listen to this article6 minutes
information
On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump issued a rather serious decree regarding Cuba’s short-term future: “Cuba is going to go bankrupt very soon. Cuba is really very close to failure” and had a good laugh with reporters in the US state of Iowa.
Indeed, this is not the first time President Trump has predicted the collapse of a Caribbean island nation. The United States has been trying to effectively destroy it for more than 67 years, since the victory of Cuba’s communist revolution in 1959, which overthrew the brutal right-wing dictator and U.S. ally Fulgencio Batista.
But this time, the threat carries a little more weight given the Trump administration’s abduction of Venezuela’s leftist president Nicolas Maduro earlier this month.
To date, the United States has not been held accountable for this completely illegal and clearly egregious act, but President Trump on Tuesday held it up as evidence of Cuba’s impending doom, saying, “You know, they’re getting money from Venezuela. They’re getting oil from Venezuela. They’re not getting it anymore.”
One might therefore hope that other countries, especially Cuba’s self-proclaimed allies, would step up to protect Cuba from U.S. depredations, or at least ensure that they voiced their opposition to imperial impunity.
Instead, all Cuba really gets is the support of perfunctory professionals, such as Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. He, like his ostensibly left-wing predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has perfected the art of pretending to counter U.S. machinations while doing exactly what the gringos want.
Following recent reports that Mexico canceled a scheduled oil shipment to Havana due to U.S. pressure, Scheinbaum reiterated that the oil shipment was a “sovereign decision” and that Mexico remains “united” with Cuba.
The Mexican leader spoke evasively at a news conference, recalling his country’s history of providing oil to Cuba for “humanitarian reasons” due to the U.S. embargo, reminding the audience that it had been going on for “many years” and resulted in “shortages.”
In fact, when I last visited Cuba in 2022, which coincidentally coincided with the 60th anniversary of U.S. sanctions against Cuba, there were shortages of essentials like coffee and milk.
The country, famous for decades for its free health care, medical humanitarianism, and international deployment of meticulously trained doctors, was now suffering from shortages of basic medical supplies. So the employee at the pharmacy I went to after a serious accident jogging along Havana’s seaside promenade looked at my bloody knee, shrugged apologetically, and sent me on my way with a prescription for soap and water.
The same prescription had also been issued by a 43-year-old Cuban named Elaudis. He witnessed me fall from my perch on the breakwater, right next to a plaque commemorating Leonard Wood, a former U.S. military governor in Cuba who oversaw the construction of the boardwalk in 1901 and also served as governor of the Philippines.
As if we needed more imperial irony, it turns out that Ellaudis is none other than Cuba’s Guantanamo province (home to the eponymous US illegal penal colony and torture center), and that his own legs were blown off by a landmine outside a US military base when he was 19 years old.
He calmed me down from my own panic, apologizing for not being able to take me home due to my lame condition. This is definitely a better act of “solidarity” than halting oil shipments to Cuba while claiming “humanitarian” motives.
Of course, it’s not just Mexico that is letting Cuba down. While President Trump attempts to engineer a decisive “failure” for the island, most of the rest of Latin America is choosing to sit on the sidelines.
The same is true for most of the rest of the Global South. On Tuesday, the same day that President Trump exchanged some friendly, sabotaging banter with journalists in Iowa, China’s Foreign Ministry called for “immediate lifting of the blockade and sanctions against Cuba” on its English-language X account.
China pledged to “continue to support and assist Cuba” and reiterated its belief that “under the strong leadership of the Cuban Party and government, the Cuban people will overcome the difficulties.”
No offense to the Cuban people, who have shown extraordinary resilience for almost 70 years, but it’s not so easy to “get over the hump” when you’re on a small island in the crosshairs of a schizophrenic megalomaniac who happens to be in charge of a global superpower.
Also on Tuesday, Cuba News Agency reported that an Indian “solidarity group” “expressed support for Cuba” during an event in Kolkata.
The program “included a minute’s silence in honor of revolutionaries and civilians who lost their lives in the struggle against imperialist forces in the region,” the report said.
At a time when the struggle is more critical than ever, it remains to be seen whether any of Cuba’s professed allies will stick their necks out to prevent the country from “failing.”
If that fails, and if President Trump succeeds in overthrowing regimes in places that have long resisted them against all odds, it is safe to say that no place is safe from imperial designs.
What we need now is true unity. Because if Cuba fails, it will be a global failure.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
