By Fernando Buen Abad Domínguez on February 7, 2026
foto: Enrique Gonzalez Enro
Cuba has not survived the empire by miracle or romantic obstinacy, but rather through political and revolutionary intelligence that has managed to reverse much of the damage caused by the blockade and turned disadvantage into method, scarcity into language, and permanent aggression into organized consciousness.
David versus Goliath is not just a biblical metaphor recycled by political rhetoric, but a profound structure of meaning, a historical grammar that organizes the struggle between asymmetrical forces when ethics decides not to surrender to the arithmetic of power.
In the Cuban case, this dialectic has been elevated to a collective virtue, a pedagogy of resistance, a semiotics of doing where material weakness is not experienced as a lack, but as a creative opportunity.
Cuba has not survived the empire by miracle or romantic obstinacy, but by a political and revolutionary intelligence that knew how to reverse much of the damage caused by the blockade and turned disadvantage into method, scarcity into language, and permanent aggression into organized consciousness.
Where imperialism—with its financial, military, media, and symbolic machinery—seeks to impose the narrative of inevitability, the Cuban revolutionary experience opposes the narrative of possibility, not as fantasy, but as social praxis sustained through decades of siege.
A Cuban virtue is not the denial of conflict, but its metabolic humanism, turning necessity into ethics, siege into school, and threat into a mirror where the revolutionary people learn to recognize themselves as historical subjects.
Trump was not an anomaly, but a hyperbole, a brutal caricature of imperialism that has always operated with the same logic of intimidation, punishment, and exemplary punishment, only this time without diplomatic makeup.
Faced with this obscenity of power, Cuba responded as always with more organization, more political culture, more symbolic density. The asymmetry is not reduced, it is re-signified.
The blockade seeks not only material hunger, but also hunger for meaning, and there the Revolution responds with a semantics of dignity that turns every act of resistance into a greater sign. It is not a question of idealizing difficulty, but of understanding how a political community decides not to be defined by the language of the enemy.
In the dialectic of Cuban virtues, the daily struggle is a dialectic of consciousness: knowing that the adversary is a stronger scoundrel and yet not accepting its hegemony. David does not defeat Goliath by physical force, but by strategic intelligence and a correct reading of the symbolic terrain; Cuba does not confront the empire by copying its methods, but by dismantling its logic, revealing its contradictions, exposing its structural violence before the eyes of the world.
Every doctor sent where no one wants to go, every vaccine developed in adverse conditions, every school sustained against imposed defunding, is a stone thrown not against a body, but against a discourse. Revolutionary humanism is not a slogan, but a practice that reorganizes priorities: saving lives before saving profits, educating before indebting, sharing before accumulating.
That is what is intolerable to imperialism: not the existence of a small rebellious country, but the empirical demonstration that another order of values is not only desirable, but functional. Trump, with his rhetoric of walls, punishment, and supremacy, embodied the most cynical phase of a system that does not tolerate difference when it becomes an example. That is why aggression against Cuba is also aggression against the very idea of popular sovereignty, against the possibility of peoples deciding without asking permission.
The Cuban response has not been hatred, but persistence; not surrender, but active memory; not imitation of the executioner, but the deepening of its own project.
In semiotic terms, the Revolution has achieved something exceptional, which is to produce meaning from the periphery, to dispute the meaning of words such as democracy, freedom, and human rights from a concrete experience and not from an abstract market.
That is the real threat to the empire: that language will cease to belong to it. Turning asymmetry into humanistic strength means accepting that not all power is quantifiable, that there is a power in the collective that does not appear in Pentagon statistics or Wall Street balance sheets.
Cuba has turned its fragility into an ethical weapon, its vulnerability into a political pedagogy, and its resistance into a form of organized social love.
David does not become Goliath by defeating him; he defeats him without ceasing to be David. Therein lies the deepest lesson: not to win by becoming like the enemy, but to triumph without betraying one’s own humanity.
In a world saturated with cynicism, such consistency is subversive. That is why imperialism insists, threatens, sanctions, and lies; because in the face of brute force, it fears only one thing: the persistence of an example that shows that even under siege it is possible to live differently, think differently, and fight without renouncing dignity.
The economic, commercial, and financial blockade imposed against Cuba is not a simple foreign policy or a “bilateral dispute,” but a systematic form of structural violence that meets the criteria of a crime against humanity, in that it deliberately, prolongedly, and consciously attacks a civilian population with the explicit aim of causing suffering, shortages, and social despair.
It punishes not a government, but an entire people, restricting access to medicines, food, technology, financing, and normal relations with the rest of the world, even in contexts of health emergencies and natural disasters.
Its logic is not legal, but punitive; it is not diplomatic, but exemplary: it seeks to punish so that no one will imitate it. From an ethical and semiotic perspective, the blockade attempts to normalize pain as a political tool and turn cruelty into the norm, violating basic principles of international law and human coexistence.
The fact that it is maintained despite repeated condemnations by the international community reveals not only the impunity of imperial power, but also its moral bankruptcy. In the face of this, Cuban resistance takes on an even deeper dimension; it not only survives a material siege, but also denounces, by its very existence, the obscenity of a system that punishes dignity and criminalizes sovereignty. The blockade is a crime against humanity.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English