By Pedro Monzon Barata on November 11, 2026
collage by: Zeinab, el-Hajj
Washington’s 2026 executive orders turned the Cuba blockade from a bounded, bilateral punishment into a worldwide system of discipline, where banks, shippers and hotel chains in third countries comply out of fear of losing dollar access.
1. Reframing the problem
On April 30, 2026, Trump declared at a private dinner in Florida that the United States would control Cuba “after finishing the job in Iran,” and described the aircraft carrier Lincoln “100 meters off the Cuban coast” with Cubans “with their hands up.” The press treated it as electoral rhetoric, but it contains a structural judgment: the blockade has ceased to be a bilateral instrument of punishment resting on contained extraterritoriality and has become a geopolitical mechanism with a global disciplinary function.
The object of the blockade has shifted. It acts first on third countries and, through their self-censorship, on Cuba. Its function is not only to punish Havana but to demonstrate exemplarily that any country or company trading with a “disobedient” actor will be incorporated into US jurisdiction. The real blockade is not at sea but in the compliance departments of third-country banks and the legal offices of shipping companies.
To understand what changed in 2026, one must start with what did not change. Extraterritoriality is not a recent invention; what changed is its extension. It became extraterritorial three decades ago. It became a global dictatorship when that extraterritoriality spread to the entire planet. That extension is itself a dictatorial imposition: a single administrative apparatus unilaterally decides the limits of conduct of every actor on the planet, without consent, procedure or remedy.
2. Preexisting extraterritoriality
Extraterritoriality always existed in the blockade. The 1992 Torricelli Act already penalized subsidiaries of US companies in third countries and barred ships that had called at Cuban ports. The 1996 Helms-Burton Act created Title III, allowing suits in US courts against those who “traffic” in nationalized property, and Title IV, barring entry to executives of companies investing in Cuba. The architecture is over three decades old.
That architecture was a limited instrument. It affected identifiable sectors—confiscated property, US subsidiaries, ships calling at Cuba—and required judicial mediation: lawsuits, lawyers, deadlines, defense. It left a considerable part of the world economy outside the veto. An Asian shipping company with no US assets, or a European bank with no dollar correspondent relationship, could in theory operate with Cuba without consequences.
The European and Canadian antidotes became inapplicable. The EU adopted its 1996 Blocking Regulation, prohibiting enforcement of third-country judgments—including Title III—and allowing damages recovery in European courts. Canada reformed its Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act (FEMA), declaring Title III judgments unenforceable and sanctioning executives who obey foreign extraterritorial laws with fines of up to $7,000 or up to five years’ imprisonment. Both became inoperative due to a structural asymmetry: they protect companies already operating in third countries from enforcement of a judgment, but not from losing access to the dollar payments system. When OFAC can cut a European bank from the correspondent network, compensation before a European court comes later, is slow and is incapable of replacing the severed channel; and a Canadian subsidiary pressured by its US parent may violate FEMA if it obeys, and lose the parent’s financial backing if it refuses. The antidote’s premise was that “a company can operate without obeying the United States”; the 2026 logic is that “not obeying means not being able to operate.” Once that premise is broken, the antidote is reduced to symbolic value.
The right question is not “when did it become extraterritorial?” but “what happened when that extraterritoriality ceased to have limits?”
III. The 2026 reinforcement: Three dimensions
The executive orders of January 29 and May 1, 2026 did not create extraterritoriality: they reinforced it until its nature changed. The first declared Cuba an “unusual and extraordinary threat” and authorized tariffs against countries supplying oil to the island. The second—described by Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez as the moment “the mask of the blockade as a bilateral matter falls”—authorized the total freezing of assets against any person or entity of a third country that “does business with the Cuban government,” introducing for the first time secondary sanctions applicable to entities with no link whatsoever to the US economy.
The reinforcement operates in three dimensions. First, from a link with the United States to mere relation with Cuba: Title III only activated US jurisdiction when there was “expropriated property” and an identifiable “trafficker”; the May order eliminates that mediation and sanctions the very fact of “doing business with the Cuban government.” Second, from litigable exception to administrative discretion: what previously required judicial process now operates by decree, without charges, due process or appeal to a neutral body. Third, and decisively, from sectoral to worldwide coverage: the order extends sanctions to “any person or entity” with ties to the Cuban government in energy, defense, mining and financial services, eliminating the distinction between “direct investment” and “incidental commercial relationship.” All contact is sanctionable. Every third country is jurisdiction. Every company is a potential hostage.
It is this third dimension that produces the change of nature. A blockade contained within identifiable sectors is an aggressive but bounded foreign policy; a blockade applied to any entity on the planet for any link with Cuba ceases to be a policy and becomes an ordering: a single jurisdiction legislating for all, without consent and without recourse. There the blockade becomes a global dictatorship. Not because extraterritoriality is new, but because its worldwide extension turns it into the rule of the system.
