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Trump’s immoral Cuba sanctions deepen suffering while failing to deliver regime change
The Vatican and UN condemn escalating U.S. sanctions on Cuba as critics question a decades-old policy’s costs and failures.
By Patrick McCormick | FāVS News Columnist
The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News.
In a recent Holy Mass for Peace and Social Development in Cuba, the Vatican argued that “no stable order can arise from the force of arms or from pressure that humiliates peoples” and that “humanitarian aid should arrive in sufficient quantities and without hindrance and must never be exploited for political or geopolitical ends.”
These comments were a clear condemnation of the fresh waves of U.S. sanctions creating an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in Cuba and of 65 years of America’s siege warfare against our island neighbor.
Catholic religious leaders in Cuba (no fans of the current regime) report Trump’s “maximalist sanctions” are causing the worst crisis in Cuba in over a century, threatening the nation’s people (especially children, elderly and the poor) with hunger, illness and crippling poverty.
UN officials, who condemn Trump’s new sanctions as “a serious violation of international law” and a “collective punishment of civilians,” warn this crisis could lead to societal collapse if access to fuel is not restored.
There have been several total collapses of the national electric grid, cutting all power to 10 million people. Hospitals have cancelled thousands of procedures. Trash is piling up in the streets. Crops that can’t be picked, processed or delivered to market are rotting or spoiling while people go hungry.
Trump justifies this cruel and futile policy as a path to regime change. As in Iran (where this approach has failed catastrophically), inflicting extreme suffering on a people is meant to force them to revolt against a failed political system.
And, as in Venezuela (where talk of regime change evaporated once we got oil), threats of invasion and kidnapping of the national leader are intended to make the desired regime change more likely.
Six decades of failed siege warfare
Ever since Jack Kennedy initiated the U.S. embargo against Cuba at the height of the Cold War, the goal of this economic stranglehold was to turn the Cuban people against the Castro revolution by inflicting widespread hardship and hunger.
Over the years the U.S. embargo has cost the Cuban people over $170 billion (enough to buy the entire island groceries for over a century) and cut them off from critical medicines, machinery and investment.
But for all the suffering it inflicted, economic siege warfare against this island nation only strengthened popular support for Castro, while the Soviet bloc was happy to supply Cuba with critical trade and supplies.
By the early 1980s most Central and South American nations had resumed normal relations with the island and the CIA recommended abandoning America’s failed embargo against Cuba.
Still, when the Cold War ended, the U.S. (happy to trade with China and most members of the former Soviet Union) saw an opportunity to finally crush a regime cut off from Russian aid and trade and amped up the Cuban embargo with the Torricelli Act (1992) and the Helms Burton Act (1995).
These supersized sanctions did not bring about promised regime change or prevent Cuba’s economic recovery, though they did inflict a great deal of harm and provoke condemnations from most of America’s allies.
Still, when Trump entered the White House in 2017 and 2025, he recommitted the U.S. again and again to a vindictive, condemned, illegal and failed policy, promising this time we would break the Cuban people. And though Trump has doubled the costs of the embargo and precipitated a humanitarian crisis, regime change remains highly unlikely.
Near-universal condemnation
Religious and international groups have long condemned the unjust, disproportionate and senseless harm the U.S. has inflicted on the Cuban people through its embargo.
Four Popes have called for an end to the embargo, as have the World Council of Churches, the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church, the American Baptist churches and the Union for Reformed Judaism. None deny the serious flaws and injustices of the Cuban government, but all argue that the embargo makes things worse without offering any real solution.
For the same reason, the General Assembly of the United Nations has voted overwhelmingly to condemn U.S. sanctions against Cuba 33 times and the EU has long forbidden member states from complying with the U.S. embargo.
The central ethical problem with Trump’s escalated embargo and blockade is the immorality of inflicting disproportionate suffering on civilian populations to force them to change their government. Holding a nation’s people hostage to hunger, illness and economic collapse is a war crime, and doing it for 65 years against a people who have never launched an attack against the U.S. is a particularly heinous sin.
Terrorizing and injuring innocent civilians so they will revolt against their leaders is a violation of their sovereignty if they support these leaders, and a sadistic insult if they lack the resources to change their government (as is surely the case in both Iran and Cuba).
Furthermore, Trump’s illegal siege warfare against Cuba is part of his widespread assault on national sovereignty, the bedrock of international law reaching back to the 1664 Treaty of Westphalia.
Since his inauguration, Trump has talked about annexing Canada and threatened to colonize Greenland and invade Iran, Venezuela, Panama, Colombia and now Cuba. He has blown another nation’s ships out of the water, kidnapped the leader of Venezuela and started a war in Iran without any clear justification or purpose.
Though he joked about being a dictator for his first day in office, Trump seems to believe he is the emperor of the Western Hemisphere, entitled to tread on the sovereignty of any people in the Americas.
A criminal policy past its expiration date
Then, of course, there is the fact that America’s nearly universally condemned Cuban embargo has been a colossal failure, providing the Castro regime with an external scapegoat to blame for its economic and political failures, alienating America from its allies and exposing us to moral condemnations from every side.
And there is a strong consensus that Trump’s fuel blockade and threats of invasion add fresh crimes to the illegality of our 65-year-old economic stranglehold of Cuba. Surely this failed criminal policy has reached retirement age.
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