the Looney Tunes, air power was celebrated across American political and cultural life. Yet the most destructive phase was to come. It was in Japan that the US would most fully embrace its identity as a “bombing country” (having bombed more than 30 countries since 1945).
The Long Shadow of Tokyo
In January 1945, Curtis LeMay assumed command of the strategic air campaign against Japan. For the next eight months, he would preside over the firebombing of 67 Japanese cities. The campaign began in force on March 9-10, 1945, with Operation Meetinghouse. That night, 334 B-29 bombers circled the skies over Tokyo, unleashing 1,665 tons of napalm on densely populated neighborhoods below. Tokyo was a tinderbox. Within hours, the city was transformed into a sea of flame and, by morning, reduced to a landscape of ash.
The napalm, a gelatinous petroleum-based weapon developed at Harvard in 1942, burned to death up to 200,000 people, by some more recent estimates. The raid charred at least 15 square miles of the city and left more than a million homeless. In the aftermath, the New York Times suggested that 1 to 2 million people were killed. While a clear exaggeration, such sensationalist reports revealed something valuable to military planners: The public had an appetite for merciless violence against the “enemy.” This perception helped give a green light not only for the continued months of bombing but also for the atomic bombings that followed.
But despite relying on the language of military necessity, the Tokyo bombing scarcely maintained the pretense of striking military targets. With the military deployed to the front lines, it was women and children, the sick and injured, and the elderly who remained behind. The aerial campaign thus amounted to a policy of collective punishment: mass killing carried out in the hope that it would produce favorable political outcomes. In other words, it was a policy of terrorism.
The mass killing of civilian populations from the air was not repudiated but quietly institutionalized.
This logic was evident in the planning itself. In 1944, the United States began constructing model Japanese homes to test these new tactics. As a short film produced by the First Motion Picture Unit explained, Tokyo was devastated by an earlier earthquake. The city center was rebuilt in a sturdier architectural style that stood in stark contrast to the “sprawling, flimsy wooden paper slums” that housed “millions of Japanese workers.” The “man-made earthquakes” that were to be unleashed by the bombers, as the narrator promised, were never tested against replica government buildings or industrial sites. They were only designed to set ablaze the homes of civilians.
The planners of the raid understood the implications. As LeMay himself reportedly remarked, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” Yet at both the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, where Nazi and Japanese high officials were prosecuted for their crimes, aerial bombardment of cities was conspicuously absent from the indictments.
Despite the hundreds of thousands killed from the air, the clear illegality of the practice was never seriously scrutinized. Telford Taylor, the chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, acknowledged the contradiction in his final report to the War Department. Even “if the first badly bombed cities… were suffered at the hands of the Germans,” he wrote, the subsequent bombings “were the results not of reprisal but of deliberate policy, and bore eloquent witness that aerial bombardment of cities and factories has become a recognized part of modern warfare as carried on by all nations.”
To prosecute others for methods the Allies themselves had refined would have exposed the trials to even stronger charges of victor’s justice and might have placed limits on the use of such tactics in the future. Instead, the precedent was left undisturbed. In this way, a fundamental hypocrisy was embedded in the emerging postwar legal order. The mass killing of civilian populations from the air was not repudiated but quietly institutionalized.
The consequences have reverberated ever since. The laying waste to German and Japanese cities was followed by the millions killed in Korea and Vietnam. In recent decades, aerial campaigns have claimed tens of thousands of lives in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iran, and beyond. The rubble of Gaza today serves as the latest horrific reminder that the central lesson of this history remains unlearned: that might does not make right; that bombing can unleash endless horrors in war but cannot bring peace.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The US Must Stop Asphyxiating Cuba Now
Cuba should not be treated as a political chess piece to demonstrate US economic and military might.
Feb 05, 2026
Since the Cuban Revolution overthrew a US-backed dictatorship and asserted national independence, Cuba has remained in the United States' crosshairs. The country has endured nearly 600 assassination attempts against its leadership, along with countless covert and overt operations aimed at destabilizing its government. For more than six decades, the US has also imposed an economic embargo explicitly designed to bring about regime change.
By any honest measure, this policy has failed. What it has succeeded in doing is fostering deep resentment toward the United States, not only in Cuba, but across much of the world, while inflicting immense suffering on ordinary Cubans.
