Cuba Starving: Global South Yawning

Washington's self-appointed viceroy for Cuba, Marco Rubio, is squeezing his parents' homeland with a precision that borders on cruelty, transforming a nation of 10 million into a theatre for American power projection.

- BY NILANTHA ILANGAMUWA

This is economic and human engineering disguised as strategic manoeuvre. The United States is testing Cuba's endurance, wagering that deprivation, blackouts, rationing and fear will fracture the island's resolve more effectively than bullets ever could. Recent reports indicate that around 33,000 pregnant women face immediate and severe health risks as a consequence of Washington's fuel blockade, imperiling newborns, children and patients in urgent need of medical care. This is punishment for defiance: for daring to exist outside the Western script, for refusing the orbit of neoliberal obedience. Yet the central question is not what Donald Trump and his administration are doing.

The real question is: where is the Global South? While Cuba endures this slow attrition, the self-proclaimed chorus of anti-imperial solidarity remains conspicuously mute. There are no flotillas, no mobilized volunteers, no sustained humanitarian presence—only press releases, anodyne condemnations and moral posturing from governments that struggle to manage their own domestic failures.

"Strategic autonomy", the favoured slogan of these states, reveals itself here as an empty abstraction: a rhetorical mirror held up to the powerless while their neighbours suffer tangible collapse. What is unfolding in Cuba is not a distant drama but a stark demonstration of how the Global South’s façade can conceal impotence, complicity and, ultimately, moral vacuity.