Tonight, somewhere in Havana, an old man will be connected to a hemodialysis machine. The machine depends on electricity. The electricity depends on fuel. The fuel was cut off by U.S. military forces in December 2025. The old man dies.

The United States government has an explanation: it bears no responsibility for that death. The responsibility lies with the Cuban government, which has refused to yield to the democratic change its people deserve. If Cuba were free, the old man would be alive.

Stop here. Because this is exactly what needs to be understood: the old man is not collateral damage. He is the instrument.

In 1960, Undersecretary of State Lester Mallory wrote it with a clarity his successors have never matched: the objective of the Blockade against Cuba is to “deny money and supplies, decrease monetary and real wages, bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the government.” No ambiguity. No euphemism. Hunger and desperation are the means. Overthrow is the end.

Sixty-five years later, the old man on dialysis is the living application of that declassified memo, now operating inside the new Donroe Doctrine, the policy of hemispheric domination that the current administration has made explicit and operational. The old man’s death is not at all an unintended consequence. It’s its application.

The Logic of the Hostage

What is being done to Cuba has a structure so simple you would recognize it instantly in any other context: do what I demand, or I will kill you.

The only difference is scale and distance. This is not one man with a gun pointed at one person. This is the most powerful country on earth cutting off fuel, medicine, food, and hospital electricity to ten million people, with the explicit intention to cause widespread harm, until those ten million people produce a political outcome that country considers desirable.

The old man on dialysis has no real political power. He cannot overthrow any government and may not even want to. So he cannot in any way produce the demanded result. But he dies anyway, because his death is part of the pressure.

That is not foreign policy. That is hostage-taking on a national scale.

The Argument You’ve Been Sold

The hegemonic narrative has a prepared answer: the fault lies with the Cuban regime, which oppresses its people and squanders whatever resources it has. It is an elegant argument because it turns the perpetrator into a facilitator and the victim into the author of their own suffering.

But look at what that argument actually does. It demands first that we judge the Cuban government (not the Blockade) for oppression. It demands that we critically measure the efficiency with which Cuba manages to use and distribute the resources being denied to it from every angle. It demands that the old man justify why his government hasn’t fallen yet.

It is an argument functionally identical to the kidnapper’s. But far more Kafkaesque.

The Cuban government has its own record to answer for on human rights and the rule of law, but that is a separate conversation, one that the Blockade’s supporters are very eager to have instead of this one.

What the Law Says, and What It Doesn’t

International law calls genocide the deliberate destruction of a national group. The 1948 Convention explicitly includes “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Article II(c). Mallory described exactly that in 1960 not as a side effect, but as the mechanism. The intent is documented. The destruction is now measurable in deaths. And the Cuban people cannot opt out of it.

Jurists will say the Blockade does not qualify in the strict sense, because its declared objective is political coercion rather than the destruction of a national group. The Cuban people are not being targeted for being Cuban, but for failing to revolt against their government.

But think about that for a moment. The Cuban people cannot stop being Cuban. And Cubans cannot escape the Blockade even by individually changing their ideology. The condition imposed, revolt or die, is a straightforward death sentence for ten million people, equally imposed on those who support the government and those who don’t. Because even when driven by hunger to revolt, most will have no real collective power to deliver what is being demanded of them in exchange for their lives. The old man on dialysis certainly does not.

The legal distinction between deliberately inflicting conditions of life to destroy Cubans for being Cubans, and deliberately inflicting those same conditions to destroy Cubans for being unable to produce a specific political outcome in Cuba, may matter enormously in a courtroom. In the old man’s room, in the dark, with the machine stopped, that distinction does not exist.

What We Know for Certain

We do not need to resolve the legal debate to know this: the Blockade is a policy designed with the explicit purpose of producing hunger and desperation in a civilian population. Maintained for nearly seventy years. Tightened over recent decades with federal laws and hundreds of additional measures. Culminated in 2025 with the military cutoff of energy supplies to an island of ten million people. Infant mortality on course to triple from its 2018 level. Hospitals unable to function. One hundred thousand patients waiting for surgeries that cannot be performed. Suffering and deaths, direct and indirect, that will never be fully counted.

All of this in plain sight, with full and documented knowledge of its effects. All of this, against a population that has no individual means of escape from the harm.

That has a name. The 1948 Convention may have technically left it without a precise legal name, perhaps because in 1948 there were states that needed that legal gap to legitimize their own political maneuvers. But you know what it’s called.

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