Sanctions Kill. I Have Watched Them Do It. |
CounterPunch Exclusives
CounterPunch Exclusives
Sanctions Kill. I Have Watched Them Do It.
Image by Marcel Scholte.
I am a surgeon in Havana, Cuba. I will not use my name — not because I fear my government, but because I fear yours and what it can do to those I love.
Last month, I operated on an elderly man with a perforated peptic ulcer. The surgery was textbook. I closed his abdomen cleanly, without complication. We had antibiotics available that time. What we did not have was intravenous crystalloid fluid for resuscitation. It’s the most basic of solutions, cheap enough to cost almost nothing, yet essential enough to save almost everything. It exists. It is manufactured in Santiago de Cuba, 500 miles away. It could not reach Havana since there was no petroleum to transport it. By the time it arrived, my patient had died.
I want you to sit with that before we discuss politics.
Now I want to tell you about a two-year-old girl, the daughter of friends of mine. Two weeks ago, she developed severe gastroenteritis — vomiting twenty times a day, rapidly dehydrating. Her parents rushed her to a pediatric hospital in Havana. There was not enough intravenous fluid in the Emergency Room. Pediatric hospitals have historically been the last refuge protected from the worst of our shortages. Even in our hardest years, we have tried to protect the children. That night, only the hospital director was authorizing each bottle of fluid as if it were pure gold. It was not gold, was only salt and water, but they only had a few bottles available.
These are not isolated tragedies. They are the intended outcomes.
Cuba’s infant mortality rate — once lower than that of the United States, a genuine achievement of our public health system — has been climbing from 5 to over 7.1 per 1,000 live births, starting in 2019. Two-thirds of essential medicines are either unavailable or in short supply. Arboviruses such as dengue, oropouche and chikungunya have been surging. According to Cuba’s own statistics office, the country has seen the exodus of more than 1.4 million inhabitants since 2020 — among them thousands of physicians — and recorded its fewest births in 65 years. In 2024-2025 alone, the US blockade cost Cuba $7.5 billion. Over 65 years, its cumulative damages have surpassed more than $170 billion. This is not a crisis of governance. This is manufactured ruin: the deliberate application of maximum economic pressure until a nation breaks, then attributing the wreckage to the nation itself. The wreckage is then cited as justification for a military intervention, and the intervention as the path to coveted resources.
US policy towards Cuba was designed this way. In 1960, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Lester Mallory wrote an internal memorandum (now declassified) that explicitly advocated measures to bring about “hunger, desperation and overthrow of government” in Cuba through deliberate economic hardship. This US embargo was established to include all trade with Cuba in 1962. It is considered illegal. Sixty-five years later, that strategy has not been abandoned. It has been refined. The State Sponsor of Terrorism designation locks Cuba out of the international financial system — no transactions, no banking access, foreign companies threatened for doing business with us. Recently, Cuba was declared by the US President as an “extraordinary threat to the US” and an order was issued preventing any country in the world from delivering oil to the island. The January 2026 naval blockade severing our primary fuel supply is the most acute recent expression of the US embargo. It is also illegal.
Against this backdrop, the United States recently announced $6 million in aid for Cuba, delivered through channels explicitly designed to........