The U.S. wants to make an example out of Cuba, to terrify the rest of the region (and the world) into submission. Canada, and the rest of the world, must also make Cuba an example—an example of the power of international solidarity to challenge imperialist aggression. .

The United States is attempting to starve a nation of 11 million people, and it is seemingly doing so for no reason other than irrational cruelty.

On January 29, United States President Donald Trump took a break from denying his well-documented ties to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to issue a new presidential order declaring a state of emergency over the “unusual and extraordinary threat” posed by Cuba. The document is filled with a number of absurd and obviously false claims, such as that Cuba acts as a staging ground for Hezbollah and Hamas. It uses those claims to justify a decision for the U.S. government to enact severe tariffs against any country in the world that sells oil to Cuba, directly or indirectly.

This comes less than a month after the United States kidnapped the president of Venezuela and his wife—killing 32 Cuban soldiers in the raid. Interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez claims that the U.S. has been threatening to kill her and other top government officials if they do not accept all U.S. demands, which include ending oil shipments to Cuba, and the Venezuelan government has obliged.

Subsequently, Mexico—Cuba’s other most significant oil supplier alongside Venezuela—has cancelled oil shipments to the island. Despite Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s claims that it was a “sovereign decision,” it was clearly the result of U.S. pressure and threats, as the U.S. has recently hinted at plans to take military action against Mexico. Mexico has sent humanitarian aid to Cuba, but has not begun shipping oil to the country again despite claiming to be searching for a diplomatic solution to do so. Between Venezuela and Mexico, over 75 per cent of Cuba’s oil imports have disappeared in the span of a month.

The situation in Cuba is dire. The country, already pushed to a breaking point since the U.S. economic blockade escalated during Trump’s first term (continuing under Biden), is now experiencing power blackouts that last up to 16 hours per day. Fuel shortages are widespread—as are, increasingly, food shortages. Local agriculture is at risk of collapse due to the lack of fuel, which could tip the island into a famine. Hospitals are running on generators and the fuel is drying up. People are likely already dying as a result of this unprovoked escalation.

Canada cannot allow the United States to destroy a small and peaceful country for no reason other than the whims of senior government officials—in this case, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has apparently been operating on his own without even briefing Trump on the file.

Canada and Cuba have a long history of diplomatic relations and friendship, with Canada being one of the few countries that has never severed diplomatic relations with the island country. Canadians visit Cuba more than any other Caribbean or Central American country, and Canada is Cuba’s second-largest source of foreign investment. Cuba even offered to send a contingent of doctors to Indigenous communities in Manitoba during the COVID-19 pandemic to alleviate the local stress on the health care system.

Canada, like nearly all other countries in the world, is formally opposed to the decades-long U.S. blockade of the island. It is time to put that opposition into practice.

The blockade

The United States has engaged in an economic siege of Cuba since shortly after the Cuban revolution in 1959. The embargo—or el bloqueo, the blockade, as it is known in Cuba—is a comprehensive set of policies that prevent Cuba from accessing the global economy.

It was nominally imposed as a punishment for Cuba nationalizing the properties of U.S. businesses, which previously controlled 40 per cent of the country’s sugar plantations, 80 per cent of utilities, and 90 per cent of mines. Nearly the entirety of the tourism sector prior to the revolution was owned by the American mafia, which was the real power behind the throne under the U.S.-sponsored dictator Fulgencio Batista, and who ran Cuba as el Prostibulo de America, America’s brothel.

The blockade formally began as a presidential decree in 1962 under John F. Kennedy, and accelerated under his successor Lyndon Johnson, who managed to convince much of the rest of the world—particularly the U.S.-sponsored dictatorships in Latin America—to sever relations with Cuba. Ronald Reagan, in the 1980s, added Cuba to the State Sponsors of Terror (SSOT) list for the first time, arguing that the country sponsored left-wing rebel groups in Latin America (the U.S. was actually sponsoring the Contras, a notorious terrorist group in Nicaragua, at the time, as well as facilitating the genocide of Maya Indigenous communities in Guatemala). The SSOT designation has a number of important ramifications, such as banning most foreign citizens from the U.S. if they have visited Cuba in recent years.

During the “special period”—a period of economic crisis in Cuba that followed the collapse of the island’s chief trading partner, the Soviet Union—the United States tightened its blockade. It passed the Helms-Burton Act and the so-called Cuban Democracy Act, which codified the blockade into law, rather than presidential decree, for the first time. The laws banned foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies (previously exempt) from trading with Cuba. It banned any international merchant ship that had docked in Cuba from accessing U.S. ports for six months after being in Cuba—meaning that companies effectively had to choose between the large U.S. market and the small Cuban one.

The blockade affects much more than U.S. trade—rather, it has systematically prevented Cuba from trading with other, non-U.S. partners. This is possible because of the U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. Nearly 90 per cent of all global foreign exchange transactions pass through the U.S. dollar, 58 per cent of global foreign exchange reserves are held in USD, and over 50 per cent of international transactions between banks (via the SWIFT system) occurs using USD. Nearly all USD transactions pass through U.S. banks in some way.

Because of this prohibition from accessing the world’s reserve currency, Cuba generally must pay for its imports in cash, rather than receiving the types of financing that are available to the vast majority of the countries of the world.

