Every time an election approaches in Colombia, the name Cuba surfaces in right-wing speeches with near-mechanical regularity, not as analysis but as warning, not as a description of a country but as a code word for possible catastrophe. “If the left wins, Colombia will become like Cuba.” The phrase works because very few people actually know what Cuba is, how it got to where it is, and above all why. On that point, nobody in the debate speaks. The omission is not accidental; it is the operational condition of the argument, because for the threat to function, Cuba must remain an image without explanation, a result without a cause, a name that evokes misery but obliges no one to demonstrate anything.
The darkness Washington designed
Cuba in 2026 is going through what the International Crisis Group, an independent conflict-analysis organisation based in Brussels, described in March as the country’s worst humanitarian crisis in decades. Structural blackouts affecting the eastern provinces exceed twenty hours a day; in Granma, more than 78 per cent of households report critical food shortages; in February, the island declared it had no fuel to refuel its own aircraft at the airports. Hospitals run on intermittent generators and harvests are lost because cold storage has no power. These figures say nothing about socialism as an abstract system. They speak to what happens when you cut off oil to an economy that cannot produce its own.
In January 2026, the Trump administration signed an executive order declaring a national emergency and imposing punitive tariffs on any country supplying oil to Cuba. Venezuela, the island’s main historical fuel provider, had already been neutralised after the American military operation that removed Maduro from power that same month. Mexico, which attempted to fill part of the supply gap through its state-owned Pemex, was threatened with sanctions if deliveries to Havana continued. Russia, which had been compensating part of the Venezuelan shortfall, reduced its shipments under diplomatic pressure. The result was the near-total interruption of oil flows to a country that produces locally only 40,000 of the 110,000 barrels per day it requires.
Between March 2024 and February 2025, economic losses associated with the blockade exceeded 7.5 billion dollars, according to official Cuban figures. In October 2024, a nationwide blackout cut electricity to ten of the island’s eleven million inhabitants, with some regions left without power for seventy consecutive hours.
An instrument sixty-four years in the making
The United States economic, commercial and financial blockade of Cuba is neither a recent reaction nor a temporary measure. It was formalised on 7 February 1962 under the Kennedy administration, in response to the nationalisation of American-owned properties following the 1959 Revolution. For its first decades it functioned as a bilateral embargo between the two countries, affecting mainly direct trade. In 1992, the Torricelli Act internationalised it for the first time, imposing sanctions on subsidiaries of American companies based in third countries that traded with Cuba, and barring ships calling at Cuban ports from docking at American ports.
In 1996, the Helms-Burton Act went further. It extended sanctions to foreign companies with no connection whatsoever to American capital, allowed American citizens to sue companies from other countries that operated with nationalised Cuban properties, and reserved to the United States Congress the exclusive authority to lift the blockade; no president can do so by decree. This provision explains why the blockade survived Obama, who in 2015 restored diplomatic relations but could not dismantle the legal framework. It is the law that transformed the embargo into a permanent and executively irrevocable instrument, and its continued force in 2026 explains why Trump can tighten it but no president can lift it unilaterally.
The extraterritorial character of this instrument, that is, its capacity to sanction actors entirely outside the United States, explains dimensions of the crisis that remain invisible when the conversation turns to socialism not working. That is why BNP Paribas, a French bank with no American capital, was fined 8.97 billion dollars for processing transactions linked to Cuba. That is why ships calling at Cuban ports cannot dock at American ports for six months. That is why the island’s hospitals cannot procure medical supplies containing components under American patents, even when the manufacturer is German or Japanese.
That is why international insurers refuse commercial operations with Cuba even when they are legal in the country where they take place. No mid-sized bank anywhere in the world can finance a project involving Cuban counterparties without risking its access to the dollar clearing system. The blockade needs no single enforcer; it works because access to the global financial system depends on the dollar, which turns every private institution on the planet into an involuntary executor of the strangulation.
What the Colombian argument does not say
The Cuban case has characteristics that make it singular in the entire economic history of the hemisphere. No other left-wing Latin American government has faced a comparable instrument in duration, legal reach and extraterritorial application. Salvador Allende in Chile was brought down by a coup funded by the CIA and the ITT telecommunications corporation, which feared the nationalisation of its lines, but did not face sixty years of Helms-Burton. Evo Morales in Bolivia was removed by a coup in 2019, but Bolivia was never subjected to an extraterritorial blockade that sanctioned its commercial partners.
