By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on June 4, 2026 from Havana
Foto Marco Peláez
Comments circulating on social media raise uncomfortable questions: What would happen if the United States were subjected for weeks to an oil blockade similar to the one it imposes on Cuba? What would happen if its hospitals depended on generators with limited fuel, if cold chains collapsed, if water treatment plants shut down, if cell towers went silent, if a major city were left without electricity, without communications, without digital payments, and without basic services?
The question does not seek to mechanically reverse history, but to expose the hypocrisy. What Washington presents as “pressure” against Cuba would be immediately recognized as collective punishment if its own population were to suffer it.
Cuba knows this logic all too well. In the late 19th century, Spanish colonial authorities implemented a policy of war that went down in history as Weyler’s Reconcentration. Captain General Valeriano Weyler’s pretext was military. He decided to separate the Cuban liberation army from the peasant population that could provide it with food, information, medicine, or shelter. The method he used was to empty the countryside, forcing thousands of families to concentrate in towns occupied by Spanish troops and razing the depopulated areas to deprive the mambises (anti-colonial forces) of resources.
The historical key is that when a colonial power fails to defeat a people through political or military means, it shifts the war into everyday life. Food, water, fuel, medicine, transportation, and information cease to be human necessities and become instruments of coercion. In Weyler’s Cuba, more than 400,000 people were interned in 80 reconcentration camps, and the decision was made against entire populations, including peasants, women, children, the elderly, white and Black Cubans, peninsulars, and foreigners.
U.S. Senator Redfield Proctor, after visiting the island in 1898, observed clearly: “It is neither peace nor war. It is desolation and anguish, misery and hunger.” He described cities surrounded by trenches, barbed wire, and blockhouses, where people had been forcibly herded to survive as best they could. They were, he said, “virtually prison yards,” where corpses mingled with the living dead and hundreds of bulging eyes, their dilated pupils reflecting the same horrifying disbelief. Auschwitz before Auschwitz. The consequences were catastrophic. It is estimated that some 170,000 people died, approximately 10 percent of the island’s population at the end of the 19th century.
The similarity does not lie in mechanically equating different eras, but in recognizing a pattern: suffering as a political tool. Weyler concentrated bodies; the energy blockade, which today marks its 126th day, aims to subject a country’s life to a planned and prolonged deprivation. Yesterday, towns were fenced off with barbed wire; today, ports, banks, shipping companies, insurance firms, supplies, and fuel are being cut off. Yesterday, the link between the peasant and the anti-colonial forces was severed; today, an attempt is being made to break the Cuban people’s will to resist in the worst possible way.
Historiography has debated whether Weyler’s reconcentration was the first modern concentration camp. Mariano Nagy notes that the case of the Spanish genocidal figure is often cited as a pioneering example, though there are earlier and parallel precedents in colonial policies against indigenous populations and in other imperial wars.
But even Weyler, who died in 1930 and never met his gifted Nazi pupils, understood that his method was pioneering a new approach. In his memoirs, he boasted that the British copied him in the Transvaal and the Americans in the Philippines.
The question circulating on social media, then, strikes at the heart of the moral problem. If four hours without electricity would be enough to empty supermarkets, spoil refrigerated food, and paralyze gas pumps in the United States; if three days would be enough to jeopardize hospitals, dialysis units, operating rooms, and ventilators in New York; if a week without power would prevent the purification of water in major cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, what should we call a policy designed to prolong that damage in another country?
In Cuba, the colonial power first called the reconcentration “pacification.” Today, the imperial power calls the economic and energy blockade “sanctions.” But words do not change the substance. When the lives of millions of people are deliberately punished to break their political will, we are not dealing with just another administrative measure. It is a crime against humanity, and it must be called by its name.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English