ANIMOSITY WITHOUT END: THE US’S GENERATIONAL OBSESSION WITH BREAKING CUBA

BY Osbert R. Biryomumaisho

“He who makes a habit of punishment soon forgets he ever had a reason.” There is a particular arrogance that accompanies unchecked power. It is not loud or theatrical; it is bureaucratic, self-assured, and convinced of its own moral exemption. It does not explain itself because it no longer feels the need to. It acts, labels its actions “policy,” and waits for the world to adjust. This is the arrogance that has governed the US’s relationship with Cuba for more than sixty years.

What Washington has done to Cuba is not a misunderstanding, nor a tragic byproduct of ideological rivalry. It is a deliberate, sustained campaign of punishment administered so long that it has come to feel natural to those imposing it. Coercion, repeated across generations, loses its cruelty in the eyes of the coercer. It becomes routine. Cuba, meanwhile, has carried the weight.

This is not a story of competing systems meeting on equal ground. It is the story of a superpower unable to tolerate defiance from a small nation that refused to remain obedient. Cuba did not merely reject an alliance; it violated an unspoken rule of empire that US authority in the hemisphere was permanent, unquestionable, and absolute. For that offense, it has been disciplined relentlessly. Washington insists this is about democracy. That fiction collapses under even modest scrutiny.

The conflict began not with ideology, but with power. When Fidel Castro’s revolution overthrew the US-backed Batista dictatorship in 1959, it dismantled an economic order that had served US interests exquisitely well. US corporations dominated Cuban land, sugar production, utilities, and infrastructure. Havana was profitable, predictable, and compliant. The revolution disrupted that arrangement, and that, more than any slogan, sealed Cuba’s fate. The US did not lose a democracy. It lost control.

The response was immediate and punitive. Diplomatic hostility escalated into economic warfare, culminating in the 1960 embargo explicitly designed to make daily life unbearable. Declassified US documents later confirmed the intent with chilling clarity to create “hunger, desperation, and overthrow.” This was never about reform. It was about breaking a population until it complied.

Predictably isolated and economically strangled, Cuba turned to the Soviet Union. Washington would later cite this alignment as proof of ideological betrayal, carefully omitting its own role in forcing Havana’s hand. The US had already closed every other door. What began as executive pressure hardened into law, calcifying over decades into the longest comprehensive embargo in modern history.

When economic suffocation failed, force followed. In April 1961, a CIA-trained invasion force landed at the Bay of Pigs, convinced that Cuban society would collapse on cue. It did not. Cuban forces crushed the invasion within days, humiliating Washington and cementing the revolution’s legitimacy at home. The lesson was clear. The US would rather overthrow a government than negotiate with it.

The following year, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Washington once again framed itself as the responsible adult in the room while treating Cuba as a reckless accessory. The fact that US missiles were already stationed in Turkey and that Cuba lived under constant threat of invasion was conveniently excluded from the narrative. Sovereignty, it seemed, applied selectively.

Pressure never eased. By 1980, economic strain and political tension erupted into the Mariel boatlift. When Cuba allowed those who wished to leave to do so, Washington seized the moment as propaganda, parading human movement as evidence of failure while continuing the policies that made life harder. Migration became both weapon and spectacle.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, hostility calcified further. Few episodes captured the mutual mistrust more starkly than the arrest of the “Cuban Five,” intelligence agents tasked with monitoring extremist exile groups in Florida responsible for violent attacks against Cuba. In the US, they were convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. In Cuba, they became symbols of political persecution. Their imprisonment entrenched bitterness on both sides and underscored the absence of good faith.

Cuba’s partnership with Venezuela under Hugo Chávez only sharpened Washington’s resentment. An oil-for-services alliance rooted in mutual resistance to US dominance was interpreted not as cooperation, but as contagion. Defiance, in the US’s hemispheric worldview, is something that must be quarantined.

To understand US policy toward Cuba is to understand how punishment disguises itself as principle. The embargo is routinely framed as a moral stand against authoritarianism. In practice, it functions as leverage, and leverage is simply domination with better branding. When pressure fails to produce submission, it is not reconsidered. It is escalated.

No symbol exposes this hypocrisy more nakedly than Guantánamo Bay. On occupied Cuban land sits a detention facility that embodies the US’s moral double standard. Despite global condemnation, the prison remains open, holding men indefinitely without charge or trial, subjecting them to torture, denying them basic legal rights. Cuba has demanded the base’s return for decades. The US responds with the familiar incantation of “national security,” as if that phrase absolves all crimes. Guantánamo is not an anomaly. It is the empire telling the truth about itself.

The Cold War is over. The Soviet Union is gone. Cuba poses no military threat to the US. Yet the embargo persists. Its longevity exposes the truth. This policy is not about security. It is about dominance. Not democracy, but obedience.

The brief thaw under the Obama administration revealed the lie at the heart of the embargo. When diplomacy replaced punishment, relations improved almost immediately. Travel expanded. Dialogue resumed. Cooperation became possible. It was proof that hostility was a choice, not destiny. That choice was later reversed. Sanctions were tightened, remittances, and Cuba was once again branded a state sponsor of terrorism. Even reconciliation had to be punished.

The true cost of this obsession has been borne by civilians. The embargo has restricted access to medicine, food, technology, and infrastructure, converting hardship into chronic crisis. Yes, the Cuban government is responsible for its own failures and repression, but the embargo ensures those failures metastasize. Sustained sanctions are not passive instruments. They are structural violence, shaping lives, distorting economies, and driving emigration that Washington then weaponizes rhetorically.

For the US, Cuba has never been merely a country. It is a warning. A lesson to the hemisphere. The embargo’s message is simple. Sovereignty will be expensive.

And yet, this is where the US script fails. Cuba did not collapse. Despite decades of siege, scarcity, and isolation, Cuba refused to surrender its commitment to life. Against the logic of punishment, it built a health system of remarkable resilience, investing heavily in medical education, scientific research, vaccine development, and the training of generations of professionals. Out of constraint came generosity. Cuban doctors were sent to places abandoned by wealthier nations. Laboratories produced life-saving vaccines under conditions Washington assumed would make such achievements impossible. A model of care emerged that treated health not as a commodity, but as a duty.

Through health diplomacy, Cuba carved out relevance on the global stage, not through coercion, but through care. This is the ultimate failure of US policy. After sixty years of punishment, Cuba still stands, not purified, not perfected, but unbroken. It continues to give where it was meant to wither.

Cuba is not the US’s moral project to manage. It is the US’s moral indictment. For more than half a century, the US has tried to break Cuba. History suggests something far more uncomfortable for empire: a nation that endured and refused to disappear.

Osbert R. Biryomumaisho

Senior Global Affairs Analyst