The Costs of the U.S. Blockade of Cuba

According to Doctors Without Borders’ “The Practical Guide to Humanitarian Law,” a blockade is an act of war that seeks to isolate an adversary, disrupt economic activity, and prevent the movement of vital supplies. Under an embargo, a country prohibits its own companies or subsidiaries from engaging in business with another country, rather than interfering with third parties. Through what is essentially a broader economic blockade, the United States has intermittently prevented Cuba from commerce with other nations. As President Donald Trump has become even more strident, the United Nations has criticized his administration’s policy of imposing tariffs on any country that sends oil to Cuba as a serious violation of international law. Earlier this year, a military blockade was evident as “the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted a tanker full of Colombian fuel oil en route to Cuba within 70 miles of the island,” according to the New York Times. The U.S. government knows that a blockade is an act of war, according to Connecticut Congressperson Joe Courtney, who said in a recent press release, “The international law, actually, in terms of blockades, was established in 1909 at the London Naval Conference, which the U.S. participated in and the U.S. Senate actually voted to endorse, and it defined blockades as an act of war.”
That is why, until now, U.S. administrations have been so adamant about calling such sanctions an “embargo.” Understanding how this economic campaign against Cuba began, along with its impacts on Cuba and beyond, will help us better understand the current situation between the United States and Cuba.

The Origins of the “Embargo”

The original justification for the embargo in the early 1960s was Cuba’s expropriation of “some $1.8 billion worth of U.S.-owned property,” according to the U.S. Foreign Claims Settlement Commission. In turn, Cubans argue that earlier in the century the United States had seized control of 70% of Cuban land and three-quarters of its primary industry—sugar—which Carollee Bengelsdorf, in The Problem of Democracy in Cuba, describes as the “virtual ‘confiscation’ of [Cuba’s] economy by the United States.” By the 1950s, as a result of U.S. wealth-extraction and the legacy of Spanish colonial rule, five out of six Cubans lived in shacks or were homeless, 80% of Havana’s residents suffered from hunger and unemployment, and two-thirds of Cuban children didn’t attend school. Cuban census data for those years reveal that only 3% of rural Cubans had habitable housing, only 10% enjoyed running water or electricity, and more than half of the Cuban population lived in housing that lacked cement walls or floors. Cubans say such conditions left them no recourse in 1959 but to expel the “Yanquis” and reclaim their own territories and businesses, just as the Yankees had expelled the British in 1776. The result was an exodus of around a quarter of a million of mostly wealthy Batista loyalists, now the anti-Castro Cuban-American lobby.

If we are to hold Cuba accountable for roughly $4.5 billion in U.S. claims stemming from the 5,911 cases certified by the U.S. Foreign Claims Settlement Commission against the Cuban government for the expropriations it carried out primarily from 1960–1961, one can hardly comprehend what the United States would owe to British Loyalists and the Crown after 250 years.

Pressured by the Cuban-American lobby, this parallel has escaped both Republican and Democratic U.S. administrations. To exact revenge, in 1962 President John F. Kennedy invoked the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, the legal basis for the trade embargo, which allowed the United States to freeze Cuban assets and prohibit financial transactions. Then, in 1966, the Helms-Burton Act tightened the economic blockade by punishing foreign companies doing business in Cuba. In 1992, worsening the impact of the Soviet collapse, President George H. W. Bush signed the Torricelli Act, banning foreign U.S. subsidiaries from trading with Cuba.
From 2017 to 2021, invoking dormant portions of the Helms-Burton Act, Trump relisted Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, restricted travel and remittances, and encouraged lawsuits against companies “trafficking” or engaging in business with property nationalized by the 1959 Cuban Revolution. This paved the way for the 2026 Supreme Court ruling allowing the U.S.-based Havana Docks Corporation to sue four cruise lines for docking in Havana ports that were nationalized by the Cuban government before 1960.

Trump’s attacks on Cuba have more recently come to mirror his broader “maximum pressure” strategy, which combines severe economic sanctions and international isolation in an effort to topple adversarial governments in Latin America and the Middle East, particularly targeting Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela.

