Donald Trump Is Strangling Cuba To Death

While the world's attention has largely been focused on the war the United States and Israel launched on Iran a few weeks ago and the rapidly unfurling series of subsequent, predictable calamities, such as the invasion of Lebanon and the constriction of the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. is simultaneously choking off Cuba in an attempt to topple that nation's government. Don't take my word for it: That's what Donald Trump is saying. "I do believe I will be having the honor of taking Cuba," Trump said on Monday. "Taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it. I think I can do anything I want with it."

What this looks like in practice is the total enclosure of the island and its 11 million people. Cuba has been contending with American economic warfare and sanctions of varying severity for over six decades. It remains an extremely poor country and, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, an increasingly isolated one. But over the past two months, the U.S. has squeezed tighter on Cuba than it has at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The already anoxic conditions have now reached a crisis point. Cubans face crippling food and medicine shortages, and their fuel supply is almost totally exhausted. Per an NBC News report Tuesday night, there are currently 25 functioning ambulances, which shakes out to one ambulance per 440,000 people. Cuba experienced an islandwide blackout on Monday. It will not be the last one.

The Trump administration started hinting that it was planning something like this shortly after the Jan. 3 kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro by U.S. special forces, and the subsequent U.S. takeover of the Venezuelan oil industry. Cuba relied on Venezuela for the majority of its energy, and once Trump's State Department seized control and began capturing oil tankers headed for the island, Havana quickly started going dark. Trump has threatened sanctions against any nation, particularly Mexico, that comes to Cuba's aid. While the State Department scarcely pretends to justify these actions, the clear objective is to exacerbate the suffering of the Cuban population until the government collapses. Noah Kulwin, journalist and host of the Blowback podcast, told Defector he'd been to Havana during the run-up to the blockade and seen a society "functioning under astonishing conditions of deprivation under the strain of the U.S. oil blockade."