Basic necessities such as food, paint, printing paper, baby formula, syringes, and other lifesaving supplies, including vaccines and cancer treatment drugs, are either restricted by the embargo or priced far beyond most people’s reach. A simple walk through Havana tells the story: crumbling infrastructure, uncollected trash, and growing numbers of people gathering near tourist areas, hands outstretched in desperation.
Fuel shortages are widespread, inflation is at historic highs, and a sharp decline in tourism, Cuba’s primary economic lifeline, has made daily life nearly unbearable for many.
It is time for the United States to respect Cuba’s sovereignty and lift the embargo and accompanying sanctions.
In response, the Cuban government has expanded the private sector, legalized small- and medium-sized enterprises, decentralized food production, and opened its markets to limited foreign investment, all while attempting to maintain the core socialist principles of the revolution. It has also reduced reliance on fossil fuels, slowly shifting to solar energy. In 2025, renewable energy accounted for more than 10% of Cuba’s energy consumption, an increase from 3% the year before.
Yet these measures alone cannot offset the outsize impact of US policy and the blockade, which has been dramatically tightened in recent months. The latest effort to cut off of nearly all oil shipments to the island has led to daily blackouts and deepened human suffering.
It is time for the United States to respect Cuba’s sovereignty and lift the embargo and accompanying sanctions. They are a cruel and inhumane form of collective punishment that disproportionately harms the most vulnerable. These sanctions, without legitimate justification, have restricted travel for Americans, made remittances far more difficult, and unjustly placed Cuba on the State Sponsor of Terrorism list. That designation effectively cuts the country off from the global banking system, making even basic international transactions nearly impossible. The absurdity is stark: Cuban biotechnology produced five globally used Covid-19 vaccines, while the US embargo restricted Cuba’s ability to purchase syringes to administer them.
Cuba should not be treated as a political chess piece to demonstrate US economic and military might. It is a proud nation of nearly 11 million people who want nothing more than to be good neighbors. It is time for the United States to end its asphyxiation of Cuba and allow the Cuban people to determine their own future, a future free from US interference, coercion, and perpetual threat.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Why the SanctionsKill Campaign Supports BDS
The BDS movement to end Zionist violence, and the SanctionsKill campaign to abolish US economic coercion, are not separate causes, but one movement for justice, sovereignty, and human dignity.
Sep 21, 2025
The SanctionsKill campaign was formed in 2019 to raise awareness of the human cost of the “sanctions”—actually economic coercive measures—imposed by the United States and its allies on over 40 countries, in which one-third of humanity lives. Our coalition of grassroots activists has exposed the suffering and death caused to populations targeted with these measures, particularly among children, the elderly, and people with health conditions.
We also strongly support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement advanced by Palestinian civil society as a legitimate way for grassroots activists around the world to pressure the settler-colonial state of Israel to comply with international law and recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination.
It is important to understand the distinction between BDS and imperialist economic coercive measures. While this includes legal differences, the most salient feature is that BDS is the peoples’ effort to end their governments’ complicity with Zionist colonial crimes, whereas US “sanctions” maintain imperialist hegemony by forcing countries to submit to US economic and political interests. The BDS movement comes from over a century of struggle for Palestinian liberation, with a global consensus of the world’s people that Zionist apartheid must end, while US-imposed “sanctions” are based on specious accusations of human rights violations to “continue the theft of wealth from the Global South, and preserve racial hierarchy in the international system.”
Some definitions and a bit of history can help to better understand the complementarity of BDS and SanctionsKill.
A Definition of Sanctions and Their Legality
The United Nations describes sanctions as restrictive measures imposed by the UN Security Council to enforce international law and maintain or restore peace and security, which may include “complete or partial interruption of economic, communications, or diplomatic relations.” Sanctions imposed unilaterally (without the UN Security Council) violate the UN Charter, and UN bodies are calling for the elimination of “unilateral coercive measures” such as those imposed by the US government.
This global consensus is shown in the fact that for over 30 consecutive years, the UN General Assembly has voted almost unanimously to eliminate the US blockade of Cuba; the usual dissenting votes are only those of the US and Israel. Even UN Security Council sanctions are often manipulated by the US to impose collective punishment on civilians, in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
What Is BDS and How Does It Work?
