In the picture
U.S. Embassy in Havana reopened with Obama's agreements [Sterba].
The economic embargo on Cuba is one of the most complex and long-standing sanctions regimes in the history of U.S. foreign policy. Since its establishment in 1960, the embargo has tightened, adding successive legal and diplomatic layers that make it an exceptional case study of how sanctions can be transformed into policies that are difficult to reverse.
Various U.S. administrations have developed sanctioning mechanisms that greatly complicate the process of eliminating the embargo. Among them is the repeated inclusion of Cuba on the List of State Sponsors of Terrorism, a measure first introduced in 1982 during the Reagan administration that was temporarily suspended by the Obama administration. Other relevant measures include theCuban Democracy Act of 1992, which prohibited Cuba from buying products from U.S. companies abroad, and the Helms Burton Act of 1996, which makes the removal of certain restrictions conditional on congress approval.
Even in periods of openness such as the relaxation promoted by the Obama administration, the changes proved to be fragile and reversible, as evidenced by the policy shift under the Trump presidency since 2017. More than six decades later, the embargo remains in force not only as an economic measure but also as a regulatory and political framework that has survived changes of administration, international junctures and the very end of the Cold War.
In light of these dynamics, it is not possible to explain the embargo solely in terms of economic efficiency or social impact. Rather than a failure, the embargo has become a useful political tool for the elites of all the actors involved, including the government in Washington, the regime in Havana and other states that benefit from the recurrent international condemnation. The survival of this policy is explained less by the material effects it produces and more by the symbolic and electoral profitability it represents. This perspective, which is developed in the central part of this article , allows us to read the embargo not as an obsolete policy but as a political device that persists thanks to the benefits it offers to those who administer or condemn it.
Measuring the real impact of the embargo on the Cuban Economics is particularly complex. The main source of information used to issue annual statistics are the data that the Cuban government itself submits to the United Nations, documents in which it reports the figure of accumulated income losses that Cuba has lost due to the U.S. embargo. In addition to being difficult to verify independently, these data do not detail the methodology used by the Cuban government nor do they offer transparency in their construction. In the end, it is a political instrument that privileges the rhetoric of the regime over technical evidence and limits the possibility for decision-makers to rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of the embargo.
Even considering the official narrative of the immeasurable impact on the Cuban Economics as valid, the embargo can hardly be considered effective. Since its establishment during the Cold War, the logic of this measure was goal to inflict an unbearable cost on the population in the expectation that the pressure would lead to an uprising against the regime. Lester Mallory, a State department official in 1960, crudely expressed this intention when he stated that it was necessary to "provoke hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the government". In this chain of victims, the Cuban people remain in the front line facing shortages, precariousness and an increasingly severe repression, while the regime remains untouchable and distant from this reality.
Consequently, to attribute the Cuban economic crisis exclusively to the embargo is to overlook the complicated situation on the island. Even under the adverse consequences of the sanctions, the regime has received sufficient material and financial support to at least partially mitigate their effects. Between 1971 and 1989, the Soviet Union transferred approximately 38 billion dollars for the purchase of overpriced sugar, of which the Cuban population received a negligible return. A large part of these resources were destined to revolutionary interventionist policies abroad, including the sending of staff and support to movements or governments in Panama, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Angola, Ethiopia, Nicaragua and other countries.
A few decades later, Venezuela became a crucial supporter of Cuban Economics . Through cooperation agreements, Caracas shipped oil on concessional and often long-term financed terms, while Havana exported thousands of doctors and health staff . In this way, Cuba ensured a stable energy supply and obtained additional foreign exchange through the resale of part of the crude oil and its derivatives on the international market. None of this support translated into sustainable reforms or structural change in the Economics.
This failure is largely attributed to the regime's internal model , a central planning system that has shown its unfeasibility and that only countries like North Korea still maintain. In Cuba this model has generated a structural deficit in its balance of payments, which is known as the capacity to sustain imports with the income from its own exports, making the country chronically dependent on external subsidies and preventing the conditions for a sustained recovery. The embargo may have aggravated certain deficits, but it does not fully explain the structural paralysis suffered by the Cuban Economics . The crisis on the island responds rather to a regime that has reproduced patterns of inefficiency and dependence in receiving international aid, first with the USSR during the Cold War, then with Venezuela until the 2017 crisis and more recently with the uncertainty in the face of a possible rapprochement with China.
