Foreign Policy

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In a new piece in Foreign Policy, Guillaume Long and Alexander Main warn that the Trump administration’s escalating pressure campaign against Cuba could produce a crisis that could prove harmful to both the Cuban people and US interests. Drawing on interviews with Cuban doctors, they describe a health system struggling under sanctions that have made it difficult to import even basic medical supplies “from serum to intravenous bags, and even paracetamol.” With a new US oil blockade now worsening shortages and blackouts, the authors argue that Cuba faces a “downward spiral that could lead to outright humanitarian collapse.”

Long and Main note that the policy’s objective has been stated clearly by US officials themselves. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has framed the effort bluntly as “regime change” (his longtime objective for Cuba) while US officials have stated that civilian suffering is an “unfortunate but necessary trade-off.” But the authors caution that destabilizing the island could have serious consequences for the United States. The abrupt collapse of the Cuban state, they write, could trigger “internal conflict, mass exodus, and expanded trafficking routes in the Florida Straits,” creating a manufactured crisis with lasting implications for regional stability and US security. Cuba has already experienced its largest mass out migration in recent years, with 10 percent of the population leaving in just 2022–2023, and the worsening economic crisis could push many more to leave Cuba for the US and other neighboring countries.

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