A 64-year campaign of economic warfare and regime-change pressure against an island of 11 million people — codified in law, condemned at the UN almost unanimously every year, and now escalated in May 2026 to a humanitarian crisis no Western broadcaster is reporting on. Click any card to expand full detail. Filter by category above.
The embargo on Cuba is the longest sustained campaign of economic warfare against a civilian population in modern history. It has been condemned by the UN General Assembly for 33 consecutive years by overwhelming majorities. It has produced documented humanitarian harm at every stage. It has not produced the regime change it was always supposed to produce. It has, instead, produced six decades of population-wide hardship and a mass emigration that the US then complained about at its southern border.
The May 2026 escalation under Executive Orders 14380 and 14404 represents the latest stage of a framework that has been operating continuously since 1962. The framework treats the suffering of a civilian population as an acceptable instrument of political pressure. International human rights bodies have used the phrase collective punishment to describe it for decades, and the phrase is technically accurate: Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits "all measures of intimidation" against protected populations for acts they did not personally commit.
If you have read the historical-suffering piece on this site, you have already seen the structural framework that justifies this. Cuba is one of the cleanest extant cases of US foreign policy operating that framework on a civilian population. The framework is the same one that operates in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and Sudan. It is the framework this site exists to document.