If every accusation is a confession, then the US State Department report released on 20 July, which describes Cuba as ‘the capital of 21st-century communism’, must rank as one of the most deranged self-denunciations on record. Across its hundred pages, the report paints Cuba as the centre of hemispheric subversion, bent on destroying the United States through a ‘long war of attrition’ that made use of ‘espionage, infiltration, sabotage, proxy networks’ as well as ‘left-wing terrorism on American soil’. Cuba supposedly recruited an array of allies and dupes, ranging from the Black Panthers to the Democratic Socialists of America to ‘the highest reaches of US government’. This unparalleled ideological campaign, according to the report, has ‘in contrast to every other aspect of Cuba’s failed state … yielded remarkable success’.
This charge sheet would make more sense if read backwards. It is, of course, the US that has been engaged in a decades-long project to contain and destroy the Cuban revolution, starting with the Eisenhower administration and culminating in Trump’s total blockade of the island. During the intervening 67 years, one American government after another has maintained or expanded measures intended to sink the Cuban economy, while also deploying an arsenal of covert tactics, all the way from the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 to the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner to the attempted motorboat assault off the coast of Villa Clara in February this year.
Even the short-lived thaw in US-Cuban relations under Obama should be understood not as a fundamental reversal of the American stance but as a shift in strategy: the expansion of free markets would loosen the Communist Party’s grip on power and achieve what decades of sanctions had not. As Obama told the journalist Jon Lee Anderson in 2016, ‘openness is a more powerful change agent than isolation.’ ‘If you are interested in promoting freedom, independence, civic space inside of Cuba’, he continued, helping people to ‘start a barbershop, or a cab service, was going to be the engine whereby individual Cubans … can start expecting more’.
Soon after this, however, the first Trump administration reinstated the punitive approach. It reimposed the restrictions that had been relaxed under Obama and added new ones, squeezing the flow of remittances to the island and designating Cuba a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’. Biden did little to help: though he lifted some restrictions on remittances in 2022, he also resumed deportation flights. Deepening economic misery drove a massive surge in emigration from the island. According to one estimate, between 2021 and 2024 as many as two million people left Cuba – perhaps a fifth of the population.
Things got dramatically worse when Trump returned to power in 2025. With Marco Rubio now secretary of state, the strategy of ‘maximum pressure’ was restored. There have been several new rounds of sanctions since, ostensibly targeting the regime and the armed forces, though they have also caused the few foreign companies operating in Cuba to withdraw. In January, the US began to block fuel shipments to the island – a blatant violation of international law, designed to inflict deadly harm on the entire civilian population. There can be no justification for such sustained and systematic cruelty towards the Cuban people.
Like so many of the activities of the second Trump administration, the State Department’s latest report on Cuba is both moronic and sinister. Although its main purpose is to justify further pressure on the island, it will also be used to clamp down on domestic dissent, in particular from the left. The report was issued four days after Rubio hosted an international summit during which he described the left as ‘an encroaching darkness’ and as ‘enemies of civilisation’. Given the killing and judicial persecution of internal critics such as those who have protested against ICE brutality, it’s easy to imagine the treatment that will greet any expressions of solidarity with Cuba.
The tightening of the US chokehold follows the intervention in Venezuela in January, which even at the time was billed by American politicians as a trial run for a takeover of Cuba. Pundits have wondered whether there is a ‘Cuban Delcy’: a figure inside the regime with whom the US can negotiate the terms of subordination. For the past few months, Trump and Rubio have alternated direct threats with demands for negotiations, smugly announcing the imminent collapse of Communist Party rule while at the same time seeking interlocutors within the regime, such as Raúl Castro’s grandson Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro. The talks have led to the release of some prisoners but little else, unless the package of reforms the Cuban government announced in June, liberalising the economy in a desperate attempt at survival, was part of the deal.
It is unlikely that events in Cuba will unfold along similar lines to Venezuela. For one thing, Cuba has only limited oil reserves and its infrastructure is dilapidated. For the Trump administration, it’s not so much a lucrative prospect as an irresistible ideological prize. But behind the question of whether the ‘Venezuela model’ can be repeated lies a larger one: what is the Venezuela model? Was the abduction of one leader and his replacement with a more pliable successor a one-off, determined by the specific weaknesses of the chavista system? Or might this new version of regime change, combined with the seizure of oil revenues, set the pattern for US relations with the hemisphere as a whole?
Commentators have struggled for analogies. ‘Is Venezuela a colony now?’ Linda Kinstler asked in the New York Times, or a ‘protectorate’ or a ‘client state’? Most have opted for one of the latter two terms, though others, such the Venezuelan journalist Luz Mely Reyes, see it as a new version of colonialism: writing in El País, Mely Reyes called it a ‘21st-century colonialism’, with her country as the century’s ‘first corporate colony’. It’s striking that these discussions don’t seem to take into account the actual record of US policy and previous Latin American responses to it; there are many historical parallels for the US’s hostile takeover of Venezuela and its plans to do the same to Cuba.
