Cuba: Why Does This Small Island Present Such a Major Challenge for the U.S.?

Original article: Cuba: ¿Por qué una isla tan pequeña sigue siendo un problema tan grande para EEUU?

By Anjuli Tostes (*)

U.S. actions against Cuba are often analyzed through familiar frameworks: the Cold War, ideological confrontation, punishment of a socialist regime, or U.S. domestic politics. Even the most sophisticated critical readings tend to remain within the logic of hard power (sanctions, embargo, isolation) or its humanitarian dimension.

However, there is a less explored, more uncomfortable, and structural angle: the relationship between Cuba and the United States as an ontological conflict concerning the very nature of power within the international system.

From this perspective, Cuba is not punished primarily for what it does, nor even for what it is, but for what it proves is possible. The island serves as a living anomaly within the global capitalist order, not because it has built a utopia, but because it has persisted as a political subject that has not been subsumed.

In terms of political philosophy and international relations, Cuba embodies a form of existential heterodoxy that challenges the deep grammar of the world system.

The contemporary international order is not sustained solely by rules, treaties, or institutions, but by an implicit ontology—the idea that capitalist economic rationality is the natural and inevitable horizon of all social organization.

Within this framework, sovereignty is only acceptable if exercised within the limits of that rationality. Cuba breaks this silent pact. Not because it is economically efficient or morally superior, but because it insists on exercising sovereignty outside the dominant ontological consensus.

This is why the blockade against Cuba does not operate solely as foreign policy, but as a disciplinary mechanism of the system. The embargo does not merely seek to weaken the Cuban state; it aims to send a structural message to the rest of the world: ontological disobedience carries lasting costs. It is a pedagogy of punishment directed less at Havana than at any society that seriously considers an autonomous path.

Here arises the most relevant blind spot: the United States does not fear Cuba as a material threat, but as a symbolic precedent of radical non-alignment. In classic realist terms, this obsession is absurd: a small island, with no relevant offensive military capacity, subjected to enormous economic constraints. However, in terms of structural and symbolic power, Cuba represents something intolerable—the historical demonstration that a country can survive—with great sacrifices, yes—without wholly subordinating to the global market led by Washington.

From this viewpoint, the embargo functions as a technology of time. It not only punishes in the present, but seeks to exhaust this situation in the long run, eroding the intergenerational transmission of revolutionary experience and reducing resistance to mere biological survival. The aim is to win not on the military field, but in the realm of duration, making time work against Cuba until surrender seems «natural.»

Most revealing is that this punishment persists even when it has lost all instrumental rationality. The end of the USSR, the partial opening of the Cuban economy, generational changes, and diplomatic gestures have not altered the underlying logic. This confirms that we are not dealing with a reactive policy but with an autonomous punitive structure, sustained by ideological inertia, internal interests, and above all, by the systemic need to close any ontological fissure.

From political philosophy, this allows for an even deeper reading. Cuba serves as a living reminder that history has not ended. And this is exactly what is intolerable for an order that presents itself as final, inevitable, and without alternatives. As long as Cuba exists—with all its contradictions, errors, and limits—the narrative of capitalist inevitability remains incomplete.

In this sense, the punishment of Cuba is not an exception but a ritual of reaffirmation of the global order. A prolonged sacrifice that maintains the narrative of U.S. power as the guarantor of a «possible world.» It is not about exporting democracy, protecting human rights, or even defeating socialism: it is about preventing sovereign disobedience from being conceivable.

That is why Cuba continues to be a problem. Not because it triumphs, but because it does not disappear. Because it persists as a sign that the international system is not a destiny, but a historical construct and, therefore, reversible.

This is the heresy that the United States cannot tolerate. And this is, paradoxically, the deepest source of Cuba’s political dignity.

(*) Anjuli Tostes holds a degree in International Relations from the University of Brasilia, is a lawyer, and a Ph.D. candidate in Law and Economics at the University of Lisbon. She has been an auditor for the Controladoria-Geral da União (CGU) of Brazil since 2012 and is a founding member of the Brazilian Association of Jurists for Democracy and the Association of Jurists for Democracy in Chile.