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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.
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'Temporary Relief Isn't Enough,' Advocates Warn After Supreme Court Blocks Abortion Pill Restrictions
"We are relieved that access to mifepristone remains protected for now, but this should never have been on the table in the first place," said one campaigner.
May 14, 2026
While welcoming that the US Supreme Court on Thursday blocked restrictions on dispensing mifepristone—a medication commonly used in abortion and miscarriage care—as a legal battle over it moves forward, rights advocates also continued to sound the alarm about attacks on reproductive freedom and argue that "temporary relief isn't enough."
At issue is the 2023 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decision to permanently lift mifepristone's in-person dispensing requirement, which has enabled doctors to serve patients nationwide via telehealth and the mail, as forced pregnancy advocates have intensified the fight for state laws cutting off access to abortion care since the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Louisiana sued over the FDA's move, and early this month, the notoriously right-wing US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit halted the agency's rule easing restrictions. Drugmakers Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro appealed, and Justice Samuel Alito, a member of the high court's right-wing supermajority, issued a one-week stay, which he then extended to Thursday evening.
With that deadline looming, the court ultimately blocked the 5th Circuit's ruling. Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, another right-winger, dissented.
"While it is good news that, for now, patients can continue to get this safe medication by mail and at pharmacies as they have for more than five years, we all know abortion opponents are continuing their unpopular and baseless attacks," Julia Kaye, senior staff attorney for the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project, said in a statement.
"And let's be clear about the Trump administration's role here: When nationwide access to a critical abortion and miscarriage medication was on the line, the Trump administration refused to defend the FDA's action and threw patients under the bus," Kaye noted. "The American people have made clear time and again that they oppose political efforts to interfere with their ability to make their own healthcare decisions—and the ACLU will keep fighting with them every step of the way."
Advocates stressed that the fight is far from over. Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong: Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, said that her organization "is relieved that the Supreme Court granted the emergency appeal to keep mifepristone accessible through telehealth and mail nationwide."
"This decision ensures that people, especially Black, brown, queer, trans, immigrant, poor, and people living in rural communities who already face barriers to healthcare, can continue accessing essential reproductive care," she noted. "While today's decision prevents immediate harm, people's lives shouldn't hang in the balance between back-and-forth litigation."
"Attacks on mifepristone have never been about safety or medicine," Simpson added. "They are about power and control—about who gets to make decisions about their body, their family, and their future."
All* Above All president Nourbese Flint also welcomed the decision while arguing that "the fact that patients and providers were forced to endure the confusion and disruption of care because of yet another court ruling on whether basic healthcare would remain available is unacceptable."
"This legal whiplash is exhausting, dangerous, and completely disconnected from science," Flint continued. "We know that mifepristone is safe and effective, and has been for over 25 years. People should not have to navigate a week-to-week roller coaster just to find out if they can still access basic healthcare and medication they need."
Serra Sippel, executive director of the Brigid Alliance, which helps people forced to travel for abortion care, similarly said that "we are relieved that access to mifepristone remains protected for now, but this should never have been on the table in the first place. Patients and providers should not be forced to wait on court rulings to know whether people can access critical healthcare."
"The back-and-forth of this case does have a cost. Confusion and uncertainty can delay care, and every day makes a difference. When people are pushed later into pregnancy, care becomes harder to access, more expensive, and many more miles further from home," Sippel explained. "We're seeing this firsthand. Last year, the Brigid Alliance helped 1,879 people travel for abortion care—a 35% increase from the year before—and those numbers will continue to rise as state abortion restrictions force more people to cross state lines for care."
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We Can Do So Much Better: It's Time for Medicare for All
The shortcomings of US healthcare are painfully apparent throughout Rep. Casten’s district, so why won't he co-sponsor the Medicare for All Act?
May 14, 2026
Ten years ago, when reflecting on his signature legislative achievement, President Barack Obama famously encouraged Americans to think of the Affordable Care Act as a “starter home.” For as much good as the ACA did—expanding coverage to millions, offering policies to people with “preexisting” conditions—it is clear that the foundation of this starter home is starting to crack.
As an emergency medicine physician who has practiced throughout the Chicagoland area for nearly 50 years, I have seen these fault lines up close. Health insurance corporations like Blue Cross Blue Shield and UnitedHealthcare have strayed far from their nonprofit roots, and now routinely delay and deny care for everyday Americans. Put simply, these insurers have an incentive—and even a duty—to skim hundreds of billions of dollars off the top.
Earlier this year, the Chicago City Council recognized this dynamic when it passed a resolution calling for a single-payer national health program, also known as “Medicare for All.”
The resolution passed without objection from any of the city’s 50 aldermen, and concluded by saying council members “enthusiastically support the Medicare for All Act of 2025 and call on our federal legislators to work toward its swift enactment.”
Under a single-payer national health program, Americans would no longer need to worry about what treatments their insurance would cover, what doctors they would be allowed to see, and how much they would be charged out of pocket.
Every representative whose district includes Chicago has already co-sponsored the Medicare for All Act in the US House, and every likely replacement for retiring members of Congress has promised to do the same, with one exception. Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.), whose district includes parts of the Garfield Ridge and Clearing neighborhoods west of Midway Airport, has committed to staying in the “starter home,” even though it is coming apart at the seams.
The shortcomings of US healthcare are painfully apparent throughout Rep. Casten’s district, where more than 40,000 of his constituents lacked health insurance before the expiration of enhanced ACA subsidies and the implementation of federal Medicaid cuts. That’s to say nothing of his constituents with sky-high deductibles and limited provider networks who cannot afford to use the coverage they do have.
During my years in the emergency department, I have seen the awful impacts of delayed care. When I practiced at Michael Reese Hospital many years ago, it was distressingly common for me to treat young men with kidney failure. Why? Because their high blood pressure went untreated due to a lack of health coverage to pay for doctor visits and simple medications. They waited until their health issues became unbearable—and much more expensive to treat.
We can do so much better than this, and growing numbers of Americans—including 90% of Democrats in a recent Gallup poll—are starting to demand that we replace our “starter home” with a much more durable healthcare system.
Under a single-payer national health program, Americans would no longer need to worry about what treatments their insurance would cover, what doctors they would be allowed to see, and how much they would be charged out of pocket. I enjoyed a glimpse of this during my 20 years at the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago, where I was able to care for veterans, active-duty members of the US military, and their families—without worrying about what their insurance would cover or whether they could afford to pursue treatment.
As Dr. Claudia Fegan, who recently retired as the chief medical officer of Cook County Health, testified before the Chicago City Council, a system like Medicare for All is well within our grasp.
“We already spend enough money on healthcare in this country,” Dr. Fegan said, “we just allow too many people who do none of the work of delivering healthcare to take profit from it. By eliminating the waste and greed of private insurance, we can afford to cover everyone in our country for all necessary care, and end the scourges of surprise bills, skipped medications, and medical bankruptcy.”
Rep. Casten has declined to co-sponsor the Medicare for All Act during his four terms in office, but his position has become increasingly lonely within the Democratic Party, the Illinois Congressional Delegation, and the US medical profession.
Thankfully, it is never too late to do the right thing.
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