Gustavo Petro in Colombia has been in office for three years and Colombia’s economic indicators show no process of Cubanisation. The peso has fluctuated, inflation has been high, some policies have been clumsy; but none of that has the structure of a strangulation designed by foreign legislation over six decades. Colombia continues to export, to import, its banks process dollar transactions without any Manhattan prosecutor opening a file on them.
In February 2024, Cuba requested assistance from the United Nations World Food Programme for the first time in its history. The request was for powdered milk for children under seven years old.
For Colombia to “become like Cuba”, one would have to suppose that Washington would impose on Bogotá the same apparatus of strangulation it has built against Havana over six decades, with laws passed by the American Congress, sanctions against the European banks financing Colombian projects, tariffs on the countries selling oil to Bogotá, fines on the insurers covering operations with Colombian companies. Nobody who uses the argument puts it in those terms, because put in those terms, the argument dissolves. Colombia exports coal, coffee and oil without restriction. Its companies access technology and medicines without any foreign law prohibiting it.
This is not a defence of the Cuban government. The internal failings of the Cuban economy are real, and the economist Omar Everleny Pérez has described them precisely as an “internal blockade”, a concept encompassing excessive centralisation, the restriction of the private sector and political repression that prevents institutional adjustment. Those costs are not fictitious. But that weight cannot be measured without separating its effects from those of the external blockade, and the evidence of recent months, when the crisis worsened in a manner directly attributable to the interruption of oil supplies, points to a causality that admits no dispute. A country that exported doctors to Venezuela and Angola does not run out of powdered milk for children because of one ministry’s poor management.
The function of fear without content
The name Cuba in Colombian politics does not serve an analytical function. It serves an emotional one. It operates as an alarm signal, not as an argument. Its effectiveness depends precisely on nobody explaining it, on “Cuba” remaining a generic image of misery without a specific cause, a floating result that can be attached to any left-wing candidate without the need to demonstrate any logical chain between the two. The moment someone explains what the Helms-Burton Act is, the moment someone points out that BNP Paribas was fined close to nine billion dollars for processing Cuban money, the threat loses its force because its premise disappears. The comparison only works in the dark.
In the 2022 presidential campaign, when Petro was leading in the polls, candidate Federico Gutiérrez and his allies repeated for weeks that voting for Petro meant voting for Cuba, for Venezuela, for the end of private property. At no point was it explained what had produced the Cuban crisis or what connection linked Petro’s policies to Washington’s blockade. The comparison operated as pure image, a name, an evocation, a fear. What the Colombian right calls “the Cuban example” is a photograph without a date or caption that shows a result without showing the process that produced it. The same operation has been applied with the Soviet Union, with Vietnam, with Venezuela, adapting the name of the threatening country to the electoral cycle and the candidate to be defeated.
This is not to say that the Colombian left is beyond reproach or that criticism of the Petro government is unfounded. The Cuban argument could be replaced tomorrow by Venezuela or Nicaragua and would function in an identical fashion, because its power does not come from facts but from the image that substitutes for them. It means that using Cuba as an electoral warning without explaining Cuba is not political analysis; it is an operation of fear. And like all such operations, its only operational requirement is that nobody examines it closely…
G.S.
Sources
- Hunger in Havana: Can the US Cutoff Bring Change to Cuba, International Crisis Group
- World Report 2025, Cuba, Human Rights Watch
- Trump’s Maximum Pressure Campaign on Cuba, Explained, Council on Foreign Relations
- Fact Sheet: President Trump Imposes Sanctions on Cuban Regime Officials, The White House
- US embargo on Cuba and its effects on the island’s economy, CNN Español
- More than 80% reported food spoilage due to blackouts, CiberCuba
- 2026 Cuban Crisis, Wikipedia
- US economic blockade of Cuba, UnoTV
- Trump to accelerate squeeze on Cuba, Axios
- What is the US embargo on Cuba, Expansión MX