BDS for Palestine is but one expression of a national liberation struggle that has been ongoing since the first Zionist settlement was established in 1878. Evoking the Great Revolt of 1936-39, the decades-long Arab Boycott initiated in 1945, the 1975 UN resolution that declared “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” the 1975 Organization of African Unity resolution that called for support of Palestine against “Zionist racist colonialism,” and the Intifadas, the international divestment movement started in 2000 and was relaunched as boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) in 2005.
It derives inspiration from the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) of South Africa which led hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens around the world to boycott goods from the apartheid state from the 1950s to 1994. Students, churches, trade unions, and local groups pushed governments and businesses to divest. There was a cultural boycott, and South Africa was banned from the Olympics and from FIFA competition between 1964 and 1992. "The strength of the international solidarity campaign was that it spoke directly to the ordinary citizen and challenged each one singly, and communities collectively, to take action.”
While the genocide takes the form of forced starvation, the world’s people are sickened to see that governments and international organizations are incapable of or unwilling to stop atrocities committed in plain sight.
UN sanctions were also imposed on South Africa (including an arms embargo undermined by Israel), and the country was suspended from the UN General Assembly from 1974 to 1994. By the 1980s individual countries, including the US, were imposing sanctions. However, it seems that the boycott movement was more impactful than official sanctions, causing a “privately induced financial crisis—the repercussions of which were substantially greater than any of the public sanctions that ensued.” BDS against apartheid South Africa was a complement to the most important factor in bringing down the apartheid regime—the resistance of Black South Africans on the ground, including armed struggle.
The movement for BDS against Israeli apartheid has been accelerating since the start of the live-streamed genocide in October of 2023. This grassroots movement, led by Palestinians in Palestine and in the diaspora, is inspiring millions to boycott consumer goods made in Israel and demand that Israeli weapons and surveillance companies be removed from their local economies, governments, and pension funds. Similar to the AAM of South Africa, billions of dollars have now been divested from the Zionist economy. Campaigns such as “Apartheid Free Communities” have moved public discourse toward an acknowledgement of the unjust, racist treatment of the Palestinian people. Divestment is again the rallying cry of students demanding an end to their universities’ complicity in human rights abuses, and there is an academic and intellectual boycott and call to ban the Israeli settler-colonial state from the Olympics and FIFA competition.
While the genocide takes the form of forced starvation, the world’s people are sickened to see that governments and international organizations are incapable of or unwilling to stop atrocities committed in plain sight. In response, many have taken matters into their own hands through boycott and divestment. And as in South Africa, BDS is a complement to the main struggle on the ground in Palestine.
The BDS movement says that boycott and divestment necessarily come before sanctions, in order to build “a crucial mass of people power to make policymakers fulfill their obligations under international law.” It is an effort to move toward binding UN Security Council sanctions to oblige Israel to comply with the many General Assembly resolutions and International Court of Justice rulings demanding an end to Israel’s apartheid and genocide.
How Do US “Sanctions” Work?
In contrast, the unilateral coercive measures (“sanctions”) promoted by the US are not intended to uphold international law or support peace and security, but rather to deliberately impose collective punishment on civilian populations in order to bring about regime change. This was revealed in a 1960 memo by a US diplomat explaining that a blockade of Cuba would “bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.” The United States government imposes these measures on countries that try to develop economic or political systems independent of US domination. And given the US’ “exorbitant power to sanction” due to the dominant role of its dollar in international trade and banking transactions, these measures are very impactful.
Economic coercive measures punish populations by impacting global trade, thus making it hard to import food, fuel, medicines, and parts to maintain civilian infrastructure. One consequence is the inability to import chemicals and parts to maintain water supply systems, causing severe shortages of clean drinking water, leading to massive child deaths.
Even UN sanctions can be manipulated for imperialist purposes. As Doa Ali said in How to Kill an Entire Country, “Iraq is a case in point of how the US has captured the UN Security Council’s sanctioning capacity using it to impose its own ‘rules-based global order’ and further its imperialist interests, regardless of the human cost.” In 1990, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and as the Soviet Union was collapsing, the US was able to engineer and oversee the imposition of severe UN sanctions on Iraq. These led to the deaths of over half a million Iraqi children from water-borne illnesses, vaccine-preventable diseases, and hunger—in a country that had achieved one of the highest per capita food production rates in the region. In the US-controlled committee that oversaw enforcement of the sanctions, the US ensured that “humanitarian exceptions” were denied and that “food itself was not considered a humanitarian necessity.”