Because the architecture of the global financial system operates using USD, the U.S. government is able to exert significant leverage over non-U.S. institutions and impose U.S. sanctions globally, including institutions in countries that are opposed to the U.S. sanctions regimes.

This is not a hypothetical—U.S. regulators, particularly during the first Trump administration, regularly fine non-U.S. institutions massive amounts of money for “sanctions violations” regarding Cuba. French bank Societe Generale paid US$1.34 billion in fines in 2018 for the “crime” of doing business with Cuba, while UK-based Standard Chartered paid US$1.1 billion in 2019 for doing business with sanctioned countries, including Cuba. This despite both France and the UK being formally opposed to the U.S. blockade on Cuba and voting to condemn it every year at the United Nations, alongside nearly every country in the world except the United States and Israel, as well as a small rotating rogues’ gallery of countries attempting to curry their favour.

Global financial institutions, due to aggressive U.S. sanctions enforcement, have mostly abandoned Cuba entirely over recent years. According to the UN, the U.S. economic blockade on Cuba had cost the island at least $130 billion by 2018—a number which is increasing exponentially now as the blockade worsens.

Break the siege

The United States has now escalated its aggression against Cuba from an economic blockade to a military siege. U.S. drones are monitoring Mexican shipping routes, and U.S. soldiers are hijacking oil tankers in international waters to “enforce sanctions” over countries that have nothing to do with U.S. trade policy.

So far, Canadian leaders have been completely silent on the issue. Despite the worsening crisis in Cuba, neither the Prime Minister’s Office nor Global Affairs Canada has made a single statement referencing the latest unprovoked U.S. aggression against a foreign country.

Canada, for its part, already has legislation on the books that protects Canadian companies who defy the blockade. In 1984, the Canadian government passed the Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act (FEMA) in direct response to the U.S. embargo on Cuba, which was meant to prevent U.S. regulators from targeting Canadian companies for their dealings with Cuba. Parliament revised and updated the legislation in 1997 following the U.S. Helms-Burton Act. The law remains on the books today.

In his speech at Davos, Mark Carney spoke about the need to rally “middle powers” together to fight against the power of “hegemons” like the United States. Now is the time to do it. Canada must act in concert with Mexico and other regional powers and bodies to break the siege.

That means, first and foremost, oil—which Canada has no shortage of, despite it being owned primarily by U.S. investors, which presents its own thorny issues for Canada’s growing sovereignty problem. Canada should, at the very least, publicly support Mexico’s position that it must be able to resume and increase oil shipments to Cuba, and encourage other regional producers, such as Brazil’s Petrobras, to do the same. Beyond that, it should seriously consider purchasing and shipping oil directly to Cuba itself as a form of humanitarian relief, much as Mexico has done for decades.

This could include refined products like jet fuel, which Cuba has already run out of, as well as diesel and gasoline, which are urgently needed to keep key pieces of infrastructure running.

It could also mean donations of straight crude. Cuba’s public oil company, CUPET, has four refineries in the country, the largest of which is in Cienfuegos. These refineries process heavy crude from the country’s Northern Oil Belt and similar heavy crude imports from Venezuela and Mexico. Canada’s crude is also heavy, meaning that it would take less adjustment for Cuba’s existing refineries to be able to process it into necessary fuels.

Canada must also help Cuba become more resilient to this type of aggression, by aiding in the process of electrifying the country, fixing its power grid, and increasing its access to the world market, with Canada as an intermediary.

The move would, of course, be risky. The United States has been hijacking oil shipments in international waters for months, and threatening Canada. But a marked Canadian shipment of humanitarian aid is not the same thing as a Russian “ghost ship,” and the United States is much less likely to openly attack a fellow NATO member, as we saw in Greenland despite U.S. bluster. Canada holds a unique power here—as a NATO member and a respected member of the so-called “international community.” The United States would have a much more difficult time justifying its actions against us compared to the narratives it would cook up about drugs and cartels in Mexico or Venezuela. Canada must use that power.

That’s not to say that there would not be consequences. While the U.S. would be unlikely to openly hijack a Canadian shipment of aid, they would certainly impose financial and economic penalties against Canada for supporting Cuba. But those threats are already on the table, and the United States is already making them. Mexico, for its part, is likely holding back from action in part because its leaders doubt that other regional powers like Canada will support it. The only way to break the siege is to rally regional actors and do so collectively. Canada has the power to do so.

The greatest unsaid risk is that we do nothing—and allow the U.S. to systematically destroy all independent countries in the region, and have no one behind us when they come for us.

Defending the Zone of Peace

In 2014, the member-states of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), which includes Mexico, all of the countries in Central America and the Caribbean, and all of the countries of South America, voted to declare their territory a “Zone of Peace.” It was a remarkable and historic declaration, in which the countries of the hemisphere vowed to deepen regional integration, respect national sovereignty, and systematically pursue peaceful diplomatic solutions to conflicts rather than military ones. The year of the declaration, CELAC’s rotating presidency was held by Cuba, and the vote took place in Havana.

Today, the long-held dream of Latin America as a zone of peace is being shattered by renewed U.S. aggression across the region, against Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, and more. The United States is directly interfering in national elections in Latin American countries, and engaging in flagrantly illegal military incursions against sovereign countries.

The U.S. wants to make an example out of Cuba, to terrify the rest of the region (and the world) into submission. Canada, and the rest of the world, must also make Cuba an example—an example of the power of international solidarity to challenge imperialist aggression.