Cuba's deputy foreign minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio went on C-SPAN Sunday and said the quiet part plainly: US sanctions against Cuba amount to genocide, and any military escalation would constitute an "atrocious international crime" against a peaceful neighbour. The language was deliberate, calibrated for an American audience on an American channel. The backdrop is Trump's UNGA speech last Tuesday, where he told Cuba that "freedom will be coming" — a phrase that prompted the Cuban delegation to walk out of the assembly hall. By Saturday, Trump was telling reporters he didn't think military force would be necessary because "Cuba is failing very badly." The sequencing matters: the implied threat of force is presented as unnecessary precisely because the economic stranglehold is already working. That stranglehold is the real story. The US has maintained maximum economic pressure on Cuba for over 60 years. The Trump administration layered an additional oil and fuel blockade earlier this year, which Fernandez de Cossio says has been running for nine months. The results are tangible: crippled infrastructure, widespread fuel scarcity, rolling power outages, and systemic difficulty securing food and basic necessities for a population exceeding 10 million. Fernandez de Cossio framed the coercion architecture explicitly: disrupting commercial shipments, starving a population of healthcare access, withholding fuel. He called it "equivalent to a genocide" — a word chosen for maximum legal and moral weight. Cuba says it will prepare its citizens for the possibility of US military aggression while exercising its right to self-defence, even if it stands alone. Diplomatic channels remain open but effectively inert. Havana says it will engage with Washington only on terms of mutual dignity and respect for sovereignty — conditions the current sanctions regime structurally cannot meet. The demand is reasonable on paper and impossible in practice, which both sides understand. Several countries condemned the US blockade during UNGA this week, continuing a pattern that has seen the UN General Assembly vote overwhelmingly against the embargo for over 30 consecutive years. The international consensus is clear; it changes nothing operationally. Washington's leverage over Cuba is not derived from legitimacy but from proximity and raw economic asymmetry. The Trump administration has stated it wants a "shake-up" in Cuba's government. The mechanism for achieving that shake-up — fuel blockade, sanctions, economic isolation — is indistinguishable from collective punishment of a civilian population. Whether you call it regime change pressure or something worse depends on where you stand, but the costs are not borne by the officials making the decisions on either side.