US-promoted sanctions have killed over 100,000 Venezuelans since 2017, and 12% of child deaths in Palestine prior to October 2023 were from lack of clean drinking water due to the US-supported Israeli blockade. Further evidence that sanctions kill is the new report in the medical journal The Lancet, which found that sanctions cause some 564,000 deaths annually—similar to global mortality from armed conflict—with 51% of the victims under age 5.
US-imposed coercive measures are based on extractive interests, dubious accusations of deficient democracy, and spurious charges of human rights violations, such as the allegation that Cuba is “trafficking” its doctors (they are actually proud participants in a renowned humanitarian project) and that Cuba is a State Sponsor of Terrorism (SSOT) because it hosted peace talks for Colombia. The SSOT allegation makes it extremely hard for a country to conduct any banking transactions, and together with the 63-year blockade, has caused a humanitarian crisis in Cuba. Such sanctions supposedly imposed to protect human rights are in fact the worst violators of human rights.
Conclusion
As hope grows for a Free Palestine sooner rather than later, it is time to lift the siege on Gaza that has been blocking desperately needed supplies since 2007. The “exorbitant sanctioning power of the US” on all the countries of the region—including Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Libya—will also end as these countries find alternative trade and financial arrangements, such as the BRICS, and a new multipolar order emerges.
The BDS movement to end Zionist violence, and the SanctionsKill campaign to abolish US economic coercion, are not separate causes, but one movement for justice, sovereignty, and human dignity. Together they embody grassroots power against imperialist violence. They are people-led projects of hope and liberation, demanding a future free from the economic coercion that results in genocide, collective punishment, and colonial domination.
Differences Between Imperialist Economic Coercive Measures and Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions
IMPERIALIST ECONOMIC COERCIVE MEASURES | BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT, AND SANCTIONS |
Seek to coerce other countries to succumb to US interests. | Called for by the grassroots in the targeted country to end the world’s complicity with an apartheid, settler-colonial regime. |
Based on spurious accusations of human rights violations. | Based on a consensus of the world’s people about grave human rights violations. |
Cause as many deaths as armed conflict. | Seeks to end deaths from Zionist genocide. |
Illegal under international law if unilateral or if they impose collective punishment. | A grassroots response to demand compliance with international law. |
Produces net transfer of wealth from Global South, consolidating US and Western capitalist hegemony. | Seeks to end settler colonial, white supremacist Zionist project that upholds US-Western capitalist hegemony. |
A tool of US imperialism. | Confronts US imperialism. |
Undermines national sovereignty. | Anti-colonialist movement for democratic-national liberation. |
A project of death. | A project of liberation and hope for the future. |
Keep ReadingShow Less
'The Howl That the World Doesn't Hear': A Gaza Teacher in Her Own Words
At 28, Reham Khaled has lived through eight wars of varying intensity. The current war has been the most brutal she's known.
Sep 20, 2025
So begin the words of a Gaza teacher's recent post after being forced to flee her home in the Al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City and the school she'd set up in a tent. A bomb tore apart the tent next to the one where Reham Khaled taught her students. Two were killed:
Pain is not a passing sensation, but a being that resides within. It has fangs and fingers. It presses on the heart, weighs down the chest, and makes the breath hesitate like a hole in the air. There is a moment, just one moment, when all the internal walls we have tried to build crumble and we reach what is called the threshold of pain. At this threshold, pain is no longer just an echo or a tremor. It turns into a howl.
Skilled at weaving the horror that is war-torn Gaza with evocative imagery of far sweeter things, Khaled says that before the bomb tore apart the tent, she and her father-in-law were dreaming of eating mangoes and chicken. “And then the rocket exploded. One moment. A collective scream. A small lake of blood begins with two children whose greatest ambition was to eat chicken and mango. It is a moment, but inside me it is years.”
Born in Gaza's Jabalia refugee camp, her grandparents were displaced from the Palestinian village of Najd which was ethnically cleansed in 1948 when the state of Israel was created. The Israeli town of Sderot was later constructed over the site of the village, as well as the nearby village of Huj, according to Working Class History.com.
