By Isaac Saney *
Every so often, The Economist resurrects a familiar script: Cuba is collapsing; Cuba is imploding; Cuba must “change drastically”—invariably in the direction of neoliberalism and U.S. tutelage. Its November 18, 2025 article, dripping with manufactured pity and well-rehearsed contempt, repeats this tired chorus. With moral indignation, it lists prices of eggs and rice, invokes the specter of humanitarian crisis, and declares—again—that Cuba is heading toward disaster.
But what The Economist refuses to confront, and what any honest analysis must begin with, is the central fact of Cuban life: Cuba is not failing. Cuba is being strangled. A nation under siege is not the same as a nation in collapse.
To ignore the U.S. blockade—now the longest and most punitive economic war in modern history—is not merely intellectually dishonest; it is propaganda masquerading as journalism.
The article’s parade of prices—eggs, beans, rice—are not neutral economic data but the weaponization of scarcity. They are the consequences of a deliberate U.S. strategy explicitly articulated in a now-declassified 1960 memorandum by Lester Mallory, then-a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs:
“Every possible means should be undertaken… to weaken the economic life of Cuba… to bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of government.”
This is not conjecture. It is policy. Amplified and laser-focused by the latest digital weaponry.
For 65 years, Washington has set out to do exactly that: cripple Cuba’s economy, deny it resources, isolate it from global finance, block food, fuel, medicine, and investment, and punish any country or business daring to engage with it. This is not a metaphorical war; it is a structural, economic, and psychological war designed to produce the shortages The Economist now reports as though they were natural phenomena.
Belittling Washington’s economic war on the island nation in any discussion of Cuban hardship is like describing a patient’s symptoms while hiding the fact that someone is suffocating them with a pillow.
Even under this prolonged siege, Cuba has achieved social outcomes that wealthy capitalist states—those most eager to lecture the world—have consistently failed to deliver. The island provides universal healthcare, free education from preschool through the PhD, and has attained one of the highest literacy rates in the world. Its life expectancy rivals that of the United States, despite spending only a fraction per capita on healthcare. And throughout its hardships, Cuba has demonstrated a level of international medical solidarity unmatched by any other nation on Earth.
This, The Economist claims, is “failure.”
Meanwhile, in the United States—the world’s self-proclaimed model of success—40 million people live in poverty, hundreds of thousands sleep on the streets, tens of millions have no healthcare, and children go hungry in a country that throws away billions of dollars’ worth of food. In the UK, austerity has become a doctrine, the NHS is being carved up, and food banks are now a permanent feature of public life.
Who, then, is the failed state?
Cuba, which — despite suffering the economic equivalent of a hurricane every single day for six decades — still insists that dignity is a human right? Or the capitalist states that abandon their poor, criminalize their marginalized, and devour their own social fabric?
The Cuban Revolution does not pretend all is well: a victory of ethics over cynicism. It does not hide its problems. It does not seek easy victories or adorn reality with comforting illusions. This is the ethical foundation of Cuban socialism—an ethical foundation grounded in African revolutionary Amílcar Cabral’s immortal injunction: “Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.”
President Miguel Díaz-Canel’s remarks earlier this year exemplify this revolutionary honesty. Confronting the country’s worsening inequalities, economic distortions, and social frictions, he declared:
“The Revolution does not hide its problems. It faces them with ethics and social justice, even in extreme circumstances.”
In a world where leaders of wealthy nations pathologize poverty and blame the poor for their suffering, Cuba’s leadership says something altogether different and far more human. As Díaz-Canel declared:
“These are our problems — our homeless, our vulnerable communities, our social inequalities.”
In that simple word—our—lies the entire moral chasm separating Cuban socialism from capitalist cruelty.
Every nation that has dared to break from imperial control has been brutally punished: Haiti after 1804, the anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia, and countless Latin American revolutions. This is the historical and global reality: the empire’s long record of sabotaging liberation. Cuba is no exception.
The unceasing U.S. assault on Cuba has taken many forms—military, economic, covert, and psychological. It has included invasions, attempted assassinations, biological warfare, terrorist attacks, economic sabotage, and sustained information warfare, all designed to destabilize the island and undermine its sovereignty. Most recently, this campaign has extended to direct intervention in Cuba’s currency and pricing mechanisms, a newly revealed tactic that further exposes the breadth and persistence of Washington’s efforts to weaken the Cuban Revolution by any means necessary.
The Economist mentions none of this. Instead, it blames the victim for the wounds inflicted by the attacker.
Despite unprecedented pressure, Cuba has not abandoned its people. It has launched more than thirty targeted social programs to address vulnerability and inequality, even as resources shrink. It engages protesters not with riot police and tear gas—as done in the U.S., France, and Britain—but with dialogue and explanations. Indeed, it is socialism that is under Siege—and still persisting.
Where capitalist states disown their poor, Cuba claims them. Where capitalist states criminalize desperation, Cuba seeks solutions. Where capitalist states privatize suffering, Cuba socializes care.
If The Economist were truly concerned about human hardship, its most urgent reporting would not be from Havana—it would be from Los Angeles, from London, from the favelas created by neoliberalism, from Gaza where Western-backed bombs erase entire neighbourhoods, from Haiti shattered by decades of Western intervention. The real crisis is the global crisis of capitalism and imperialism, not of a beleaguered Cuba.
But imperial narratives always invert reality.
Cuba, a small island fighting to breathe under siege, is portrayed as disaster, while the wealthy nations engineering global inequality, war, and ecological destruction are portrayed as models.
Cuba is wrestling with real hardships—no honest observer denies this. But hardship imposed by an external siege is not the same as systemic failure. The Revolution’s survival, its commitment to ethics, and its fidelity to social justice are not signs of decay. They are signs of dignity.
To rebuild its economy, to repair its social fabric, to keep its commitments to health, education, and solidarity—all while facing the most powerful empire in history—this is not failure. It is a revolutionary achievement. Cuba’s struggle is not collapse—it is resistance.
So, when The Economist proclaims Cuba a nation “heading for disaster,” it tells us far less about Cuba than it does about the worldview of those who cannot imagine a society organized around justice rather than profit.
The real question is not whether Cuba is failing.
The real questions are: Why does Cuba still stand? Why does Cuba refuse to surrender? Why does Cuba continue to embody values the capitalist world abandoned and shredded long ago?
And perhaps most importantly:
If Cuba is truly a failed state, why must the United States spend untold mountains of dollars a year to try to make it fail?
A failed state collapses on its own. A besieged state survives despite those who want it destroyed.
Cuba is the latter. And that is precisely what The Economist cannot countenance nor forgive.
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Isaac Saney is a Black Studies and Cuba specialist and coordinator of the Black and African Diaspora Studies (BAFD) program. He holds a PhD in history from the School of Oriental and African Studies – University of London. His teaching, research and scholarship encompass Cuba, Africa, the Caribbean, Black Canadian history, the global Black liberation struggle, and reparations. A major area of his research is Cuba’s relationship with Africa. Isaac was also the Director of Dalhousie University’s Transition Year Program, the ground-breaking program founded in 1970 to redress the educational barriers and injustices that confront the Mi’kmaq Nation, other Indigenous peoples in Canada, and the African Nova Scotian community. Isaac is a long-time community activist and participant in the anti-war movement and the anti-racist struggle and passionately believes in the collective power of the people to transform the world in ways that bring forth equity, justice, and human dignity. His roots lie in the African Nova Scotia community and the Caribbean.
