ANALYSIS: Cuba, 11 million hostages caught between a dictator who wants to die and an empire that wants to win

Outages That Are No Longer Just Incidents

Power outages have become more frequent in recent weeks in Cuba. These are no longer mere outages. They are systemic collapses. Entire neighborhoods in Havana are plunged into darkness for sixteen, eighteen, or twenty hours straight. Hospitals are running on generators. Refrigerators are no longer keeping anything cold in a tropical country where the heat turns food into poison in a matter of hours.

Experts are honest about one thing: Cuba’s energy crisis predates the blockade. The island’s oil infrastructure has been obsolete for decades. The thermal power plants date back to the Soviet era. The power grid runs on equipment that even industrial museums would reject.

But the embargo has turned the crisis into a catastrophe

What the blockade has done is turn a chronic crisis into an acute humanitarian emergency. The distinction is crucial. A diabetic patient can live for years with the disease. Cut off their insulin, and they die within a few days. That is exactly what Operation Southern Spear is doing in Cuba: it does not create the disease, but it withdraws the treatment.

Díaz-Canel says it with a frankness unusual for a communist leader: “It’s not the Cuban government’s fault.” The statement is both true and false. True because the blockade is a U.S. decision. False because sixty-five years of catastrophic economic management have left the island vulnerable to exactly this kind of pressure.

1961 Never Really Ended

When Díaz-Canel speaks of “military aggression,” a “surgical operation,” or the “kidnapping of a president,” he isn’t fantasizing. He’s reading history. The United States attempted to invade Cuba in 1961. It attempted to assassinate Fidel Castro—according to declassified archives—at least 638 times. It imposed an embargo that has lasted for more than six decades.

In this context, Cuban paranoia isn’t paranoia. It’s memory.

But 2026 is not 1961

The fundamental difference between the Bay of Pigs and today can be summed up in one word: impunity. In 1961, the U.S. failure sparked an international scandal. The USSR reacted. The Non-Aligned Movement mobilized. Kennedy was humiliated. In 2026, who would react? Russia is bogged down in Ukraine. China is calculating its commercial interests. Europe is focused on its own crises. Cuba is more isolated than ever.

And it is precisely this isolation that makes Díaz-Canel’s statements so chilling. He is not speaking from a position of strength. He is speaking from a position of lucid despair.

Why Now

The question no one is asking loudly enough: Why is Trump stepping up pressure on Cuba now? The island poses no military threat to the United States. Its economy is minuscule. Its strategic projection capability is nonexistent.

Three theories are circulating in foreign policy circles in Washington. The first: Florida. The Cuban-American electorate remains a crucial bloc, and nothing mobilizes this bloc like the promise of regime change in Havana. The second: the domino effect. If Cuba falls, Maduro’s Venezuela loses its last credible ideological ally in the hemisphere. The third: ego. Trump wants to accomplish what thirteen presidents before him have failed to do.

The strategy of slow suffocation

The administration isn’t talking about an invasion. It doesn’t need to talk about an invasion. The strategy is more elegant and more cruel: cut off the oil, let the power go out, watch the population rise up, and wait for the regime to collapse from within.

It’s the same logic applied to Iran. It’s the same logic applied to Venezuela. It’s a doctrine that has a name in political science textbooks: regime change through civilian suffering. And Díaz-Canel knows it. That’s why he points to the strikes against Iran during the negotiations as proof that Washington isn’t negotiating—Washington is dictating.

Protests That the Regime Is Crushing

We must speak with brutal honesty: the Cuban government is a repressive regime. The protests rocking the island in response to the energy and food crises have been met with mass arrests, beatings, and the temporary disappearances of activists. The word “brutal” is not just a columnist’s adjective—it is the term used by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the United Nations special rapporteurs.

When Díaz-Canel speaks of “dying for the homeland,” he is not talking about dying for his people. He is talking about dying for the system. The distinction is fundamental. And it is often lost amid anti-imperialist rhetoric that, on both the left and the right, exploits Cuban suffering to serve agendas that have nothing to do with the Cuban people themselves.

Caught Between Two Narratives

The ordinary Cuban—the one who stands in line for four hours for bread, the one who charges their phone at a neighbor’s house because the power has been out at their home for three days—is caught between two narratives that do not belong to them. Washington’s narrative: “We are liberating you.” Havana’s narrative: “We are protecting you.”

Neither one asks him what he wants. And yet, it is his life that is at stake.

