Much of the world refers to the Cuban people as “resilient” after enduring nearly seven decades of the worst the United States could throw at them. But Cuba is about much more than resilience; it’s about resistance to a mass-murdering U.S.-backed dictator, a failed invasion, countless terrorist attacks, and some of the harshest sanctions. Yet, somehow, defying Western logic, Cuba still stands. The people, many of whom have grown tired of the U.S.’s imperialist ambitions, remain broadly steadfast in keeping the U.S. out of Cuba.
Meanwhile, as the U.S. continues to ramp up pressure to force a leadership change in Cuba’s government with additional sanctions, Cuba’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bruno Rodríguez, recently highlighted how U.S. sanctions are meant to harm people, not governments. His point is not based on propaganda or hyperbole; it’s backed by decades of extensive analysis and data showing how U.S.-led sanctions don’t win the hearts and minds of the people it claims to care about. Instead, the sanctions kill them.
It’s not just a well-known fact, but one that policymakers and high-ranking U.S. government officials are well aware of, yet don’t seem bothered by. In 1996, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, responded to a question about 500,000 Iraqi children dying as a result of U.S.-led sanctions by declaring it was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from rebuilding the Iraqi military.
“I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it,” Albright to Lesley Stahl in 1996
Today, that same attitude drives U.S. policy. In a recent interview on CNN’s Inside Politics, Florida Rep. Carlos Gimenez admitted that U.S. policy toward Cuba is about collective punishment by using starvation as a weapon in both Cuba and Iran.
In 2025, a report was released highlighting how U.S. sanctions kill more than 500,000 people a year and have killed tens of millions of people over the last several decades. The United States claims to do this for the people of the victimized countries, yet it does so as it starves millions of them every day. This duplicity has become more evident than ever in the modern era, thanks in large part to independent journalists and analysts who have had to point out what should be obvious: claiming to care for the people you are actively starving is blatantly hypocritical.
The suffering that sanctions bring is an attempt to coerce people to bend to the U.S.’s will and rise up against governments that aren’t as friendly to U.S. corporate interests as the billionaires who influence our elected officials believe they should be. The targets always begin with countries that nationalize their resources to help ensure that the wealth generated benefits their people more than it benefits greedy oligarchs who will exploit anyone or anything for a buck.
While the decades of collective punishment have long failed, and with the U.S. refusing to accept that the Cuban people aren’t interested in its intervention, the relentless oppression of the island continues based on duplicitous ramblings of Cuban American hardliners. That oppression was recently highlighted in a United Nations (UN) report demanding the end of unilateral United States sanctions against Cuba.
“Unilateral sanctions are creating severe humanitarian crises and punishing entire populations for political disputes they have no voice in,” said Zaina Jallad, UN Special Rapporteur. “These measures depress growth and development, increase indebtedness, and undermine conditions of life for entire populations that have no meaningful participation in the political disputes giving rise to the sanctions,” Jallad said. “Impacted populations are held hostage to conditions in which fundamental rights are denied, with the heaviest burdens falling on those in vulnerable situations, including persons with chronic diseases and persons with disabilities.”
The report emphasized how entire generations have been forced to live under the restrictions imposed by U.S. sanctions, which limit fundamental rights related to “food, health, education, international cooperation and humanitarian support” and hamper access to essential public services and infrastructure. The UN report aims to create a framework that brings together the “universality of human rights, the everyday experiences of affected populations, pathways through which harm is produced, and the obligations of prevention, remedy, restitution, and recovery.”
While the U.S. claims that it imposes sanctions on Cuba and other countries for democracy, the collective punishment and the oppression it inflicts on millions of people every day to achieve those aims are the least democratic options on the table, aside from military action. The Trump administration has exposed what decades of U.S. foreign policy look like behind the scenes, not out of benevolence, but out of outright incompetence, and the truth is stranger than fiction.
Additional Photos From Cuba
Recently, L.A.-based freelance photojournalist Francisco Lozano spent some time in Cuba. Some of his efforts to document Cuba today are featured throughout this article. If you’d like to support his work and help offset some of the trip’s costs, please donate here.
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