By Raúl Antonio Capote on May 28, 2026
Havana, foto: Bill Hackwell
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1948, establishes in Article II that genocide is defined as any of the acts committed “with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national group.”
Dawn breaks in Havana; the coffee cools on the table as I skim through the international news wires. The news, as is almost always the case, carries the same bitter taste: Zionist crimes continue in Palestine, NATO is killing children in Luhansk, and the White House is intensifying—to extreme and unprecedented levels—the economic, commercial, and financial blockade against Cuba.
It is best to start with the legal aspects, so that no one can later claim this is mere trench rhetoric: The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1948, establishes in Article II that genocide is defined as any of the acts committed “with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national group.”
And it lists: the killing of members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and—pay close attention to this clause—“intentionally subjecting the group to conditions of existence calculated to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part.”
Now ask yourself, reader: what is the name of the policy that for sixty years has prevented food, medicine, fuel, and technology from reaching an island? How do you define the act of persecuting foreign banks that dare to finance a public health project in Havana?
What word describes the deliberate decision to cut off energy supplies to an entire country, knowing that this means shutting down ventilators, incubators, refrigerators for storing vaccines, and drinking water pumps? The word exists: GENOCIDE.
The machinery of crime
What we are witnessing in these months of 2026 is a qualitative escalation, a leap into a legal and moral abyss; the Trump administration’s policy, designed with mathematical precision, has reached “levels of systematicity and cruelty without historical precedent.”
This is an act of aggression that targets sectors vital to national survival: fuel, remittances, tourism, and medical cooperation.
The cornerstone of these developments is the Executive Order of January 29, 2026, which declares a “national emergency” based on the fallacy that Cuba constitutes an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. security.
Under this pretext, punitive tariffs and secondary sanctions are imposed on any country, company, or shipping line that exports fuel to the island.
However, Article 41 of the UN Charter empowers only the Security Council to impose sanctions, and only in response to actual threats to peace. Washington is acting by trampling on the sovereignty of third-party states and flagrantly violating international law.
But it doesn’t stop there: on May 1, 2026, the White House issued a new executive order that multiplies the extraterritorial effects of the blockade, with the application of automatic secondary sanctions against foreign companies, banks, and entities—even if their business operations in the United States have no connection whatsoever to Cuba
This is the law of the strongest, disguised as legality. Added to this is the fuel blockade, implemented through financial persecution and secondary sanctions against ships and shipping companies, insurers, banks, and logistics operators.
There is no need to intercept ships with gunboats; it is enough to threaten those who charter them. The result is the same: the energy suffocation of an entire nation.
The victims: when the statistics bleed
We now come to the most painful chapter, where the numbers leave the coldness of the page to become bodies, families, and shattered dreams.
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez reported in May 2026 that the infant mortality rate had doubled by the end of 2025, reaching 9.9 deaths per thousand live births, due to a lack of essential medicines and medical supplies
Not due to medical negligence, not due to a lack of training among Cuban doctors, but because the most powerful empire on Earth has decided that antibiotics, anesthetics, and laboratory reagents must not reach the island.
Some 100,000 patients, including 12,000 children, remain on the surgical waiting list due to the energy blockade; the survival rate for children with cancer has dropped from 85% to 65%. More than 32,880 pregnant women face additional risks, with limited access to obstetric and genetic ultrasounds essential for the timely diagnosis of birth defects.
More than 61,830 children under one year of age require special care that is now compromised by the lack of fuel for medical transport and electricity for medical equipment; more than 350 pediatric surgeries per week are directly affected by the deliberately provoked energy crisis.
Shortly thereafter, U.S. President Trump himself boasted of having cut off the island’s “lifeblood.”
Marco Rubio: the architect of horror
And here we come to the man who has put a face, a voice, and a signature to this policy of extermination: Marco Rubio, U.S. Secretary of State, a descendant of Cubans who emigrated before the triumph of the revolution, has become, in the words of Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez, “one of the main architects of the military threat against Cuba, of the energy blockade, and of the total cutoff of fuel supplies.”
Rubio is not a bureaucrat who merely carries out others’ orders; he is the hand that tightens the screws. The war memorandum signed by Trump bore his personal stamp: sanctions against foreign companies, financial persecution, and economic suffocation as instruments of political subversion.
But perhaps the most revealing aspect of Rubio’s moral character is his denial of the obvious. In an interview with Al Jazeera, the Secretary of State stated with complete nonchalance that Washington has taken “no punitive measures” against Cuba and attributed the energy crisis to the fact that the island “wants free oil.”
Responsibility Before History
At this point, it is worth asking: What is Marco Rubio’s personal responsibility for the deaths of Cuban children and the elderly?
Article III of the Genocide Convention establishes that not only acts of genocide themselves shall be punished, but also “conspiracy to commit genocide,” “direct and public incitement to commit genocide,” and “complicity in genocide.”
Article IV is crystal clear: “Persons who have committed genocide or any of the other acts listed in Article III shall be punished, whether they are heads of state, government officials, or private individuals.”
Rubio has the decision-making authority, the budget, the influence, and the power to stop the machinery of death he has helped create; yet, he chooses to tighten the screws even further.
When a child dies in a Cuban hospital because the ventilator shuts off during a power outage, there is a chain of responsibility that leads directly to the State Department building in Washington.
When a mother loses her baby because the incubator stopped working, there is a signature, an executive order, a banking sanction that made it possible; when an elderly person dies due to a lack of medication that was blocked at a foreign port out of fear of financial reprisals, there is a specific name behind that decision. To put it correctly, two names and an Empire.
No management report will erase the bloodstains, no national security memo will justify the extermination, no media denial will hide the truth.
As I write these lines, I think of the Cuban doctors operating by flashlight during the blackouts caused by the lack of fuel, of that child who could not grow up, of the elderly man who died before his time.
Raul Capote, foto: Bill Hackwell
The sun sets over Havana’s Malecón as I finish this chronicle; there, in the distance, I try to make out the silhouette of a ship that never arrives, of a shipment that never reaches its destination, of medicine that never makes it. The economic war continues its course, silent and lethal; history will judge them.
Raul Capote is a Cuban writer, professor, researcher, and journalist who has written many books
Source: Cuba en Resumen