Díaz-Canel is right about one thing

When the Cuban president points the finger at the U.S. strikes against Iran—carried out even as negotiations were underway in Pakistan—he hits a nerve that Western diplomacy prefers to ignore. How can you negotiate with a country that bombs your ally while it’s reaching out to you?

The comparison isn’t perfect. Iran has a nuclear program, proxy militias throughout the Middle East, and a capacity for disruption incomparably greater than Cuba’s. But the principle remains the same: U.S. military force knows no diplomatic pause. It strikes AND negotiates. Simultaneously.

What Cuba Is Learning from Tehran

The lesson Havana is learning from Tehran is simple and terrifying: there is no guarantee of security. No agreement is inviolable. No negotiation can prevent a strike. In such a world, the only option left is resistance to the very end—or total capitulation.

And yet. There is a third path that neither Washington nor Havana wants to explore: negotiated transformation, without humiliation. But this path requires something that neither Trump nor Díaz-Canel possesses: patience.

The Man Who Wasn’t Supposed to Last

Miguel Díaz-Canel is the first Cuban leader outside the Castro family since the 1959 revolution. When he took power in 2018, analysts gave him two years. Five years, if he was lucky. He was supposed to be a placeholder, a transitional manager, a man without charisma appointed to cushion the fall of a system.

Eight years later, he’s still there. And he talks about dying in the line of duty. History has a sense of irony.

The Trap of Heroic Rhetoric

The danger of this bellicose stance is twofold. For Cuba, it closes the door to any real negotiation—it’s hard to return to the table after announcing that you’d rather die. For Washington, it offers a golden pretext: “See? He refuses to negotiate. He’s becoming more radical. Intervention is becoming necessary.”

This is the classic trap of verbal escalation: every statement narrows the room for maneuver. Every heroic phrase brings us closer to an outcome that no one wants—except perhaps those on both sides who need an enemy to justify their own existence.

Legitimate Demands, an Illegitimate Approach

Let’s be clear: the U.S. demands—the release of political prisoners, free elections, and a free press—are demands that every democrat should support. There are hundreds of political prisoners in Cuba. No opposition parties are permitted. The press is entirely controlled by the state. These are facts, not opinions.

But the method—economically strangling an entire population to force regime change—is morally indefensible. You don’t democratize a country by starving its children. You don’t free political prisoners by creating the conditions for a famine. The end does not justify the means, especially when the means kill the very innocent people the end purports to save.

Díaz-Canel knows this—and exploits it

The Cuban president exploits this contradiction with cynical skill. By saying “it’s not the Cuban government’s fault,” he turns the U.S. blockade into a moral shield. As long as Washington continues to strangle the country, Havana can attribute all suffering to the external enemy. It is the oldest mechanism of authoritarianism: the enemy on the outside protects the tyrant on the inside.

And both sides know it. And both sides take advantage of it.

The National Anthem as a Rhetorical Shield

Díaz-Canel quotes the Cuban national anthem: “To die for the homeland is to live.” It’s a beautiful phrase. It resonates with the revolutionary mythology that has shaped Cuban identity since 1959. But in 2026, it raises a question that the Cuban president refuses to confront: to die for which homeland?

For the homeland of endless lines? For the homeland of doctors who earn $50 a month? For the homeland where young graduates dream of fleeing on a raft rather than building their future there? For the homeland where criticizing the government lands you in prison?

The Silent Deaths That No One Counts

While Díaz-Canel speaks of dying heroically in the face of the Americans, Cubans are dying silently every day. From malnutrition. From diseases treatable in any hospital on the continent. From despair. These deaths are not mentioned in any national anthem. They don’t make the headlines. They don’t spark any impassioned speeches on NBC.

Dying for one’s country may be a form of life. But dying because of one’s country—because of its stubbornness, its incompetence, its refusal to change—is simply dying.

The continent’s complicit silence

Where is Lula’s Brazil? Where is Mexico? Where is Petro’s Colombia? The Latin American countries that routinely denounce the U.S. embargo against Cuba in international forums are remarkably silent in the face of this escalation. No joint statement. No offer of mediation. No emergency meeting of the Organization of American States.

The reason is simple and cowardly: no one wants to get in Trump’s way. Not when the economy depends on trade with the United States. Not when tariffs are already threatening exports. Not when the priority is domestic survival, not continental solidarity.

The Monroe Doctrine, Version 2026

What is at stake in Cuba goes beyond Cuba. It is the brutal reaffirmation of the Monroe Doctrine—the idea that the Western Hemisphere is the United States’ backyard. Trump has never stated it so bluntly. He doesn’t need to say it. Operation Southern Spear says it for him.