The UN Working Group on the democratic international order called the January order “an extreme form of unilateral economic coercion with extraterritorial effects” and warned, “there is no right in international law to impose economic sanctions on third States for maintaining lawful trade with another sovereign country.” It is an accurate description, but the norm has no enforcement mechanism. That is the operational definition of global dictatorship.
If the dimensions describe the axes of change, the links describe the parts of the mechanism. It operates through three mutually reinforcing links, each converting “trading with Cuba” into “having US assets as an enemy.” What distinguishes the 2026 version is not the existence of the links but that none leaves anything out of reach.
First link: maritime interception. Over 7,000 containers held in third-country ports, many with food, medicine and medical equipment, lawfully contracted and paid for by Cuban MSMEs. When a European shipping company refuses to carry them, it applies no European law: it avoids Treasury reprisals against its US assets. The international law of the sea obliges it to nothing; the logic of the balance sheet obliges it to everything. The deployment of US naval assets adds physical to financial coercion: it constitutes a naval interdiction with blockade effects—an act of war—raising its own problems under international humanitarian law.
Second link: financial blockade. Cuba’s correspondent banks refuse to provide services for fear of losing access to the dollar payments system. Visa and Mastercard operations become impossible, not for technical reasons, but because participating in the dollar system presupposes accepting the US right of veto over the counterparty. The October 2026 sanction against Banco Internacional de Comercio (BICSA), for alleged links to a sanctioned Iranian bank, illustrates the mechanics: the Cuban financial system is excluded not for its behavior but because of Washington’s position in the global payments system.
Third link: investment deterrence. In June 2026, several international hotel chains abandoned management contracts in Cuba. The reason is not that the Cuban market is deficient, but that a company with US assets turns its entire global balance sheet into a hostage of sanctions. All contact is sanctionable.
The common logic is this: the United States does not need to convince any country to “accept” the blockade. It only needs to make compliance the “rational option of self-preservation.” That is the cost of dissent: it is no longer charged in Havana but in every boardroom of every third country calculating its dollar exposure. And that calculation is universal because worldwide extension is not an attribute of the mechanism: it is its definition.
The blockade has always relied on extraterritoriality to punish Cuba beyond the bilateral relationship: without it, third countries would continue trading with Cuba, and the damage would be dispersed rather than concentrated on the island. What it did not require was that this extraterritoriality remain confined within identifiable limits—specific sectors, US links, judicial mediation. While contained, the blockade was an aggressive but bounded foreign policy. Once extended to the entire planet, it became a global ordering. Its true function is no longer to punish Cuba but to produce a global habit of obedience: worldwide extension is not the means to that end; it is what makes it possible.
Here is the syllogism the debate usually omits: pre-existing extraterritoriality was the instrument; worldwide extension is what changes its nature; and the change of nature is what turns it into a global dictatorship. There is no global dictatorship without worldwide extension. Worldwide extension is the condition of possibility.
When a French shipping company, a Spanish hotel group, a Panamanian bank and an Emirates trader each decide, “not to deal with Cuba,” they seem to make scattered decisions. But the sum constitutes a structural order of exclusion: a mechanism of global discipline that depends neither on UN resolutions nor on treaty obligations, but operates automatically on the dollar infrastructure and the threat of asset confiscation. This is what the Cuban foreign minister signalled at BRICS: the United States seeks to impose the blockade on the entire world. The phrase is not diplomatic hyperbole: it is the technical description of the change of nature.
The term “global dictatorship” must be precise. It is not a moral judgment but an operational description. A dictatorship is an order in which a singular will exercises power without institutional counterweight, without due process applicable to the affected party and without recourse to an independent body. The blockade’s global dictatorship meets three conditions:
And all three are fully met only when extension is worldwide. A bounded blockade leaves a considerable part of the world economy outside the veto; a worldwide blockade leaves no one outside. That totality is the dictatorship.
The UN General Assembly may vote, for the thirty-third consecutive year, on a resolution demanding an end to the blockade. The majority will vote in favour. But that vote will be irrelevant to how the banks and shipping companies enforcing the blockade actually behave. That gap is not a defect of the multilateral system: it is its defining feature in the field of economic coercion. And it is empirical proof that worldwide extension has produced an ordering that no longer responds to multilateral politics but to the discretion of Washington.