The US has developed a repertoire of ways to exert its dominance. There have been direct occupations, including four in Cuba alone (1898-1902, 1906-9, 1912 and 1917-22), as well as a slew of others across the Caribbean basin (most notably in Haiti, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic). In some cases, these military occupations segued into protectorates, in which the country’s sovereignty was curtailed either de facto or de jure, as in the case of Cuba after the first American withdrawal: the Platt Amendment, a piece of US legislation forcibly incorporated into the 1901 constitution, gave the US government a veto over Cuba’s foreign and economic policy as well as granting it the right to intervene. In other cases, protectorate status was a more informal, arms-length supervision with the US delegating the task of governing to a reliable proxy. This was the case with the Somoza dynasty, which ruled Nicaragua from 1937 to 1979; there were several other strongman regimes during the Cold War, including Batista’s in Cuba.
Indirect rule was exerted more through the power of finance than the gun. In the early 20th century, US banks expanded across the Caribbean as part of President Taft’s ‘dollar diplomacy’. Although this approach was supposed to replace armed coercion with financial pressure, in practice the two were never entirely separate. In 1914, National City Bank became concerned that Haiti might default on its loans; that December, US marines marched into the Banque Nationale d’Haïti, took out $500,000 worth of gold and shipped it back to City Bank’s headquarters in New York. US corporations were able to dominate entire countries thanks to the vast scale of their capital relative to the economies of their hosts: for example, the United Fruit Company owned large parts of Honduras, the original ‘banana republic’, and helped persuade the US to topple Guatemala’s president, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954. A more subtle kind of influence was wielded by economists such as Edwin Kemmerer, the ‘money doctor’ who between 1917 and 1931 advised a string of Latin American governments – Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru – on how to stabilise their economies without inconveniencing foreign investors.
All these forms of power – military, political, financial, as well as ideological and cultural – are what Latin Americans have in mind when referring to US dominance over the region as imperialism. It’s precisely because these states have remained nominally sovereign that a more complex understanding of empire has been needed. A century ago, communists developed the concept of ‘semi-colonialism’ to capture this ambiguous position, though the founder of Ecuador’s Socialist Party, Ricardo Paredes, preferred the term ‘dependent countries’. And it wasn’t just the left that thought this way: in the 1920s and 1930s, anti-imperialist sentiments were shared across the political spectrum.
Contemporary commentators may imagine that the US takeover of Venezuela ‘reflects the mechanics of the new age of empire’, as Kinstler put it in the New York Times. But when it comes to defining what is new about it, this form of empire turns out to be suspiciously similar to the old one. ‘Regime change and formal occupation,’ Kinstler writes, ‘are no longer necessary when compliance and control can be imposed from afar’ – hardly news to anyone who has considered American foreign policy over the past century or so. There are, however, distinctive features to the US’s subjugation of Venezuela. The opacity around finances, for example, is astonishing given the sums involved: according to the Financial Times, the US has collected $13 billion of Venezuela’s oil revenue, yet no one seems able to say where those billions are. In the wake of the double earthquake on 24 June, which killed at least 6100 people, the US administration claims to have made $386 million available for disaster relief, but that still leaves an awful lot of cash unaccounted for.
Cuba has been at the epicentre of US imperial thinking for more than two centuries, starting with the Monroe Doctrine – which aimed in large part to warn off European powers that might harbour designs on the island. The assumption was that Cuba would sooner or later fall from Spanish into US hands; as John Quincy Adams put it in 1823, ‘there are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation; and if an apple, severed by the tempest from its native tree, cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union.’
Cuban nationalism, for its part, has been forged in opposition to first Spanish and then American imperialism. Since winning belated independence in 1902, Cuba has contended with all forms of US dominance. The Platt Amendment was abrogated in 1934, in the wake of a nationalist revolution that overthrew the American-backed dictator Gerardo Machado. But within weeks, the US was conspiring to install a more acceptable government, with Batista acting as its linkman for a series of figureheads. After serving as elected president from 1940 to 1944, Batista seized power in a military coup in 1952 and made Cuba a haven for US corporate and mafioso interests while suppressing all internal dissent. (Rubio’s parents left Cuba during Batista’s dictatorship, making his ideological origin story all the more bogus.)
The Cuban Revolution of 1959 was, among many other things, a rejection of this history of subordination. And the revolutionary regime’s radicalisation once in power, in particular its embrace of communism, was driven in no small measure by rising tensions with the US in the context of the Cold War. The Eisenhower administration put in place the first embargo measures in late 1960, in response to a series of nationalisations in Cuba; it was only after this, in the spring of 1961, that Fidel Castro publicly proclaimed the socialist character of the revolution. This is the irony behind the State Department’s anti-communist fever dream, as embodied in its July report: one of the major factors in the long survival of communist rule has been the identification – fostered by the regime, of course, but shared at least until recently by a sizeable portion of the population – of the revolution with Cuban sovereignty.
The prolonged penury created by sanctions has brought most of the population to the point where they would prefer any kind of exit from the current situation. But in describing the communist regime’s attempts to survive US pressure as ‘subversion’, and in pressing with such sadistic glee for its surrender, Rubio’s State Department may well end up strengthening the identification of sovereignty with revolution and resistance to the US. Cubans have had to choose between US dominance and deepening misery many times, and it usually hasn’t turned out to Washington’s liking.