The blockade of Venezuela. The strangulation of Cuba. Pressure on Nicaragua. Threats against the Panama Canal. The pattern is consistent, methodical, and relentless. And it sends a clear message to every country on the continent: “You are sovereign only as long as we say so.”

What if Cuba fell—what would happen next?

Let’s imagine for a moment that the U.S. strategy works. Díaz-Canel falls. The regime collapses. And then what?

Iraq was supposed to become a democracy. Libya was supposed to stabilize. Afghanistan was supposed to modernize. Every time Washington has orchestrated a regime change, the result has been chaos. Not democracy. Not prosperity. Chaos.

Cuba is an island of eleven million people, 150 kilometers from Florida. A collapse of the regime would trigger a migration crisis on a scale the U.S. coast has never seen. Not thousands of refugees. Hundreds of thousands. On rafts, on fishing boats, on anything that floats.

The Paradox of Victory

This is the paradox that the hawks in Washington refuse to admit: a collapsing Cuba is more dangerous to the United States than a Cuba that remains standing. The Cuban regime is repressive, incompetent, and cruel. But it maintains a minimum level of order. Remove that order, and you get a large-scale Haiti—within swimming distance of Key West.

And yet, the machine keeps turning. The blockade tightens. Rhetoric grows more heated. And on both sides of the Florida Straits, men talk of dying and conquering, while ordinary people are simply trying to put food on the table.

The Era of Dead-End Ultimatums

Cuba 2026 is the perfect symptom of a world that has lost the art of compromise. On one side, a superpower demanding total capitulation. On the other, a regime that prefers death to negotiation. Caught in the middle, eleven million human lives reduced to mere pawns in a geopolitical standoff.

The same logic is at work in Ukraine, Iran, and the Strait of Hormuz. Escalation as the sole language of diplomacy. The ultimatum as the sole tool of negotiation. Civilian suffering as the sole lever of pressure.

The world of 2026 no longer negotiates—it strangles

Naval blockades, economic sanctions, energy wars: these are the siege weapons of the 21st century. They do not bomb cities—they turn off the lights. They do not kill soldiers—they starve civilians. They allow those who impose them to say, “We haven’t killed anyone”—while knowing full well that people are dying.

This is clean violence. Violence that leaves no craters visible from a satellite. Violence measured in kilowatt-hours cut off and calories gone missing, not in missiles fired.

What Díaz-Canel Has That His Opponents Don’t

I’m going to write a sentence that will irritate many readers: there is something respectable about Díaz-Canel’s refusal. Not in his regime. Not in his repression. Not in his catastrophic economic record. But in the simple act of looking at the most destructive power in history and saying, “No.”

That “no” won’t feed anyone. It won’t turn the lights back on. It won’t free the political prisoners. But it reminds us of something that cold geopolitical calculation tends to overlook: national dignity is not a luxury. It is a fundamental need. And when everything else is taken away—oil, electricity, food—dignity is sometimes the last thing that remains.

And what this respect does not change

Respecting courage does not require respecting the system. Díaz-Canel may be sincerely willing to die for Cuba and, at the same time, be a leader who imprisons those who think differently. Both realities coexist. The world is not a movie where heroes are pure and villains are simple.

Cuba deserves better than its government. Cuba deserves better than the U.S. embargo. Cuba deserves better than to be a pawn on the chessboard of U.S. domestic politics. But what Cuba deserves and what Cuba gets are two tragically different things.

The phrase that will resonate

In a few months—perhaps a few weeks—Cuba’s history will have taken a decisive turn one way or the other. The regime will have held on or will have fallen. The blockade will have been lifted or tightened. Díaz-Canel will still be president or will have vanished into the limbo of exile or martyrdom.

But this phrase will remain: “If we must die, we will die.”

It will remain because it says something our era does not want to hear. That power is not always right. That resistance is not always futile. That small countries are not just checkboxes on an empire’s list of strategic objectives.

And the silence that will follow

When the lights go out in Havana—and they will go out; they’re already going out—no one will be filming. No CNN cameras in the working-class neighborhoods. No Washington Post reporters in hospitals without electricity. No live broadcasts from the kitchens where mothers are trying to feed their children with what no longer exists.

There will only be darkness. And in that darkness, the voice of a man who said he’d rather die. And the silence of all those who let him do it.

Signed, Jacques PJ Provost