Cuba occupies the place of a permanent test case. By imposing sustained costs on Cuba, Washington signals all observers: the price of disobedience is precisely calculable, and the reward for obedience is “not being targeted.” The blockade causes annual losses of billions of dollars, but its demonstrative value exceeds its direct economic damage. The damage is the message. And the message is legible only because extension is worldwide: were the blockade bounded, the message would be “don’t invest in Cuba”; being worldwide, the message is “don’t challenge Washington anywhere on the planet with any partner.”
This mechanism gains analytical value because it operates in a world that claims to be multipolar. In 2026, the UN General Assembly adopted, for the thirty-third consecutive year and by an overwhelming majority, a resolution demanding an end to the blockade. In diplomatic statements by African, Latin American and Caribbean countries, words such as “extraterritoriality,” “sovereignty” and “free trade” reappear. China has explicitly rejected that US accusations can justify the blockade. Brazil, Spain and Mexico have coordinated humanitarian assistance to alleviate the energy crisis.
Yet a systemic fracture exists between diplomatic consensus and effective conduct. Colombia may have declared at the UN that it “rejects Cuba’s inclusion on the list of state sponsors of terrorism,” but its banks still do not process Cuban transactions. Spain may demand that the European Commission activate the blocking regulation against US sanctions on ICC judges, but its hotel groups continue withdrawing from Cuba.
In addition, in 2026 that fracture has grown cruder: there is open blackmail at the UN. Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez denounced that Secretary of State Marco Rubio pressures and extorts heads of state and government to change their vote on the resolution against the blockade. As a result, when the vote was finally held on October 28, the result was 130 in favour, 17 against, and 25 abstentions— a decline from the 165 votes in favour the previous year, but still massive support for the Cuban resolution. The debate itself was marked by an unprecedented incident: US representative Mike Waltz used his podium to deny the very existence of the blockade, calling it a “myth.” When Waltz proceeded to blame the Cuban government for the country’s economic hardship, questioned its medical cooperation and uttered a string of highly offensive lies, Foreign Minister Rodríguez requested a motion of order and confronted him directly: “The United States not only lies grossly and arrogantly: it also offends the dignity of the member States and of the Cuban people.” The exchange—which included Waltz’s retort, “This is America”—exposed the mechanism’s contempt for the forum it was addressing, treating the General Assembly not as a space of sovereign equals but as an extension of US jurisdiction.
Extortion diplomacy is not an anomaly of the multilateral system but the consummation of its logic: the system proclaims sovereign equality while operating on an infrastructure that denies it, and extortion is the point where that contradiction becomes practice..[A mechanism that has already abolished exteriority cannot tolerate a disobedient exterior persisting in the UN hall. If the banks of a third country no longer have an exterior in the dollar system, that country’s government must not have one either in the General Assembly vote. Vote blackmail is the diplomatic correlate of boardroom blackmail. Both follow the same rule: obedience is rational self-preservation; the price of disobedience is precisely calculated.
But the aim of extortion must not be confused. Washington knows the resolution will pass overwhelmingly, as it has for 32 years. Extortion cannot reverse the result, but it can devalue it: reduce the majority’s margin, extract abstentions, turn a historic vote into routine procedure, and demonstrate that even countries voting against the blockade can be punished for doing so. The resolution passes every year. The question is at what political cost to those who support it—exactly the logic the mechanism applies in the boardroom: not to prevent the decision but to make it costlier.
This fracture reveals a key limitation of multipolarity: political multipolarity does not automatically translate into multipolarity of financial and logistical infrastructure. As long as cross-border transactions are denominated in dollars, settled in New York and based on US assets as credit, political “opposition” cannot become economic “disobedience.” A country can vote against the blockade in the morning and enforce its provisions in the afternoon—not from hypocrisy, but because its banking system has no other operational option.
Cuba’s situation thus becomes a precise measuring instrument: it measures how far a country can survive outside the gravitational field of US financial infrastructure. The current answer: very limitedly. And the worldwide extension of the 2026 reinforcement means that gravitational field no longer has an outer edge: there is no known escape orbit.
But measurement must not be confused with verdict. That there is no known escape orbit does not mean no resistance is possible; it means resistance can no longer be measured by its capacity to leave the gravitational field but by its capacity to hold the line within it. Cuba has not survived sixty years by finding an escape orbit: it has survived above all because it chose to pay the price of disobedience, and with that price built a legitimacy that no dollar-exposure calculation can produce. The cost is enormous and real: blackouts, scarcity, daily wear. But the decision to resist and develop is not deduced from cost calculation: it is taken despite the calculation. And that is precisely the variable the mechanism cannot model.
VII. The Cuban response
The Cuban response—renewable development, oil exploration, tripartite cooperation with Russia and China—should not be read merely as “development policies” but as survival experiments to find an escape orbit within that gravitational field. They are attempts to find local escape velocity.
