By Rosa Miriam Elizalde
There is nothing more convenient than labeling and discrediting. It eliminates any discussion, any nuance, any attempt to understand what we are experiencing—and what we will experience.
The Cubadebate Media Observatory has studied the main pejorative labels used by the Trump administration to refer to Cuba, and, among them, the most common is “failed state.” It concludes that the power of this formula lies not in its analytical accuracy, but in its political utility. It transforms a country’s complex crisis into a simplistic verdict—”there is no state, therefore, change must be forced”—and shifts the public debate from the legitimate question (are the sanctions legal and effective?) to a deceptive one (how do you manage a collapse?).
When Washington calls Cuba a “failed state,” it is not providing information about a country, nor is it evaluating its social cohesion or historical identity: it is attempting to delegitimize the Cuban state in order to discipline the entire nation. Donald Trump and Marco Rubio, who have made a particular contribution to perfecting the use of public power as an instrument for crime, theft, and blackmail, seek to normalize the economic siege as if it were a “responsible” response to a supposed institutional vacuum.
Under this logic, the scarcity and precariousness of daily life in Cuba are interpreted as “internal failure,” while the accumulated impact of more than six decades of unilateral coercive measures, now pushed to the extreme, is concealed. The narrative functions as a revolving door in which the deterioration caused by the sanctions fuels the The label, and the label legitimizes policies that further exacerbate this deterioration.
Now, a failed state, strictly speaking, does not protect its population, does not exercise a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, does not guarantee the rule of law, nor does it maintain basic services. Therefore, it is important to distinguish between fragility and failure. There can be sectoral weakness—energy, supply, transportation—and still a functional state. In Cuba, this threshold has not been crossed.
First, the country meets the classic requirements of a state (according to the Montevideo Convention): a permanent population, a defined territory, an effective government, and the capacity to engage internationally. The subtext that it “has ceased to be a state” is neither legally nor politically tenable.
Second, what characterizes state collapse is not scarcity, but the emergence of parallel authorities that control territories, collect taxes, administer their own justice, and impose traffic regulations. In Cuba, there are no armed or political actors with territorial or fiscal control that replace the state. There is no internal armed conflict, no sustained insurgency, and no war of attrition. There are no cartels or territorial takeovers. The “law of the jungle” does not prevail.
Third, there is administrative continuity and implementation capacity.
Even under stress, ministries, the civil registry, and the education and healthcare systems operate; public health and civil protection campaigns are carried out; illicit markets are regulated and prosecuted. A truly collapsed state cannot maintain these chains of command, provision, and control.
Fourth, Cuba retains effective foreign policy capacity. It maintains bilateral and multilateral relations with more than one hundred countries, participates in international organizations, negotiates agreements, and deploys missions abroad. This agency is not symbolic; it is a tangible indicator of state functioning, not of “void” and “collapse,” as the rumor mills in Miami repeat.
Fifth, the capacity for institutional resilience in the face of energy, financial, or logistical shocks is evident. The response on the island is not state dissolution, but adaptation. We see this when contingency and territorial coordination structures are activated, and in the continued priority given to essential services. essential services—health, water, basic foodstuffs, communications—and the administrative reorganization of scarce resources through regulated distribution mechanisms and social protection.
This week, for example, the creation of a new joint venture between the Ministries of Public Health and Transportation (Transmed) was announced. This company will allocate a fleet of minibuses to transport medical personnel and patients requiring specialized treatment to Havana hospitals, amidst the fuel embargo imposed by Trump.
The adequacy of these responses in a context of severe material crisis and economic strangulation may be debated, but their existence and implementation refute the narrative of paralysis and state vacuum that Washington repeats ad nauseam.
Therefore, Cubadebate rightly concludes that labels like “failed state” are not reliable analytical categories, but rather propaganda tools used to maintain sanctions, isolation, diplomatic pressure, and scenarios of induced “transition.”
They don’t describe, they prescribe.
(Taken from La Jornada, Mexico)
