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collective punishment
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."
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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.
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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.
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