The Threat of a Good Example: U.S. Hegemony and the Strangulation of Cuba

To grasp what the reporting from Havana describes—an entire population driven into darkness, thirst, and hunger by the deliberate interdiction of fuel—one needs the analytical apparatus Chomsky has refined across six decades of writing on U.S. foreign policy. The central methodological move is what he sometimes calls Operations Research: read state behavior not through its declared intentions, which are infinitely plastic, but through its consistent operative outcomes. By that standard, the immiseration of Cuba is not a policy failure, not collateral damage, not an unfortunate side effect of well-meaning sanctions. It is the policy. It has been the policy since April 6, 1960.

On that date, Lester D. Mallory, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, set down in an internal memorandum—declassified and now reproduced in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, Vol. VI—the operative doctrine of the U.S. campaign against the Cuban Revolution. The majority of Cubans, Mallory wrote, supported Castro; there was no effective political opposition; therefore “the only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” The recommended “line of action” was one that “makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” This is not an interpretation imposed by the policy’s critics. It is the operative document, in the perpetrator’s hand. The 2026 executive order strangling fuel shipments, interdicting tankers, and threatening tertiary sanctions against any country that supplies Havana is the Mallory memorandum in late-stage refinement.

Chomsky’s first analytical demand is the single standard: that we apply to ourselves the criteria we apply to designated enemies. Imagine, he frequently observes, that Iran or Russia or China maintained for sixty-six years a policy whose declared internal purpose was to inflict “hunger” and “desperation” on a small neighbor’s civilian population—children, pregnant women, dialysis patients, elderly residents of high-rise apartments dependent on electric water pumps—in order to coerce political change. The Western press would have a vocabulary ready. It would not call the policy an “embargo.” It would call it terrorism, economic warfare, aggression, a crime against humanity. The category exists. It is selectively withheld.

The second analytical demand is to explain why. What threat does a small island of eleven million people pose to a hemispheric superpower that would justify a sixty-six-year war of attrition against its civilian population? Chomsky’s answer, drawn consistently from the declassified planning record, is the threat of a good example. Kennedy-era planning documents speak openly of the danger of “successful defiance”: the possibility that an independent Cuba, with universal healthcare, mass literacy, world-class biotechnology, and medical brigades dispatched gratis to half the Global South, might constitute a model others would imitate. The Mafia don—the recurring Chomskyan figure—does not punish the small shopkeeper because the shopkeeper threatens him militarily. He punishes him to make defiance intolerable as a category, lest the rot spread. The fuel blockade is a demonstration directed not at Havana but at every state in the hemisphere considering an independent path.

The third analytical demand is to register the international consensus. Since 1992, the United Nations General Assembly has voted annually on a resolution condemning the U.S. blockade. The vote is consistently in the range of 185 to 2 or 187 to 2, with the United States and Israel isolated, occasionally joined by a Pacific microstate dependent on U.S. aid. This is not a contested moral question among the community of nations. It is the considered judgment of essentially every government on earth. The United States stands against this judgment in the technical posture Chomsky has elaborated for decades: a rogue state, which exempts itself from the rules of conduct it demands of all others. The “rules-based international order” is the order in which the United States writes the rules and others are bound by them.

The fourth analytical demand is legal. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective punishment of civilian populations. The 2026 fuel blockade, as documented in the reporting from Havana, produces extended hospital blackouts, water failure for over a million people, paralysis of food transport from countryside to city, and the spoilage of insulin and other refrigerated medicines. The pattern of suffering is selectively distributed: not toward the political leadership, who command whatever resources they require, but toward the maternity ward, the dialysis patient, the elderly woman on the fifteenth floor whose pump no longer runs. The Nuremberg principles, which the United States authored and prosecuted, hold that the foreseeability of such consequences, not the actor’s claimed intention, supplies the standard for criminal liability. Applied evenly, the standard yields an unambiguous result.

The fifth analytical demand is to ask how a policy of this character—openly documented, internationally condemned, materially catastrophic—escapes sustained moral scrutiny in the elite press of the country that conducts it. The answer is the propaganda model that Herman and Chomsky set out in Manufacturing Consent: ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and an ideological frame that distinguishes worthy from unworthy victims. The Cuban child who dies because her insulin spoiled in a powerless refrigerator is, in the technical sense Herman and Chomsky introduced, an unworthy victim: her suffering serves no institutional interest of the news producer, and therefore does not register as suffering. A Cuban dissident briefly detained is a worthy victim, and her detention is a story. The asymmetry is not accidental. It is the filtering function the model predicts.