Trump’s January 29, 2026, Executive Order expanded his maximum pressure campaign by imposing tariffs on countries sending fuel to Cuba, and his May 1, 2026, Executive Order authorized the United States to seize assets belonging to foreign individuals found to be “trafficking” in blacklisted or nationalized properties.

The Costs to the United States of Maximum Pressure

Most countries have consistently supported U.N. resolutions opposing U.S. actions against Cuba. U.N. experts call the blockade an “extreme form of unilateral economic coercion” that violates international law. They say it obstructs the “Cuban people’s right to development while undermining their rights to food, education, health, and water and sanitation.” For 34 consecutive years, since 1992, the U.N. General Assembly has overwhelmingly passed resolutions demanding an end to the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba, citing the violation of international law. Annual votes consistently see over 180 countries opposing the U.S. stance, with only the United States and Israel typically voting against.
The U.S. public has been skeptical of the blockade for decades. A 2016 Pew Research Center poll revealed that 73% of Americans favored ending the blockade. More recently, a February 25, 2026 poll by YouGov shows that not even a third of people in the United States approve of the blockade, and only 13% support attacking Cuba. Just 5% of Americans view Cuba as a serious threat. To put this in perspective, 4% of Americans view Canada as a threat, too. A 2024 Data for Progress poll shows that only roughly a quarter of Americans oppose lifting travel restrictions to the island.

These percentages might be higher were the public aware that the blockade is costing us more than Cuba. The Cuba Policy Foundation estimates that the United States is losing up to $4.84 billion annually in sales and exports. “If the embargo were lifted, the average American farmer would feel a difference in his or her life within two to three years,” the study’s author wrote. At $4.84 billion a year, over the lifespan of 64 years, the United States has missed out on $310 billion—nearly enough to provide a home for every unhoused person in the country. (According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the number of people experiencing homelessness in 2024 peaked at 771,480 people. This is about $402,000 per unhoused individual, just shy of the Median Home Listing Price of $425,000.) While this won’t fix the structural causes of homelessness, it would represent a transformative solution. The housing comparison is just one way of understanding the scale of that figure. A total of $310 billion could also put $1,890 in the pocket of each of the nation’s 164 million taxpayers.

In turn, as Helen Yaffe notes in a Jacobin article from earlier this year, “In 2025, Cuba’s annual report to the United Nations put the cumulative cost of the U.S. blockade at over $170 billion. Costs are rising year after year, reaching $7.6 billion from March 2024 to February 2025 alone.” This would put the cost for Cuba to date at about $178 billion, a little over half of the $310 billion the United States has spent so far.

The blockade has also deprived the U.S. public of Cuba’s medical breakthroughs. In 2008 Cuba released Cimavax, the first lung cancer vaccine which extended life in lung cancer patients while also easing breathing and restoring appetite. In 2022, Cuba released NeuroEPO, which reverses cognitive decline in patients with Alzheimer’s. U.S. consumers have also been denied access to the world’s first meningitis B vaccine; Cuba’s potent Covid vaccines; Heberprot-P, a treatment for severe diabetic foot wounds that also significantly reduces the risk of lower-limb amputations; technologies for hearing impairment; treatments for retinitis pigmentosa (a group of rare eye diseases that affect the retina); and PPG, a popular cholesterol-reducing drug with the side effect of increased sexual potency.

Until maximum pressure, the socialist island managed to provide all its inhabitants with what the most affluent country in the world could not: free top-notch health care, free university and graduate school education, subsidized food and utilities, and overall, very low violent crime and gun ownership rates.

In the United States, as of 2024, nearly 14% or 47.9 million people were food insecure and 26.7 million lacked health care coverage, according to sources including the U.S. Census Bureau. In contrast, prior to 2018, Cuba’s food insecurity hovered around 2.5%, according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service. After the pandemic and Trump’s maximum pressure campaign, by 2023, the USDA Economic Research Service estimated that nearly 12.8% of Cuba’s population were food insecure. Today, as a result of Trump’s accelerated campaign against Cuba, independent groups like the Cuban Observatory for Human Rights have reported that up to 78% of Cubans are skipping meals.

