BRICS, the Global South and the Continuing Siege of Cuba

The impact of the current policy is particularly severe because the Trump administration has moved beyond the longstanding financial and commercial restrictions and intensified pressure on Cuba’s energy supply. In January 2026, Washington imposed measures designed to prevent Cuba from obtaining oil and fuel, while also threatening countries that supplied it. The significance of this escalation cannot be separated from the character of the Cuban economy. Energy is not a luxury commodity. Without fuel, electricity generation is disrupted, transport is paralysed, agriculture becomes more difficult, hospitals face enormous pressures and food cannot be moved or refrigerated. By September, Cuba was experiencing prolonged and nationwide power shortages, with the resulting disruption affecting ordinary households, businesses, hospitals and the country’s already fragile economic infrastructure.

This is where the humanitarian character of the blockade becomes impossible to ignore. The people who experience the consequences of sanctions are not abstract representatives of the Cuban state. They are patients requiring medical treatment, children travelling to school, farmers needing fuel for machinery, workers travelling to their workplaces, families trying to preserve food and elderly people dependent on electricity, transport and medicines. When an economic policy deliberately restricts the resources necessary to keep an entire society functioning, the distinction between political pressure and humanitarian punishment becomes increasingly difficult to defend. UN experts have warned precisely about these consequences, including threats to food supplies and disruptions affecting health, water and essential services.

The history of the blockade also exposes another contradiction. Washington has repeatedly described its policy as a means of encouraging political and economic reform in Cuba. Yet the sanctions can simultaneously make the economic reforms more difficult to achieve. Cuba has in recent years introduced measures intended to expand private economic activity and attract investment, but US restrictions continue to make international banking, investment and commercial relations extraordinarily difficult. It becomes reasonable to ask whether the ultimate objective is genuinely economic reform or whether the purpose is to use economic distress as an instrument for political transformation. If the latter is the intention, then the policy belongs within the much larger history of external attempts to determine the political destiny of smaller countries.

This is precisely why the BRICS intervention matters. The New Delhi Declaration places Cuba within the wider Global South demand for an international system based on sovereign equality rather than unilateral coercion. The declaration does not merely express sympathy for the Cuban people; it explicitly calls for the ending of the economic, commercial and financial measures against Cuba in accordance with the UN General Assembly resolution. At the same time, BRICS has been increasingly critical of unilateral sanctions and other coercive economic instruments that are imposed without broad multilateral authorisation. This connects the Cuban issue with the concerns of many countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America that have themselves been subjected to sanctions or fear the growing use of economic power as an alternative to diplomacy.

The Cuban case is particularly revealing because the blockade has survived even after the circumstances that originally produced it have changed dramatically. The Cold War ended more than three decades ago. The Soviet Union disappeared. Cuba is no longer part of a global bipolar confrontation of the kind that shaped American policy in the 1960s. Yet the basic architecture of the embargo survived. This raises an uncomfortable question about the nature of US foreign policy: when does a temporary instrument of political pressure become an institutionalised system of punishment that continues largely because the powerful state has acquired the ability to maintain it?

Trump’s second administration has demonstrated how dangerous that institutionalised system can become. A president who is willing to use tariffs, sanctions, threats and control over energy supplies as instruments of foreign policy can turn an already damaging embargo into something much more severe. The concern is not simply that Trump may intensify existing restrictions. It is that the capacity of the United States to exert pressure through the global financial and trading system allows decisions taken in Washington to have consequences far beyond American territory. Countries and companies that wish to trade with Cuba can find themselves calculating not merely the commercial value of their relationship with Havana, but the possible consequences of crossing Washington. This is the extraterritorial dimension that makes the Cuban blockade an issue for the entire Global South.

There is also a deeper question of principle. If the sovereignty of a country is recognised only when a powerful state approves the political choices made by its government, then sovereign equality becomes an empty phrase. International law was developed, however imperfectly, to establish that states are not entitled to impose their will upon others simply because they possess greater military, financial or economic power. The UN Charter rests upon sovereign equality and the prohibition of intervention in the domestic affairs of states. The repeated international condemnation of the Cuban embargo reflects the belief of the overwhelming majority of countries that these principles must apply to Cuba as they apply elsewhere.

The United States will undoubtedly continue to argue that its measures are intended to pressure the Cuban government over human rights and political freedoms. These questions can and should be discussed, as they can in relation to every government, including governments in the Global North. But human rights cannot become a selective language invoked when convenient and ignored when the consequences fall upon ordinary people. A policy that restricts medicines, fuel, food production, electricity, transport and international economic activity cannot be justified simply by attaching a human-rights rationale to it. If the concern is genuinely with the welfare and freedoms of the Cuban people, then deliberately worsening their economic conditions is a deeply questionable instrument through which to pursue that objective.

The Cuban blockade has therefore become much more than a bilateral dispute between Havana and Washington. It is a test of the international order that BRICS and the wider Global South are attempting to reshape. The emerging multipolar system will have little meaning if it merely replaces one set of dominant powers with another while leaving intact the principle that economically powerful states can determine the political and economic space available to smaller countries. The demand to end the blockade is ultimately a demand that sovereignty, international law and the principles of the UN Charter be applied consistently rather than selectively. Cuba’s case has endured for more than sixty years because the issue is larger than the Cuban Revolution itself: it concerns whether the twenty-first century will continue to be governed by the coercive privileges inherited from the twentieth century, or whether the Global South will finally have a meaningful voice in defining the rules by which nations are expected to live together.