Hunger Is Not a Tool of Freedom

There are moments in international politics when the language of power becomes so blunt that it exposes the moral failure behind policy.

The recent remarks from U.S. President Donald Trump about Cuba, declaring that he would have “the honour of taking Cuba” and that he could do “anything I want with it”, fall squarely into that category. Words like these are not merely rhetorical flourishes. They reflect a strategy that has long defined Washington’s relationship with Havana: pressure the country until its people are pushed to the brink and then call the resulting desperation a pathway to freedom.

What is unfolding in Cuba today is not simply a political dispute between two governments. It is the deliberate economic suffocation of an island nation in the hope that collapse will produce regime change.

By cutting off Venezuelan oil shipments and threatening tariffs against countries that supply fuel to Cuba, the United States has effectively strangled the country’s fragile energy system. The result has been predictable power outages, shortages, and growing hardship for ordinary citizens who already live under severe economic constraints.

To starve a nation into submission is not diplomacy. It is coercion. For decades the Cuban people have lived under the weight of an economic embargo that has limited trade, constrained development, and isolated the country from normal financial systems. Regardless of one’s views about the Cuban government, the policy has consistently punished the wrong target. The people who suffer most are not political leaders in Havana. They are teachers, farmers, doctors, and families trying to survive in a country whose economy has been squeezed for more than sixty years.

The language now emerging from Washington goes even further. It suggests that the suffering itself is part of the strategy. When a powerful nation declares that another country is “weakened” and therefore ripe to be “taken,” it echoes a colonial mindset that should have been buried long ago. Cuba is not a territory waiting to be claimed. It is a sovereign nation with its own political system, its own history, and its own people.

International law is built on a simple principle: nations have the right to determine their own future without external coercion.

The irony is that the same voices speaking about liberation are implementing policies that deepen human suffering. A nation without fuel cannot run hospitals effectively. A country without electricity cannot maintain stable food distribution systems. A collapsing power grid does not punish political elites alone; it punishes every child studying by candlelight and every elderly person struggling through another blackout.

History should have taught the world that collective punishment rarely produces democracy. Economic strangulation often strengthens hardline leadership while weakening civil society. When survival becomes the central concern of daily life, the space for political reform shrinks rather than expands.

Cuba’s future should ultimately be decided by Cubans themselves, not by sanctions designed to push the country into collapse or by foreign leaders talking about the “honour” of taking control of another nation.

There is a profound difference between supporting democratic change and engineering humanitarian crisis. One respects human dignity. The other weaponizes hunger and hardship as tools of geopolitical leverage.

If the international community truly believes in freedom, sovereignty, and human rights, then it must reject the idea that starving a nation is an acceptable path to political transformation.

Power may impose suffering, but it cannot claim the moral authority of liberation while doing so.

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