A recent report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research based on World Bank data also found that the strengthening of U.S. sanctions against Cuba beginning in 2017 were likely the main cause of a huge spike in Cuba’s infant mortality rates. For decades Cuba had a lower infant mortality rate (four per 1,000 live births) than the United States (six per 1,000 live births). Since 2018, however, the report found the rate has increased, reaching 9.9 in 2025, resulting in a total of 1,800 infant deaths over a seven-year period.

While Cuba may have universal health care, with fuel reserves depleted, hospitals lack electricity for incubators and operations, and pharmacies lack medicine. Nonetheless, Cuba still compares favorably to the United States in other areas:

Housing: There are virtually no unhoused people in Cuba. The 1960 Urban Reform Law turned renters into homeowners so 85% of Cubans own their own homes and pay no property taxes or interest on their payments. After 1985, payments toward buying a home couldn’t exceed 10% of the combined household income. U.S. mortgages often exceed 38% of salaries.

Literacy: The adult literacy rate in Cuba (99.8%) is higher than the United States’ rate (97%), per the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Employment: Cuba’s unemployment rate is only 1.8% according to CIA data, compared with 4.3% in the United States.

Harms to Cubans

While the United States’ $310 billion price tag is higher, Cuba has obviously suffered a far greater blow relative to its size and resources.
Many unnamed Cuban and U.S. sources for this article mentioned a variety of hardships—the garbage piles attracting pests (one mentioned seeing a person sifting through them for food), the 20–22-hour blackouts halting water pumps, people skipping showers and meals. Ellen Rosenzweig, who lived in Cuba for 20 years and was married to a musician in the legendary Cuban band Los Van Van, noted, “So if your electricity is on at 3 a.m., you have to be up then to fill bathtubs and cook for the day.” One result of Trump’s maximum pressure campaign has been a massive exodus from Cuba of 10% of its population, mostly young professional economic refugees, with emigration continuing to rise.
Before Trump’s first presidential term, Cuban ingenuity was able to outsmart el bloqueo. The country withstood the previous oil crisis during the 1990s post-Soviet Special Period, the loss of its tourist industry during the pandemic, and the need to improvise replacement parts for aging U.S.-made transportation systems and electric grids. Yet each of these crises further exposed Cuba’s Achilles’ heel, one that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was more than happy to attack.

“All of the pieces aligned to make this obsessive desire to finally take over Cuba seem possible,” observes Medea Benjamin, author and co-founder of the anti-war organization Code Pink, in a telephone interview. In a recent article on Common Dreams responding to Castro’s indictment over the deaths of four Brothers to the Rescue operatives who were killed in 1996 when their plane was shot down over Cuba, Benjamin describes how anti-Cuban extremist groups have killed over 74 Cuban civilians and how Brothers to the Rescue specifically received warnings for “25 serious and systematic violations of Cuban airspace” prior to the downing of the plane. (Brothers to the Rescue was a Miami-based Cuban exile organization that began as a search-and-rescue group for Cuban migrants but became politically controversial due to anti-Castro activities and flights near Cuban airspace.)

“That same anti-communism has been around for decades and Miami Cubans like Marco Rubio feel they can finally accomplish their dream. This bold-faced support for the modern-day Monroe Doctrine—the ‘Donroe Doctrine’—is coming directly from Rubio,” she explains. The term is a play on Donald Trump’s name and the 1823 policy established by President James Monroe that has evolved to justify military interventions in Latin America.

Rubio is a primary driver of the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaigns. He is supported by influential anti-Castro Cuban-American political networks, including the Cuban-American lobby, the Fanjul family (a prominent Cuban-American family known for building a multi-billion-dollar sugar and real estate empire), and the late Las Vegas Sands owner Sheldon Adelson, a conservative donor whose primary cause was maintaining U.S. support for Israel.

Given our own economic woes here in the United States, a growing chorus of voices is calling for an end to this costly, immoral vendetta. After meeting with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla this spring, House Representatives Pramila Jayapal and Jonathan Jackson released a statement. “This is cruel collective punishment—effectively an economic bombing of the infrastructure of the country—that has produced permanent damage. It must stop immediately,” they wrote.