Augustine recounts in The City of God the pirate captured by Alexander the Great, who is asked what he means by infesting the sea. The pirate answers: the same as you in infesting the earth; but because I do it with a small ship I am called a thief, and you, doing it with a great fleet, are called emperor. Chomsky has returned to this parable for fifty years because it specifies, more compactly than any framework of international law, the operative distinction between a crime and a foreign policy. The dispatches from Havana—the children’s wards on generator power, the tap water that no longer arrives, the diesel-starved trucks that cannot move medicine from port to clinic, the deliberate interdiction of fuel by the U.S. Navy as the codified continuation of a doctrine first written in April 1960—are the small ship’s catalogue of grievance. They are being read, as always, from the deck of the great fleet.

The moral judgment Chomsky’s framework yields is not subtle and is not new. The United States, over sixty-six years and thirteen presidencies, has waged a documented, openly planned, internationally condemned campaign of economic warfare against the civilian population of a small island, calibrated to produce the suffering the planning documents specified, in order to coerce a political result the population’s own ballots had refused to deliver. That this campaign is conducted not by an external aggressor but by the hemispheric hegemon, in defiance of the considered judgment of the entire community of nations, and that it is materially intensified in 2026 to the point of foreseeable mass civilian harm, places it within the category of state conduct the Nuremberg tribunal was convened to prohibit. The category does not become inapplicable because the state conducting it writes the histories.

The Operative Refutation: From the BRAC Cellars to the SWIFT Network

The analytical apparatus established above—the single standard, the threat of a good example, the international consensus, the Nuremberg principle, the propaganda model—gains additional force, and the indictment grows more difficult to evade, when the historical record is extended beyond the moment of the Mallory memorandum in either direction. Three further passages require registration. There is the structural precondition that the 1959 Revolution overthrew, which exhausts in advance every subsequent American invocation of human rights as the basis for Cuba policy. There is the operational record of what the United States actually did during the six decades when the Mallory doctrine was being enforced—a record of sabotage, biological warfare, and terror that the Church Committee began to expose in 1975 and that subsequent declassifications have placed beyond reasonable dispute. And there is the post-Cold War passage, the single most damning segment of the entire record, the moment when the Soviet pretext collapsed and the policy intensified, exposing what the policy had always actually been. Each of these passages, examined honestly, narrows further the space for the apologetic interpretations on which the American press has subsisted for six decades.

The structural precondition was Fulgencio Batista, and to understand the ferocity of the American response to the Cuban Revolution one must first register what the Revolution had overthrown. For most of the twenty-six years separating the formal abrogation of the Platt Amendment in 1934 from the entry of the rebel army into Havana on January 8, 1959, Batista was the political enforcer of an arrangement under which roughly seventy percent of Cuban arable land, the entire sugar industry, the public utilities, the telephone system, the principal banks, and the bulk of the tourist economy were owned by United States interests, and under which the Cuban political system functioned in significant respects as an annex of the U.S. State Department and the New York commercial banks. Cuba’s 1940 Constitution, drafted with broad participation across the political spectrum including the Communist Party, was among the most progressive charters in the hemisphere: it guaranteed land reform, the right to organize, universal suffrage, free education, and an array of social rights that would not be matched in the United States itself for another generation. Batista, who had himself participated in its drafting, overthrew it by military coup on March 10, 1952, suspending the elections he was on track to lose. The Eisenhower administration extended diplomatic recognition within seventeen days. U.S. military aid not only continued but accelerated throughout the seven-year dictatorship that followed.

What that aid sustained is now amply documented. The Buró de Represión de Actividades Comunistas, Batista’s political police, was established in 1955 with active CIA assistance and operated cellars and interrogation centers across the island in which thousands of Cubans were tortured and killed before 1959. The Mafia, in the persons of Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante Jr., operated the casino and tourism economy of Havana as a private fiefdom in partnership with Batista’s circle, with Lansky enjoying personal access to the dictator and his protection in return for a percentage of the take. Vice-President Richard Nixon visited Batista in 1955 and compared him favorably to Abraham Lincoln, a remark that captures the moral universe of the relationship more economically than any analyst could. Ambassador Earl E. T. Smith, in subsequent congressional testimony, acknowledged the operative reality with a candor that has rarely been improved upon: until Castro, he conceded, the American ambassador in Havana had been the second most important man in the country, sometimes more important than the Cuban president. The arms embargo finally imposed by Eisenhower in March 1958 was a gesture undertaken when the dictatorship was already collapsing under the weight of the Sierra Maestra campaign; Britain and the Dominican Republic immediately stepped in to supply replacement weapons, in a division of imperial labor with its own genealogy. The summary that Chomsky has delivered across multiple essays is uncomplicated: Washington supported the dictator until the moment he could no longer be saved, and discovered the cause of Cuban freedom on January 2, 1959. A press that had not noticed the BRAC torture chambers across seven years of operation suddenly developed exquisite sensitivity to Cuban human rights at the instant those torture chambers were dismantled by the incoming government—a chronology that exhausts the credibility of every subsequent American invocation of human rights as the basis for its Cuba policy.