Her goal, other than giving as many students as possible the right to education, is to instill one idea in the children of Gaza “so that they may travel the world and spread peace one day."
In Gaza, Khaled studied in UNRWA schools, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, established by the UN in December 1949, to provide relief and humanitarian assistance to Palestine refugees displaced by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
At 28, she has lived through eight wars of varying intensity. The current war has been the most brutal she's known. She and her extended family have been displaced 15 times.
The howl is “not a loud, audible scream”, explains Khaled, “but the howl of the soul, that subtle sound that the ear cannot pick up but shakes the entire body from within. It's like the wind sweeping through an empty house, or the emptiness exploding in the head. In Gaza, this howl has become the secret language of everyone. The child who smiles so as not to cry in front of his mother, the mother who hides her tears from her child, the man who stands silently before the corpse of his son. They all howl from within, with a voice the world does not hear.”
A teacher of language and literature, Khaled is not overtly political and shies away from assigning blame for what is happening to her people once again. All she knows, she tells me when we exchange more messages, is that “the language of killing and violence is the biggest mistake that my people have been paying the price for two years or more.... The world is mean, cruel, and dull to the point of melting the nerves. I try to keep up with it, but I break. I try to look at it, but I find its eyes devoid of any glimmer of humanity.”
At this writing, Israeli forces have destroyed an estimated 70% of Gaza City. Airstrikes have turned entire apartment blocks and tent encampments into rubble. The Israel Defense Forces claim, without evidence, that Hamas has been using the buildings for surveillance; justifying collective punishment of Gaza City's entire population. While collective punishment is a war crime and prohibited under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, this has done nothing to protect innocent civilians throughout Gaza from October 2023 to the present. An estimated 65,000 have been killed to date, with upwards of ten thousand trapped under the rubble.
“Howling,' writes Khaled, “doesn't always manifest in screams or tears. Sometimes it manifests as cold dullness. Evacuation notices drop on doors like inane announcements, read by people with blank eyes and then go on with their lives: a man arguing with his neighbor over a gallon of water, women fighting over a turn at the oven, a young man fixing a crack in the wall. It's as if the announcement of the city's destruction means nothing, as if the preordained mass exodus is just another rumor.”
“This isn't true indifference,” she believes, “but another form of howling: a hidden protection against total collapse. When a person is unable to face the naked truth, they hide in the small details, clinging to crumbs to prevent their souls from disintegrating. Politics isn't content with killing bodies; it seeks to break the inside, to make people treat their end as secondary news. It wants evacuation itself to become a habit, a weightless piece of paper, part of the daily noise.”
Israel has ordered everyone in Gaza City to evacuate to the al-Mawasi tent encampment in the south. But the camp is severely overcrowded with hundreds of thousands of displaced people from Rafah, Khan Younis, and other areas and there is no available land. Nor is it rent free, as others I am in touch with tell me. The entirety of Gaza's most southern city, Rafah, once home to 250,000 people, was razed to the ground earlier this year. Khan Younis was razed in part, but some neighborhoods remain.
As for Khaled and her family, refusing to be broken or adhere exactly to Israeli orders, they moved to Deir al-Balah, a city about 10 miles south of Gaza City. They're not safe there, but at least they found land to set up tents. Khaled has already started looking for a new place to establish a school. This morning she reposted a link for the school, which is backed by the Chuffed Project, a nonprofit whose goal is to support children's education in Gaza
Her goal, other than giving as many students as possible the right to education, is to instill one idea in the children of Gaza “so that they may travel the world and spread peace one day. Plant a rose on the tip of every gun. Prevent killing. Spread love and peace and never allow war to continue for long.”
It doesn't mean she's not always hungry or trying to recover her voice or understand why such hell has been unleashed on her people. But that she refuses to surrender to the “twisted logic that turns life into a farce. My voice has been extinguished, not because it disappeared, but because the echo no longer returns. And my being? I've scattered like dust, like a ravening beast that isn't satisfied with flesh and bones, but burrows deep within me in search of something I no longer know the name of. Yes, I'm hungry, but not just for bread. I'm hungry for the security that has become a myth, for the meaning that has become a mirage, for a slice of life that resembles life, not this mockery I live.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy