By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on July 2, 2026
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla
stepped up the tone of his condemnation: the U.S. government’s aggression against the island is “multidimensional.” Therefore, at a press conference on Tuesday, he announced that Cuba has requested a session of the United Nations General Assembly for July 7, with the aim of bringing the impact of the economic and energy blockade to the attention of the international community, while the State Department is taking steps to halt the debate at the UN.
We have heard the terms “hybrid war” or “multidimensional war” many times, but their nature and manifestation are not explained; they are not incorporated as a strategic vector; they are not accessible—precisely because the destructive, mafia-like, and illegal power of this type of aggression lies in attacking a country without the intervention of armed forces.
Victory without combat, breaking the will before the armies do, isolating, confusing, wearing down, and demoralizing are supreme expressions of the art of domination, which are being applied to Cuba. In this sense, the island is a textbook case of multidimensional or hybrid warfare.
Mexican researcher Ana Esther Ceceña has documented how contemporary forms of domination are not limited to the direct use of armed forces, but rather operate across the “full spectrum”: economy, finance, energy, communication, diplomacy, social subjectivity, and material living conditions. But let’s look at this step by step.
War no longer seeks only to destroy, but to wear down. A protracted war is being waged against Cuba. It does not require a formal declaration because it operates through accumulation. Every sanction, every ban, every pressure exerted on third countries, every obstacle to the purchase of fuel, food, medicine, or spare parts is part of the same plan: to make life ungovernable. The aggression is measured in social exhaustion, anxiety, waiting, material deterioration, and accumulated pain.
The real target is the population. The U.S. narrative often presents its measures as political pressure. But when the purchase of fuel is prevented, access to credit is restricted, financial transactions are targeted, imports become more expensive, and trade routes are blocked, the impact is not confined to the corridors of power. It trickles down to the dining table, the neighborhood, the school, the health clinic, the line, public transportation, and domestic life. Without going any further, yesterday in Matanzas, a province in the west, more than 70 hours without electricity were reported.
That is the key to this multidimensional aggression: it turns an entire people into a battlefield. It does not fire directly at people’s bodies, but it creates the conditions for them to fall ill, wait, become exhausted, emigrate, despair, or turn against one another. Sometimes, the most effective violence is that which is administered as scarcity.
Simultaneity is the method. The blockade does not act alone. It is combined with a communications war, financial persecution, an energy blockade, smear campaigns, diplomatic threats, and pressure on international organizations. Everything happens at once. That simultaneity makes it impossible to breathe. When fuel is scarce, the sense of collapse intensifies.
When there are power outages, despair is fueled. When Cuba tries to buy something, the seller is threatened. When it tries to secure financing, the bank is punished. When it speaks out, attempts are made to isolate it. When it resists, it is accused of failing.
Impunity sustains the crime. The United States acts as if international law were mandatory for others and optional for itself. For decades, the international community has almost unanimously rejected the blockade against Cuba. Yet Washington maintains it, updates it, and tightens it. That impunity is not an accidental excess. It is part of the mechanism. It seeks to demonstrate that a superpower can punish an entire country, even if the world condemns it. That it can turn regulations, banks, insurance companies, shipping lines, platforms, and markets into instruments of coercion. That it can inflict harm and call that harm “foreign policy.”
War also contests meaning. Cuba is not merely subjected to a blockade. It is portrayed. It is caricatured. It is reduced to crisis, failure, repression, or ruin. Aggression needs to produce a simple explanation: if the people suffer, the blame lies solely with their government; if the blockade kills slowly, it does not exist; if resistance continues, it is portrayed as stubbornness. The war of communication seeks to separate cause and effect. It erases the hand that squeezes and then points to the body that is suffocating. It turns the victim into the culprit and the aggressor into the judge.
To defend Cuba is to defend a boundary. The July 7 session at the United Nations must be understood as a defense of Cuba, but also as a defense of the right of all peoples to exist free from blackmail. If we accept that a power can subjugate a country through hunger, energy, credit, trade, information, and fear, then no other country will be safe.
Source:La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English