Devastating Cuba: The American Empire is declining, and trying to drag everyone down with it

Despite US attempts to sabotage and manipulate the event, the UN General Assembly has followed the request of the Cuban delegation to debate the “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.”

While this debate has been an annually recurring event since 1992, this year its backdrop is particularly grim, as Washington has greatly escalated its longstanding economic-warfare campaign against Havana. At the same time, the US has also threatened a military attack, which may or may not have been delayed by the American defeat in the war against Iran.

But the Cuba debate at the UN also needs to be put in a much larger context: A quarter of a millennium after its founding and about four decades after the end of the last century’s Cold War in the late 1980s, the American empire is declining.

Two recent failed US wars have made that much clear. Under President Donald Trump Washington has scaled down – though not entirely abandoned – its commitment to the Western proxy war against Russia via Ukraine, leaving the expensive and cruel meat grinder to NATO-EU Europeans too shortsighted to know when to quit and too cynical to care what they do to ordinary Ukrainians.

The reasons for this relative yet significant American disengagement have little to do with Trump’s personal – and volatile – attitude toward Russia or, for that matter, Ukraine. The US establishment has simply recognized that the initial aims of the Western proxy war cannot be achieved: Moscow has not been defeated or geopolitically degraded; regime change has not occurred.

In its failed war against Iran and on behalf of Israel – even while it is sputtering on and may easily flare up into a full-blown conflagration again – Washington has exposed its own limits, if anything, even more revealingly.

America’s unipolar moment, inasmuch as it ever was real, has long been over, as John Mearsheimer – a rare voice of reason in the US – recently explained to the European Parliament. Meanwhile, a multipolar world has already emerged, even if it will keep evolving for a long time and is very unlikely to ever correspond to the utopian fantasy of perfect international equality some may dream about. Real-world multipolarity is vastly preferable to American unipolarity, but it will be a global balance of great powers, or at best, a concert of such powers.

Yet there is a paradox to American decline: While the vast majority of humanity sharing a planet with its biggest rogue state urgently needs the US to lose its extraordinary and catastrophically malignant power, the process will not be fun. On the contrary, the declining US is and will be for quite a while even more aggressive, unpredictable, and dangerous than before. Unlike the former Soviet Union, which went down with historically unusual self-restraint, the American empire is likely to wreak ever more havoc on its way down to the rubbish heap of history.

Next to, for instance, Gaza and Venezuela, one place where you can see this US escalation in action is Cuba. Indeed, Cuba is a particularly pronounced example: Under an unforgiving and criminal American embargo already for almost two thirds of a century, the Caribbean island nation of just about ten million people has recently been subjected to an even fiercer and constantly escalating regime of sanctions and blockade, based on an absurd executive order issued by Trump at the end of January.

Cutting off its oil supplies in particular – a viciously inhumane strategy facilitated by the US assault on Venezuela half a year ago – Washington has been clear that its aim is brutal coercion: either Cuba submits and becomes, in essence, a US protectorate like post-Maduro-kidnapping Venezuela or its people will, at least, continue to suffer under a literally lethal blockade. By now, Cuba has been hit by its third total, nationwide blackout since the beginning of the year, while severe power cuts are already a constant part of everyday life.

And the blackouts and power cuts are only the most obvious effects of what Cuba’s foreign minister, Bruno Rodriguez, has rightly denounced as “collective punishment” through “multi-dimensional, non-conventional warfare that has already lasted for almost seven decades now and has become ever more cruel and more ruthless during the last seven months.” So much, incidentally, for who has really invented “hybrid warfare” and practiced it ruthlessly for decades.

Cubans also suffer from a breakdown of their agriculture and food distribution systems, both heavily affected by the energy blockade: no gasoline or diesel means no agricultural machinery and no transport; no power means no cooling chains, for instance. Harvests are rotting in the fields; farmers are forced to leave their farms. Meanwhile the health sector is impoverished and paralyzed. At least about 100,000 Cubans cannot receive necessary treatment; 11,000 children cannot have surgeries they need.

While exact figures are impossible to come by, there is no doubt that Washington’s merciless economic warfare against Cuba is producing mass casualties. This is, after all, what American sanctions and blockades have always done. A recent study in The Lancet has concluded that such US measures are associated with about 564,000 excess deaths – per year.

On average, that is comparable to the annual death toll from direct armed conflict. Keep in mind, too, that the Lancet figure is an under-count, since the study includes only the effects of unilateral US sanctions. In Cuba, it is clear already that child mortality has doubled. The scales are still different, but as in the Gaza genocide, which the US has, in effect, been co-perpetrating with Israel, children are a special category of victims.

And all of this while Cuba does not even have the natural resources that made Venezuela a target of American greed. And, despite Havana’s courageous solidarity with Palestine, unlike Iran Cuba is not in a position to stymy America’s ally from hell, Israel.

As American dissident journalist Abby Martin has pointed out, the deepest reason why Washington is devastating the lives of over 10 million Cubans is a form of sadism: An imperial sadism that loves to make examples of its victims just because it can and, of course, to publicly punish them for their defiance. Like a deranged mafia boss on a very bad day, the US keeps kicking and beating the Cuban people just to show them and everyone else: This is what happens if you do not obey.

As the NATO summit in Ankara has demonstrated, NATO-EU Europe is only doubling down on its obsequious submission to Washington. Where Europe could render the world an invaluable service by helping deter the declining yet hyper-aggressive US, the opposite is happening: Europe as well is to blame for America’s continually escalating crimes since its unflagging support – AKA “burden shifting” – frees US resources so that Washington can do its worst.

But for the rest of the world, Cuba – small as it may be – is an urgent warning: While the American empire is declining and falling, we must learn to stand together to contain and, if necessary, fight its global aggressions. We are, of course, very far from such a strategy. That’s a pity because humanity’s survival may well require it.