The Embargo at 64: Why Washington's Longest-Running Sanctions Regime Keeps Failing Cuba—and Everyone Else
On 21 May 2026, while scrolling through a feed of unrelated content, users on X encountered something unexpected: a buffalo in Bangladesh whose face, photographed in raking afternoon light, bore a striking resemblance to Donald Trump. The image travelled fast, generating the kind of involuntary engagement that the platform rewards. Within hours it had been viewed millions of times, its creator evidently amused by the accidental fame.
The same day, in a setting far removed from farmyards in South Asia, Trump was less amused. Addressing Cuba directly, he called it a "failed country" with no electricity, no money, and nothing of substance. He declared he would be the one to "do something" about it. The Polymarket post that carried this declaration attracted significant attention from users tracking the intersection of political betting markets and White House signalling. The statement landed against a backdrop that makes the framing harder to sustain than its authors might prefer: the United States has been trying to "do something" about Cuba for sixty-four years, and the country has not fallen, not liberalised, and not become a success story by any metric the embargo's architects might have intended.
The Numbers That Don't Add Up
The United States first imposed comprehensive sanctions on Cuba in 1960, two years after Fidel Castro's revolution. The embargo was formalised and extended repeatedly over the following decades, becoming the most enduring sanctions regime in American foreign policy history. The stated goal has remained consistent across administrations: economic pressure will force political change. The results have been consistent in a different way.
Cuba's GDP per capita in 2025, adjusted for purchasing power, stood among the lowest in the Western Hemisphere. Infrastructure in Havana's central districts is crumbling in ways that are visible from the street — power grids that collapse during heavy rain, buildings whose facades have not been maintained in decades, a public transport system that runs on vehicles assembled from parts sourced across four continents. These are not new conditions. They are the accumulated consequence of six decades during which Cuba could not access normal trade financing, could not sell sugar or cigars or nickel into the largest economy in the Americas without a licensed intermediary, and could not update its industrial base without navigating a labyrinth of compliance requirements that make ordinary business impossible.
American officials who defend the embargo cite Cuban human rights conditions as justification. They are not wrong that restrictions on political expression exist. But the structural question — whether the embargo advances the cause it claims to serve — produces a different answer. After sixty-four years, the Cuban Communist Party remains in power. Cuba's security apparatus remains state-directed. The conditions that sanctions proponents cite have not demonstrably improved as a result of the restrictions. What has demonstrably deteriorated is the material condition of ordinary people living under them.
A Hemisphere That Moved On
The political geography around the embargo has shifted substantially, and not in Washington's favour. When the sanctions were first imposed, Cold War logic gave them geopolitical purchase: Latin American governments broadly accepted the framing that Cuba was a Soviet satellite requiring containment. That logic has dissolved. The Organization of American States, which expelled Cuba in 1962, suspended that expulsion in 2009. Latin American governments of varying political stripes — from Brazil's pragmatic industrialists to the left-wing governments that dominated the region in the 2000s — have repeatedly called for an end to the embargo at the United Nations General Assembly. The votes have been lopsided, with Washington increasingly isolated alongside Israel and a handful of Pacific island states.
This matters for reasons beyond solidarity. Latin American governments are not abstractly sympathetic to Havana — they are making concrete calculations about their own economic relationships. Countries that want American investment, American market access, and American goodwill have to perform a complicated diplomatic manoeuvre: maintain the correct public stance toward the embargo while privately acknowledging that it complicates their own trade relationships with a neighbour that sits eighty miles off the Florida coast. The embargo does not just affect Cuba. It imposes compliance costs on every bank, shipping company, and commodity trader that touches the island's economy and worries about secondary sanctions exposure.
China has filled space that American policy vacated. bilateral trade between Cuba and China has grown steadily, with Chinese companies involved in infrastructure projects, telecommunications, and the nickel sector that represents one of Cuba's few significant natural resources. This is not a Sino-Soviet-style military alliance — Cuba's economic importance to Beijing is modest, and the relationship is primarily commercial. But it demonstrates a structural point: the embargo does not isolate Cuba from the global economy. It isolates Cuba from the American-led segment of it, and that segment has been shrinking relative to Chinese, Russian, and Gulf-state economic activity for two decades.
What "Doing Something" Actually Means
Trump's statement that he would be the one to "do something" on Cuba follows a pattern that has defined his administration's approach to the island since the first term. The president has cultivated relationships with Cuban-American voters in Florida, a demographic whose political influence in a contested swing state is substantial. His first administration expanded sanctions that had been partially rolled back under Obama. The pattern suggests that "doing something" is more likely to mean tightening than relaxing.
This creates a specific problem for the coherence of American policy. The embargo was originally justified as a tool to produce regime change — to apply enough economic pain that the Cuban government would either reform or fall. After sixty-four years, neither has happened. American officials have partially updated the public rationale, shifting toward human rights concerns as the primary justification. But this reframe does not resolve the underlying incoherence: if the goal is to improve conditions for Cuban citizens, the embargo demonstrably worsens those conditions. If the goal is political change, the evidence that the embargo produces it is absent.
The ambiguity in Trump's statement is useful for a president who needs to signal toughness to a politically significant constituency without committing to a policy direction that would be difficult to reverse. The Polymarket reaction reflected this ambiguity — markets that track political outcomes were actively processing the statement, uncertain whether it portended escalation, a deal, or simply the performance of resolve without the substance of policy change. The honest version of "doing something" would require an administration to answer a question it has avoided for six decades: what, specifically, does success look like, and does this tool produce it?
The Stakes Ahead
If the embargo is maintained and potentially intensified, several things follow with high probability. Cuba's economic situation will continue to deteriorate, accelerating emigration that has already produced significant demographic pressure on American border infrastructure and Latin American transit states. The political calculus in Latin America will continue to shift against Washington, as governments that have tolerated the embargo as a legacy issue begin to treat it as an active irritant in their relationships with the United States. And the Chinese footprint on the island will expand, not because Beijing is pursuing a grand strategy against American interests but because Chinese companies are willing to do business where American companies are prohibited from doing so.
If the embargo is relaxed — a step that would require significant political courage from an administration facing re-election pressure in a state where Cuban-American voters are concentrated — the question becomes whether normalised economic relations would produce the political liberalisation that American officials have claimed to seek. The evidence from other cases is mixed. Sanctions removal in Myanmar, Sudan, and Iran produced different outcomes depending on the domestic political conditions in each country. Cuba under normalised economic conditions might liberalise, might not, or might liberalise in ways that do not match American expectations about what liberalisation looks like.
What is not in question is that the current arrangement serves no one well except the political class on both sides that has an interest in maintaining it. American officials can point to a tough stance on Cuba without producing results. Cuban officials can point to American hostility without addressing the structural failures of their own governance. Citizens on both sides pay the costs. The buffalo in Bangladesh, accidentally famous for a day, has a more comfortable existence than most people in either country — fed, photographed, and released back to the field without anyone asking it to resolve sixty-four years of geopolitical failure.
Monexus has covered Cuba intermittently over the past decade, typically in the context of diplomatic reversals or migration crises. The wire services have covered the embargo's legal architecture extensively without producing sustained analysis of why it persists despite its documented failure to achieve its stated goals. This piece attempts to close that gap, with the expectation that the question will remain live regardless of what Trump decides "to do" — and that the costs of the status quo will continue to accrue to those least positioned to bear them.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://x.com/polymarket/status/2057582244718333952
- https://x.com/sprinterpress/status/2057582244718333952
- https://x.com/sprinterpress/status/2057580685137719297
- https://x.com/unusual_whales/status/2057515938594103296