The operational middle is the Cold War terror campaign, and here the documentary record—released in fragments through the Church Committee in 1975 and through subsequent declassifications—has placed beyond serious dispute facts the U.S. press treats, when it treats them at all, as a closed episode of regrettable excess. After the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, the Kennedy administration did not abandon its objective; it institutionalized it. Operation Mongoose, established in November 1961 under the operational direction of General Edward Lansdale and the political supervision of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, became at that point the largest covert operation in CIA history, with an annual budget exceeding fifty million dollars and a staff of roughly four hundred Americans and several thousand Cuban exiles based at the JM/WAVE station in South Miami. Its targets were the Cuban civilian economy and the Cuban head of state. The sabotage program burned cane fields, dynamited oil refineries and electrical installations, attacked fishing vessels, mined harbors, and bombed factories and warehouses across the island. The Church Committee documented at least eight CIA assassination attempts on Fidel Castro between 1960 and 1965, employing means ranging from poisoned cigars and exploding seashells to recruited Mafia hitmen drawn from Lansky’s old Havana circle—an operational continuity from the Batista period that is itself worth registering. Cuban counterintelligence would subsequently document over six hundred attempts on Castro’s life across the four decades that followed. Chomsky has characterized this campaign in plain language across many essays as the most extensive international terrorism program of the postwar period, with Cuba as its longest-running target—a description that becomes a category error only if one applies to oneself a definition of terrorism different from the one applied to one’s adversaries.

The biological warfare component requires its own registration, because it occupies a category most American commentary refuses to acknowledge exists. In 1971, an outbreak of African swine fever in Cuba, the first in the Western Hemisphere, forced the slaughter of half a million pigs and devastated the protein supply of the rural population; Newsday reported in January 1977, on the basis of CIA sources, that the virus had been introduced by anti-Castro operatives staging from the Canal Zone. Subsequent outbreaks of tobacco blue mold, sugarcane smut, and an unprecedented dengue hemorrhagic fever epidemic in 1981 that killed 158 people—101 of them children—have been attributed by Cuban and several U.S. investigators to deliberate biological introductions. Whether or not every such attribution can be definitively proved, the documented program of biological warfare directed against Cuban agriculture and livestock—now established beyond dispute through Freedom of Information Act releases—satisfies the legal definition of biological weapons use under the 1972 Convention to which the United States is a signatory.

The terror campaign culminated, in the most directly murderous of its instances, in the destruction of Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 on October 6, 1976. A Douglas DC-8 en route from Barbados to Havana via Kingston was destroyed in midair by two C-4 bombs planted by operatives of an anti-Castro network coordinated by Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, both former CIA assets with extensive operational histories. All seventy-three civilians aboard were killed, including the entire Cuban national youth fencing team returning from a Central American championship in which they had swept the gold medals—twenty-four young athletes, the eldest twenty-one, the youngest fifteen. The aircraft was civilian, the passengers were civilian, and the act was the deliberate destruction of a commercial airliner. By every definition the United States itself has subsequently applied to such acts—after Lockerbie in 1988, after the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998, after September 2001—it was terrorism in its purest form. Posada Carriles, indicted in Venezuela, escaped from prison, returned to operational work (he would later confess to The New York Times his role in a 1997 bombing campaign against Havana hotels that killed an Italian tourist), was eventually convicted in U.S. immigration proceedings only of perjury, and lived out his life in Miami as an honored figure in segments of the Cuban-American political establishment until his death in 2018. Bosch was pardoned by President George H. W. Bush in 1990 over the explicit objection of the U.S. Justice Department, which had described him in writing as an unreformed terrorist. The single-standard test could not find a cleaner illustration: had a hostile foreign power destroyed an American commercial airliner full of teenaged athletes, and had the bomb-makers been subsequently sheltered by that government and pardoned by its president, the response would have been calibrated in megatons. Done by the United States and its proxies, against Cubans, it is filed under a heading the U.S. press does not name and the U.S. public does not learn.

