By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on November 5, 2026
Despite the oil embargo and pressure from Washington, history shows that social suffering does not lead to surrender in Cuba. Photo: Europa Press
On October 23, in Fort Myers, Donald Trump described Cuba’s surrender as a naval stopover, with his ships returning from Iran and one of them halted off the Cuban coast, where, he predicted, “they’ll raise their hands.” He would then send Marco Rubio to finalize the deal, effectively reducing an entire country to a stopover on the return trip. To complete such a fantasy, all that was missing was to imagine the secretary of state parachuting in to take up residence as proconsul.
Tuesday’s election results put an end to that narrative with a humiliating defeat for the Republican Party—a vote of no confidence nearly two years into Trump’s second term. The president, who promises to have entire countries at his disposal, will have to govern in the face of a society that has just withdrawn much of its support from him, while his demand for obedience abroad contrasts with the trust he needs to regain at home.
The result does not in and of itself determine his foreign policy, but it calls into question the premise underpinning his threats—namely, that material superiority guarantees control over events. Iran has already demonstrated the limits of that calculation: on March 1, Trump spoke of an operation lasting about four weeks, and in September, Reuters reported—citing sources within his administration—on efforts to contain the escalation before the elections and on the need to replenish severely depleted ammunition reserves. In late August, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed 63 percent opposition to the war, which helps explain how the operation—conceived to demonstrate strength—had become an electoral problem.
Anyone who announces that they are going to bring order to a region assumes that its inhabitants will accept the place assigned to them, just as presenting Cuba as an unresolved issue turns another country’s sovereignty into an administrative anomaly. Such a strategy may be convincing within an office but falls apart as soon as others make their own decisions, because a society retains interests and aspirations that no power can simply dismiss. Sanctions shape our lives, but they do not grant Washington the right to decide for us nor do they nullify our ability to act.
Washington is attempting to reduce that margin of autonomy through specific measures, such as the executive order of January 29, which opened the door to imposing tariffs on imports from countries that supply oil to the island. By extending the threat to third parties and using energy supplies for political ends, the capitulation announced from a public platform is underpinned by measures that disrupt the daily lives of millions of people—a logic with a long history.
The policy toward the largest island of the Antilles is not merely a product of the Cold War; it controls the Florida Strait, access to the Gulf of Mexico, and the corridor to Haiti. The geostrategic importance of the country that institutionalized socialism just 90 miles from the capitalist mecca explains two U.S. military interventions (1898 and 1906), the Platt Amendment, Guantánamo, and the deplorable punitive isolation.
In a memorandum dated April 6, 1960, Lester Mallory, a State Department official, proposed to provoke “hunger, despair, and the overthrow of the government.” The document, preserved in U.S. diplomatic archives, clearly sets forth the intention to put pressure on the population until their suffering produced the political behavior Washington expected.
But in December 2014, when announcing the policy shift toward Cuba, Barack Obama acknowledged that isolation had not worked, after more than five decades of a strategy aimed at exerting pressure on the island. That acknowledgment does not make the strategy invulnerable, but it forces anyone who once again bets on suffering to explain why they would now achieve the surrender they failed to secure before—a question that will remain unanswered no matter how much the tone of the threat escalates.
Tuesday’s defeat may narrow Trump’s room for maneuver regarding new military adventures, but it may also fuel the temptation to flex his muscles abroad—which makes it all the more necessary to accompany the rejection of his threats with active diplomacy and concrete support for the Cuban people. There are reasons to believe that the promise of a subdued island will also fail, because between the damage Washington can inflict and the obedience the president still commands, there remain the decisions of the Cuban people.
Cuba’s future will not arrive aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier. I assure you of that.
Rosa Miriam Elizalde is a Cuban journalist who is First Vice President of the Union of Cuban Journalists (UPEC) and was a founder of Cubadebate, she is a writer of several books and a regular contributor to La Jornada.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English