The energy crisis is the most visible laboratory of this test. Blackouts of up to 20 hours in large areas of the country, interruption of the cold chain for food and medicine, and difficulties for ambulances and essential services constitute the direct human cost of extraterritorial coercion. The UN Working Group warned in February 2026 that interfering with fuel imports “could lead to a serious humanitarian crisis with cascading effects on essential services,” and recalled that measures likely to cause shortages of essential goods “may constitute collective punishment of the civilian population.”
Faced with that cost, the Cuban response is not an alternative to the system but a search for margins within it. Its institutional framework is the package of 176 economic and social measures approved in June 2026 by the National Assembly of People’s Power. They are not an adjustment imposed from outside but a sovereign decision in the face of the blockade. The cost is visible—73% of hotel facilities closed, seven chains withdrawn—but the report presented by Prime Minister Marrero Cruz records thirteen foreign companies contracting directly, the first joint venture with private MSMEs, and over 100 non-state actors in wholesale fuel marketing.
On that framework, the material response unfolds: each solar panel installed, each oil well drilled with foreign cooperation, each local-currency settlement mechanism negotiated with strategic partners is an attempt to reduce exposure to the US veto. They do not solve the structural problem. However, they make it measurable and partially attenuate its effects.
VIII. Conclusion: A problem beyond Cuba
The deepest significance of the Cuban case lies not in Cuba itself but in the fact that it previews a possible future: a world where political sovereignty is systematically depreciated against financial infrastructure. Extraterritoriality always existed; what changed in 2026 is not its existence but its extension: from contained exception to rule of worldwide scope. And it is that extension—not extraterritoriality itself—that turns the blockade into a global dictatorship. A bounded extraterritorial blockade is coercion; a worldwide one is an ordering. The difference between them is the difference between a policy that can be resisted and a system that must be inhabited. This worldwide extension is not a sign of strength but of decline: it is the reaction of a power that perceives its comparative loss of global influence in the face of rising emerging countries. The global dictatorship of the blockade is, at bottom, the result of that decline.
Two consequences beyond Cuba follow. First, the mechanism prevents the development of independent processes. If worldwide extension eliminates the exterior, any country attempting to organize its production, trade or finance outside the dollar system faces not punishment for its behavior but punishment for its existence. It is not sanctioned for threatening the United States but for proving that exteriority is possible. Every successful sovereign development experiment refutes the thesis “there is no outside,” and must therefore be smothered in its demonstrative phase. Cuba is not the only object of punishment; it is the exhibit shown to all countries considering an independent path.
Second, it constitutes aggression and a denial of national sovereignty. When one country’s administrative apparatus can decide the consequences for any entity on the planet that lawfully trades with any third country, the principle of sovereign equality ceases to be the foundation of the international order and becomes mere rhetorical residue: it is still invoked, but it no longer governs. The UN vote can be extorted, third-country banks disconnected, a company’s global balance sheet taken hostage: these are not isolated injustices but manifestations of a single order that has subordinated sovereignty to financial infrastructure.
The counteroffensive must therefore be global. Not because the Cuban cause requires global solidarity—though it does—but because the logic Cuba faces can only be challenged on a global scale. Resistance by one country or region within the gravitational field of dollar settlement will face the same fate as the European and Canadian antidotes: legal victory, practical inoperability. Resistance will have a material base only when alternative infrastructures for payments, settlement and credit reach sufficient scale for “disobedience” to cease being economic suicide.
Under those conditions, neutrality and “letting it pass” are irrational and suicidal. Irrational, because a mechanism that has abolished exteriority will not exclude from its discipline an actor declaring neutrality: the neutral is merely an obedient party not yet tested. Suicidal, because each concession strengthens the extortioner and raises the price to be paid next time. The extortion diplomacy before the October 2026 vote proves it: not even a non-binding vote allows Washington to tolerate an exterior. If not even the vote can be neutral, neutrality in trade, finance and development is an illusion. Any country that proclaims its preference for a multipolar world will sooner or later face a Cuban test. The question is not “whether Cuba can resist” but “how much the next country put to the test is willing to pay to prove that it will not obey.” And the answer, so far, has been: less than the cost of disobedience.
The blockade’s global dictatorship does not rest on aircraft carriers. It rests on the rationality of fear in every boardroom, every compliance department, and every central bank calculating its dollar exposure before calculating its obligation under international law. That is the mechanism Cuba reveals, and the one the multipolar world has not yet decided to deactivate. Extraterritoriality was always the instrument. Worldwide extension is the current trend. Global dictatorship is the result. And the counteroffensive—if it comes—will have to organize on the same scale: global, material, and without excuses of neutrality.
References
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Source: Al Mayadeen