By Randy Alonso Falcón on July 3, 2025
mural on a major street in Havana: “The harassment and measures against Cuba are inhumane and they persist. This must stop. No More Blockade.” photo: Abel Padrón Padilla
President Trump’s new memorandum on Cuba, which is already old, seems less like the harsh and terrifying verbal outbursts of the eccentric White House tenant and more like the libidinous and nauseating language of the anti-Cuban political operators in Miami.
But regardless of who wrote the presidential libel, the document is a rehash of the 2017 Trump memorandum that paved the way for the 243 coercive measures imposed on Cuba during the first Trump administration.
More measures, more hatred, more aggression, more blockade, more attempts to intimidate US citizens who want to visit Cuba and foreigners who try to invest in the Caribbean nation are the backbone of the Memorandum released on June 30.
Forcing the detention of financial flows to sectors of the Cuban economy and the government as a whole, republishing and expanding the punitive blacklist of productive and service entities in Cuba, preventing at all costs the visit of US citizens to Cuba to exercise their right to tourism, auditing travel agencies and flights to Cuba to punish those who want to violate the blockade, and allocating resources to subversive anti-Cuban programs (which Trump himself described as a horrible expense) are among the punitive actions reflected in the document.
It also proposes expanding the list of “prohibited” Cuban officials to include leaders of the Party, the government, the FAR and the Minint, ministries, mass organizations, directors and deputy directors of the media, and the Court, among others. Old formulas and renewed efforts to apply them to the extreme.
Helms, Burton, and Rubio: The Devil’s Trident
The essence of the presidential decision is to reaffirm the blockade as the cornerstone of US policy toward Cuba. It leaves no doubt about the permanence of the economic war and the attempt to strangle Cuban finances and trade.
The specters of Jesse Helms and Dan Burton are revived in the spirit of the document. The infamous Helms-Burton Act is reiterated time and again as the guide for this government’s actions against Cuba:
“(c) Support the economic embargo against Cuba described in section 4(7) of the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act (LIBERTAD) of 1996 (the embargo), including by opposing measures that call for the end of the embargo in the United Nations and other international forums and by providing periodic reports on whether the conditions for a transitional government in Cuba exist.”
And in the absence of an officially appointed proconsul for Cuba, as the alcoholic Bush Jr. once designated under the Helms-Burton Act, Marco Rubio has set himself up as the supposed guarantor of the policy of maximum pressure against Cuba. In his triple capacity as Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and Administrator of USAID, Rubio appears in every paragraph relating to the measures announced in the Memorandum as one of the decision-makers or guarantors of their implementation.
While Trump entertains himself with his tariff hikes, manhunts, rocket launches, and his circus of vanities with Elon Musk, Marco Rubio will work hard to reinforce his particular agenda, and that of his cronies in Miami, against Cuba and the Cuban nation.
Infamous arguments
Beyond the spiritual poverty and narrow-mindedness of Miami politicians that oozes from the Memorandum, the justifications and purposes announced in the document are infamous and hypocritical:
-Solidarity with the Cuban people. Can a government that persecutes fuel purchases for Cuba, the ships that transport it, tourism, and medical services that feed the country’s foreign exchange finances to sustain basic and social services, and that boycotts any movement of money for our imports or exports, have solidarity with the Cuban people? Can an administration that reaffirms the blockade as its official policy toward Cuba, designed to “deny money and supplies to Cuba, reduce monetary and real wages, cause hunger and despair,” in the words of Lester Mallory, have solidarity?
-Improve human rights. Can a government that carries out infamous manhunts against migrants, who are sent without mercy to a kind of concentration camp in El Salvador, and which has just opened an unprecedented and disgraceful prison for deportees in the middle of a swamp infested with alligators in Florida, with the idea, according to Trump, that they will face the saurians if they try to escape from this new Alcatraz, give lessons? What can we learn from an administration that gasses and beats protesters in Los Angeles with the National Guard, that seeks billion-dollar cuts to social assistance and Medicaid, which would leave 11.8 million Americans uninsured by 2034, and that cancels aid programs for vaccination, AIDS treatment, and tuberculosis around the world, while presenting a scandalous and historic war budget that exceeds $1 trillion?
-Promote the rule of law. Can a government that has stormed the Supreme Court and forced it to make 19 emergency decisions in just five months, that has openly threatened judges who have prosecuted or opposed the president’s decisions, do so?Can an administration that attacked another country without consulting Congress, that publicly attacks congressmen, journalists, the media, and officials, and whose president is ruling by decree, signing 164 executive orders and 70 presidential proclamations on a wide range of issues in his still very short term, do so?
-Promoting free markets and free enterprise: How can a government that has unleashed an absurd trade and tariff war, that has tried to force US companies to return to US soil, that has imposed sanctions on Chinese, Russian, and other companies around the world, and that has forced its banks and companies to withdraw from funds to finance climate change and protect the environment talk about this?
-Support the Cuban people by expanding Internet services. Could a government be more hypocritical than one that denies Cuba access to the dozens of submarine data cables that surround our archipelago, that denies the purchase of computer and telecommunications equipment with more than 10% US components, and that blocks access to computer programs and applications produced in the United States?
One after another, falsehoods and hypocrisies are strung together to try to justify an anachronistic and genocidal policy. A policy that does not respond to the best interests of the US people, but to the desires of a corrupt minority elite that has lived for decades off the shameful business of anti-Cuban politics.
Epilogue
On the same day that Trump intensified his imperial policy against Cuba, he signed an Executive Order revoking sanctions against Syria, in clear support of the regime that governs that nation, whose current leaders were until very recently declared terrorists by the White House itself and whose crimes against sectors of the Syrian population have been reported around the world in recent weeks. The facts speak for themselves.
Source: Cubadebate translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English