Turning lights off in Havana

The scene in Havana this past May Day was not one of revolutionary triumph but of a quiet, mechanical exhaustion.

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In the twenty-first century, the most effective way to destroy a nation is not to bomb its cities but to turn off switches that power it. Since the American executive order of late January, Cuba has been subjected to a maximum pressure campaign, a euphemism for a deliberate energy strangulation. It has reduced a country of eleven million people to a state of pre-industrial misery. This is the “Donroe Doctrine” in its most naked form, an assertion that the Western Hemisphere is a private estate and that any tenant who fails to please the landlord must be starved out. Only the other day, Donald Trump, the American president, punctuated this policy with a characteristic quip, suggesting that he needed only send a single warship to sit offshore and the island would “immediately surrender”. The rhetoric reveals th