In this context, it is more accurate to interpret the embargo not so much as a structural cause of the Cuban crisis but as a political scenario that favors certain interests. Far from measuring its effectiveness in economic terms, it is possible to observe how Republican and Democratic politicians in the United States, the Cuban regime itself and various international actors extract concrete benefits from the persistence of these measures, thus guaranteeing their survival more for their political utility than for their real economic impact.
In the case of the United States, the usefulness of the embargo operates differently among the Republican and Democratic elites. For the Republican Party, it constitutes an electoral resource and a political identity resource that sustains a hard stance against the Cuban regime. The main interest lies in the electoral capital that the embargo produces in core topic states such as Florida, by mobilizing donations from anti-Castro groups and reinforcing before the conservative electorate a narrative of firmness against the regime in Havana.
The Democrats, for their part, share the intention of promote reforms on the island, but have faced different obstacles in converting that intention into concrete results. Every attempt at rapprochement by Democratic administrations has been thwarted by the actions of the Cuban regime itself. During the Ford administration, Cuba intervened in the Angolan war where the United States had strategic interests. Under Carter, the Cuban government sent troops to Ethiopia and Somalia in sensitive scenarios for Washington. Under the Clinton administration, tension escalated after the downing of the plane of the Brothers to the Rescue, generating widespread rejection and criticism from U.S. society. Even after Obama's visit to Cuba, whose policy of openness generated expectations, the gesture was received with reluctance by the regime as reflected in Raul Castro's reflections 'El amigo Obama' when he stated that "we do not need the empire to give us anything as a gift".
As Carmelo Mesa Lago, Full Professor of Economics and Latin American programs of study at the University of Pittsburgh, points out, the Cuban regime must learn to yield without the ambition to win all and lose all. In these rapprochements, measures such as the release of political prisoners would have shown a real willingness to change on the part of the Cuban government. In the absence of these gestures, the most conservative Republican sectors keep alive the argument of the need for an embargo within their electoral logic.
From the regime's perspective, the continuity of the embargo represents an unparalleled narrative resource at the domestic and international level. Attributing the crisis to external sanctions allows diverting attention from the internal inefficiencies of a centrally planned model dependent on subsidies and without the capacity to generate sustained economic growth. In this way, the embargo functions as a pretext for the government to justify shortages, shortages and the lack of reforms, while at the same time legitimizing the permanence of power and conditioning any opening towards Washington.
In this dynamic of interests, the international community has also found in the condemnation of the embargo a way to question U.S. hegemony, rather than a gesture of solidarity with the Cuban people. This point reflects the way in which actors such as China and the European Union use these instruments to assert their role in questioning U.S. hegemony; such is the case of the annual UN General Assembly resolutions against the embargo. At the same time, European companies, including Spanish hotel chains, are limited in their ability to invest in the island due to restrictions affecting their actions and investments in the United States. Cuban diplomacy, whose ability to articulate support in New York cannot be ignored, has been able to take advantage of this scenario, obtaining almost unanimous support that reinforces the narrative of resistance to U.S. restrictions.
In a scenario of transition to a Democratic administration in the United States, the elimination of the embargo will depend on the ability of the Cuban regime to respond to signals of openness from Washington. Recent experience and historical precedents show that this possibility does not automatically materialize. Even during the Biden presidency, progress was limited, and the U.S. diary continues to be oriented toward other strategic regions, such as Asia and the Middle East. The generation of a favorable context for a substantive review of U.S. policy toward Havana implies that the Cuban government demonstrates reliable signals, through domestic political gestures and measures of economic openness.
The embargo against Cuba, beyond its economic effects, reveals its effectiveness as an instrument of political and symbolic calculation. Fundamentally, its value lies in the utility it offers to U.S. elites, to the regime in Cuba itself and to certain international actors seeking to counter Washington's influence. This shared profitability is not only the main reason for its permanence, but also for its institutionalization as an arena of political interests that prioritizes power calculations over the original intention of inducing economic and regime change. In this way, the embargo is evolving as a self-sufficient political mechanism, whose influence transcends the objectives for which it was conceived.