Earlier this year, House Representative James McGovern introduced H.R. 7521, the United States-Cuba Trade Act of 2026, which would lift the blockade entirely. Unfortunately, the legislation has not yet been scheduled for a vote.

“That’s a failed blockade because it hasn’t worked in 64 years,” says Zoila Benitez, the retired head of a Cuban news department. “The oil sanctions have created a humanitarian crisis and nobody should have to go through that.” Benitez emigrated to the United States in 2021 after an accident in an unlit stairwell and the sudden unavailability of medical joint replacements due to Trump’s sanctions. She misses loved ones and her beautiful apartment with marble floors that she helped build. Like many Cuban émigrés she believes Cuba needs change—including, possibly, more political parties—but rejects U.S. involvement.

Seventy-five percent of Cuban-Americans in South Florida—mostly Rubio’s and Trump’s base—also say that the blockade has not worked, a recent poll by the Cuban Research Institute found.

Florida Uber driver Ryan Stone told me, “I’m 100% for America staying in its lane instead of wasting our money. I think we should vote on it each year and it should be democratic.”

Jean, a former Colombian who is in Florida on asylum, lost his commercial trucking license thanks to an executive order Trump issued in March. “Es una tonteria—It’s a joke,” he said about the blockade dismissively. On the other hand, when I asked hotel hostess Yanet about whether or not she supported a U.S. invasion, she said in Spanish, “Invasion? I call it an intervention.”

While lifting the blockade would boost Cubans’ living standard and lay bare the Cuban government’s true mistakes, Cuba’s economy would still be saddled with its colonial legacy as a producer first of sugar and later of tourism. Unequal trade terms historically maintain formerly colonized countries as purveyors of raw materials and services, subsidizing the high standard of living in industrialized countries. It is useful to remember this uneven playing field whenever making comparisons with Cuba.

The Cuban president implied that copycat Iran assassinations and Venezuela kidnappings won’t work in Cuba, nor would an occupation. “The fact is that we have a collective leadership …there are hundreds of people who are capable of assuming that responsibility and making decisions collectively,” Díaz-Canel explained on NBC, “...a doctrine known as the War of the Entire People … every Cuban woman and every Cuban man has a mission, a purpose, a goal to defend, a place and a position to occupy in the defense.”

Cuba’s Future

Despite the hardships, more than half of the Cuban population (5.2 million out of 9.7 million) came out to celebrate the legacy of the Cuban Revolution and International Workers’ Day on May 1. Later that month, 6,230,973 people—or 80% of the country’s population over age 16—signed a petition denouncing the energy blockade and committing to defend Cuba’s sovereignty.

Recently, Mexico, China, and Russia pledged to continue trading with Cuba. The BBC reports that “the Chinese foreign ministry called on the United States to stop using ‘coercion’ and ‘threats’ against its ally, while the Kremlin said the pressure being exerted on Havana ‘borders on violence.’” China has been working with Cuba to build up its solar infrastructure. This does not look like a war that Trump and Rubio will win quickly.

Prior to 1959 Cuba was dominated by casinos, prostitution, and organized crime. Judging from his former investments, political maneuverings, and close friendships, one could assume Trump has a soft spot for casinos, ballrooms, and islands. Will the exorbitant cost of the blockade be worth returning to the same unequal status quo Cuba had under Bastita, but under the Trump brand instead?

Prior to Trump’s maximum pressure campaign, the fact that a poor, formerly colonized country could meet its citizens’ basic needs, while outperforming the United States on key measures, underscored how inexpensively the United States could follow suit. And herein may lie the real motivation of the blockade, and its most significant cost: it keeps people from making such comparisons first-hand. In other words, why is the U.S. government willing to spend $310 billion, plus the incalculable cost of a potential invasion, just to keep the U.S. public from making its own comparisons?

Margot Pepper’s memoir about her year based in Cuba during the Special Period, Through the Wall: A Year in Havana, was nominated for the 2006 American Book Award. Her work has appeared in Dollars & Sense, Common Dreams, the Utne Reader, Monthly Review, Z-net, Counterpunch, City Lights, and elsewhere and can be found at margotpepper.com.

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