Cuba and the United States

Cuba is an island of fewer than ten million people a hundred and fifty kilometres from Florida. Since 1959 it has been governed by a single communist party that took American property without payment and allied itself with Washington's enemies. Since 1962 the United States has forbidden nearly all trade with it. In 2026, after American forces removed Venezuela's president and with him Cuba's supply of subsidised oil, Washington went further: it has stopped tankers reaching the island, indicted its former president, and says openly that it wants the system gone. The lights have gone out across Cuba several times this year.

Where it stands · September 2026

On 3 September 2026 the United States imposed new sanctions on Cuban companies and a relative of Raúl Castro. It imposed additional sanctions on 4 September. Cuba's national power grid collapsed nationwide on 18 September and collapsed again on 19 September, leaving millions without electricity. On 25 September the U.S. Army prepared for possible military action around Cuba. On 27 September China pushed back on U.S. policy toward Cuba.

What the dispute is about

Who decides how Cuba is governed. Washington says it wants a free Cuba and will keep up the pressure until the one-party state ends. Havana says its system is for Cubans to decide and that no country negotiates its form of government with a foreign power.

The embargo. The longest trade embargo in modern history. Its stated purpose is to deny resources to the government. Its effect falls on everyone on the island.

Property and people. Claims for what was confiscated in 1960, worth billions with interest, and two million Cuban Americans, many of whom lost homes and relatives, and who decide elections in Florida.

How each side explains it

Washington's account

Cuba is a dictatorship that has held no free election in sixty-seven years, jails people for shouting in the street, and has driven a tenth of its population abroad in four years. Its poverty is its own work: a command economy that cannot feed an island with some of the best soil in the Caribbean, run by generals who keep the tourist dollars. It hosts Russian and Chinese intelligence, sent its security men to prop up Venezuela, and trafficked drugs. Food and medicine were never under embargo. The pressure will end when political prisoners are freed and Cubans can choose their rulers.

In our coverage

Pressure on the governments in Caracas and Havana is justified →18 headlines
Covered by:El País · El Mundo · Associated Press · Clarín · La Nación · The Guardian

Havana's account

The United States occupied Cuba, ran it through dictators, organised an invasion in 1961 and hundreds of attempts on its leaders' lives, and for six decades has tried to starve it into submission for the offence of choosing its own path. The blockade has cost the island more than a hundred and seventy billion dollars. Cutting fuel to a country's power stations, hospitals and water pumps is a siege of civilians, and it is meant to be. Cuba has offered talks on everything except its sovereignty.

What each account leaves out

Washington's leaves out its own part in Cuba's history before 1959, and the landing it organised and the plots to kill Cuba's leaders after it, which its own Senate documented; that the policy has not achieved its aim in sixty-four years; and that a blockade of fuel closes operating theatres and water plants for the people it says it wants to free, many of whom then arrive at its border and are sent back.

Havana's leaves out that it has never let Cubans vote for another party; that more than a thousand people were jailed after the protests of 2021, some for twenty years; that the armed forces' business group holds billions in hard currency while the grid decays; and that an island which imports most of its food, much of it for cash from the United States, has problems the embargo does not explain.

The other governments' leaves out that they say little about Cuba's prisoners when they vote, and that Mexico and others stopped their oil shipments as soon as Washington threatened their trade.

The ledger

The United States

Wanted: the end of communist rule ninety miles away.
Did: everything short of war, and has not ruled that out.
Gained: prisoners released, market reforms the party had refused for decades.
Paid: near-total isolation on the question, and responsibility for what a fuel blockade does to civilians.

Cuba's government

Wanted: to survive on its own terms.
Gained: it survives.
Paid: its oil, its tourism, a million of its youngest citizens, and one ideological retreat after another.

Cubans

Twelve and more hours a day without electricity, food rationed, relatives abroad. They were consulted by neither government.

Words in dispute

Names and terms the sides do not share. This page keeps them out of its own voice.

embargo / blockade
regime / revolutionary government
maximum pressure / siege, genocide
political prisoners / mercenaries
failed state
sovereignty
transition