The post-Cold War passage is, of all the segments of this history, the one that most decisively refutes every official rationale ever offered for the policy. From 1960 through 1991, U.S. statecraft justified the campaign against Cuba as a necessary front in the global confrontation with Soviet communism. Cuba was, in this telling, a Soviet beachhead, a forward base, a proxy whose containment was a strategic imperative. The rationale was always thin—the missiles had been removed in 1962, Cuba’s foreign policy was rarely synchronized with Moscow’s, and the island’s actual military threat to U.S. security was negligible. But the rationale at least possessed the form of a geopolitical argument, and many in the U.S. policy class appear to have believed some version of it. Then, between 1989 and 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. The Warsaw Pact dissolved. Soviet subsidies to Cuba, which had constituted roughly four billion dollars annually and underwritten approximately eighty percent of Cuban trade, ended within eighteen months. Cuba entered the catastrophic deprivation it would name the Special Period in Time of Peace: daily caloric intake collapsed from roughly 2,900 to under 1,900 per capita, the average Cuban lost between nine and twelve kilograms of body weight, an epidemic of optic neuropathy from vitamin deficiency afflicted some fifty thousand people, transit ground to a halt, the electrical grid failed for hours daily, and the entire structure of Cuban economic life had to be reconstructed under conditions of acute scarcity.

In any honest version of the Cold War rationale, this was the moment for the embargo to end. The geopolitical pretext had vanished; the Cuban population was suffering enormously; the United States had won the larger contest and could afford, even on the narrowest realist calculus, a gesture of magnanimity. The opposite happened. In October 1992, in a campaign appearance staged at the offices of the Cuban-American National Foundation in Miami, President George H. W. Bush signed the Cuban Democracy Act, sponsored by Representative Robert Torricelli, which closed loopholes that had previously permitted U.S. subsidiaries in third countries to trade with Cuba and extended the embargo into a transparently extraterritorial regime. In March 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, sponsored by Senator Jesse Helms and Representative Dan Burton, which codified the embargo into law (thereby removing presidential discretion to lift it), authorized U.S. nationals to sue foreign companies trafficking in property nationalized after 1959, and conditioned any future normalization on a series of regime-change provisions that effectively required the dismantling of the Cuban political and economic system. The stated rationale for both acts was the human rights situation in Cuba—at a moment, that is, when the human rights situation in Cuba had been catastrophically worsened by the very embargo the legislation was now intensifying.

Chomsky’s characterization of this sequence in his post-1991 writing has been consistent and unforgiving: the disappearance of the Soviet pretext, far from prompting reconsideration of the policy, exposed what the policy had always actually been. The campaign against Cuba was never about containing communism; it was about punishing the demonstration effect of an independent small country in the U.S. sphere, what he has called for fifty years the threat of a good example, and once the Cold War cover story was no longer available, the underlying motivation surfaced in legislative form. The Torricelli and Helms-Burton acts constitute, in this analysis, the operative confession of the entire policy—the moment the mask slipped.

The mechanism by which this codified hostility is enforced in the present is the U.S. designation of Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism. The designation was first imposed under Reagan in 1982, removed by Obama in 2015 as part of the brief normalization, and reimposed by Trump in his final days in office in January 2021, where it remained through the Biden administration and into the present second Trump term. Its operative function, distinct from its symbolic one, is to weaponize U.S. control of the global financial system. International banks face catastrophic Treasury fines if they process transactions involving a designated country; the result is what compliance officers call de-risking, the wholesale exclusion of Cuba from the SWIFT-mediated banking system through which all modern international commerce flows. Cuba cannot wire payment for Chinese rice, Vietnamese coffee, Spanish medical equipment, or Mexican gasoline without negotiating elaborate workarounds that add twenty to forty percent to every transaction and that frequently fail outright. The designation is, in effect, a global financial blockade enforced not by U.S. warships but by the deterrent effect of Treasury fines on banks in Singapore, Frankfurt, Mexico City, and São Paulo. That the country thus designated as a sponsor of terrorism is the same country whose civilian airliner was bombed in 1976 by operatives subsequently sheltered on U.S. soil—a fact the State Department’s annual Country Reports on Terrorism manages to omit—is the kind of inversion that Chomsky has spent six decades documenting and that the U.S. press has spent six decades not noticing.

The COVID-19 pandemic supplied the most lethal recent demonstration of how the codified blockade now operates. Between 2020 and 2022, Cuba developed two domestically produced vaccines, Soberana 02 and Abdala, on a public-health scientific infrastructure that had been built under conditions the embargo was specifically designed to prevent; the vaccines achieved efficacy comparable to the major Western products and were deployed not only on the island but in Iran, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The blockade prevented Cuba from purchasing mechanical ventilators from European manufacturers whose components included U.S.-licensed parts. It prevented the purchase of oxygen-concentration equipment. It prevented the import of the polypropylene resin from which medical syringes are manufactured, with the result that Cuba in 2021 was producing world-class vaccines that it could not administer for lack of syringes—a difficulty eventually resolved through international solidarity shipments organized by, among others, the Saving Lives Campaign within the United States itself. Whether this configuration crosses the threshold of the 1948 Genocide Convention’s Article II-c—the inflicting on a group of conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part—is a legal question that U.N. Special Rapporteurs on unilateral coercive measures have raised in increasingly direct language. The position taken here is the cautious one: the documentary record establishes the conditions the Article describes; whether the intent element required by the Convention is satisfied is a question the relevant tribunals would have to adjudicate, and the United States has ensured through its non-accession to the Rome Statute and its hostility to the relevant U.N. machinery that no such adjudication will ever occur. The structural fact remains: a global hegemon deliberately prevented a small country, during a respiratory pandemic, from acquiring oxygen, ventilators, and syringes. The Mallory memorandum, applied to a coronavirus, reads as the documentary specification of what then took place.

The propaganda model’s most sophisticated current function is the inversion that converts this engineered catastrophe into evidence for an ideological proposition the catastrophe was designed to demonstrate. The standard Western press treatment of contemporary Cuba—blackouts, shortages, emigration, decaying infrastructure—presents these consequences as the natural results of socialist economic mismanagement, occasionally with a parenthetical concession that “U.S. sanctions also play a role.” The inversion is structurally elegant. A great power deliberately engineers, across six decades and through documented mechanism after documented mechanism, the impoverishment of a small country; then, when the impoverishment becomes visible, the press of the engineering power identifies that impoverishment as proof that the small country’s political-economic system does not work. The head is held underwater long enough, and the inability to swim becomes the explanation for the drowning. Chomsky has documented this particular inversion across multiple cases—Vietnam after 1975, Nicaragua after 1990, Iraq across the long sanctions decade of the 1990s—and has formulated it as a general principle of imperial rhetoric: the consequences of the punishment are subsequently mobilized as the retroactive justification for it. The propaganda model predicts not merely that worthy and unworthy victims will be treated differently but that the suffering of unworthy victims, when it cannot be ignored, will be reattributed to causes that absolve the perpetrating power. The Cuba file is the longest-running and most thoroughly documented case of this reattribution in the postwar record. Every blackout in Havana is, in the Western press, a fact about socialism; every blackout in Caracas, the same. The blackouts in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria, sustained for over a year under U.S. administration in a U.S. territory, somehow generated no comparable theoretical conclusions about the inherent failures of American capitalism. The asymmetry is not a defect of the propaganda model; it is its operating signature.

The geographical irony that closes the arc has, by now, the quality of an obscene punctuation mark. Of all the territory of the island of Cuba, there is exactly one location in the early twenty-first century where human beings have been held without trial for indefinite periods, where waterboarding and stress positions and sleep deprivation and other techniques meeting the international legal definition of torture have been systematically practiced, where the writ of habeas corpus has been formally suspended by act of the holding power’s legislature, and where detentions have in many cases now exceeded the maximum sentences that would have applied under any criminal code on earth. That location is the forty-five square miles of Guantánamo Bay, occupied by the United States under the perpetual lease extracted from the Cuban Constitutional Convention of 1901 under the duress of the Platt Amendment, and refused recognition by every Cuban government since 1959, which has declined for sixty-seven years to cash the annual lease check the U.S. Treasury continues to issue—the uncashed checks now accumulating in a desk drawer in Havana as a small bureaucratic monument to a long refusal. The country that has spent six decades demanding regime change in Cuba on the stated grounds of human rights operates, on Cuban soil, the most legally infamous human rights black site of the post-2001 period. The country that designates Cuba a State Sponsor of Terrorism harbors on its mainland the operatives who bombed Cuban civilian aviation, and on the Cuban naval base it refuses to relinquish tortures individuals who were in many cases never charged with any offense. The pirate of Augustine’s parable, asked to justify his infestation of the sea, could at least claim consistency in his methods; the imperial fleet operates simultaneous regimes of cruelty whose mutual exposure of one another is the most damning testimony any external prosecutor would ever need to assemble. There is, at this point in the documentary record, nothing left for the analyst to add. The documents speak. The graves speak. The uncashed checks speak. What remains is the question Chomsky has put to American audiences for sixty years and that no American audience has yet found a satisfactory way to answer: what would we say if any other country in the world had done what our country has done to Cuba?