On Cuba
The Irrelevance of Morality Under US' Hegemony
Morning Comrades.
By the looks of it, the US is hell-bent on accelerating its plans on an invasion of Cuba, again, and I wanted to share a few thoughts on our shared reality. This isn’t entirely about Cuba, but rather, about the reality of the US and its Capitalist lapdog states and our response to it all.
The entire liberal-leftist ( derogatory ) ritual of defending Cuba by reciting its literacy rates, healthcare statistics, or medical internationalism is, at its core, a catastrophic concession to empire. It accepts the obscene premise that a nation must first morally justify its right not to be strangled, sanctioned, invaded, sabotaged, terrorised, or economically suffocated by the United States. As though sovereignty itself is conditional upon approval from Washington or the moral sensibilities of the western middle classes. As though the global hegemon, whose wealth was built through genocide, slavery, colonial plunder, coups, proxy wars, sanctions regimes, and industrialised slaughter across the planet, possesses any legitimate ethical authority whatsoever to sit in judgement over anyone.
Cuba does not need to earn the right not to be brutalised by producing doctors or reducing illiteracy any more than Iraq needed to justify its right not to be invaded by proving cultural refinement, or Chile needed to earn immunity from coups through parliamentary civility. The moment one argues that Cuba does not deserve punishment because it did “good things,” one silently admits that punishment might in fact be deserved if Cuba failed the moral test established by imperial ideology.
That is the trap. That is the lie.
Whatever political, economic, or social system a country develops is fundamentally the business of that society and its people, not the concern of an empire that has spent more than a century treating the world as its private estate. The United States has no inherent rights over Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Bolivia, Vietnam, or any other nation on earth. There exists no divine mandate granting American capital the authority to dictate acceptable forms of governance, development, ownership, or sovereignty across the planet. Yet this assumption saturates western political discourse so completely that even critics of intervention often reproduce it unconsciously, pleading for mercy by pointing to the humanitarian achievements of the targeted state rather than rejecting the imperial premise itself. Importantly, imperial domination does not become illegitimate only when imposed upon morally sympathetic victims. It is illegitimate in itself.
The starvation of populations through sanctions, the engineering of economic collapse, the financing of coups, the sponsorship of terror, and the permanent threat of military annihilation are not unfortunate excesses of an otherwise moral order; they are the normal functioning of capitalist hegemony. Cuba could have achieved nothing at all beyond merely existing outside Washington’s command, and that alone would still never justify a single sanction, a single act of sabotage, or a single threat of invasion.
The history of the United States’ treatment of revolutionary Cuba demonstrates something profoundly uncomfortable about the structure of global capitalism: morality is entirely incidental to imperial power. Whether the Cuban Revolution improved literacy, healthcare, life expectancy, anti-racist policy, scientific development, or international solidarity is ultimately irrelevant to the logic through which the United States relates to any political project that escapes capitalist discipline. The central issue has never been whether Cuba was “good,” humane, democratic, authoritarian, efficient, or morally justified. The issue has always been that Cuba represented a successful rupture from the capitalist world-system within the geographical sphere historically dominated by American capital. Once that rupture occurred, punishment became structurally inevitable. The embargo, sabotage campaigns, assassination attempts, diplomatic isolation, economic warfare, and recurring invasion rhetoric are not moral reactions to Cuban governance but expressions of a deeper historical reality: capitalism as a global system cannot tolerate successful examples of political-economic independence from its command structures, regardless of the ethical character of those examples.
This is precisely why liberal-leftist attempts to defend Cuba purely on humanitarian or moral grounds ultimately fail to grasp the actual mechanisms of imperial power. One often encounters the argument that the United States’ treatment of Cuba is unjust because Cuba achieved universal healthcare, dramatically reduced homelessness, exported doctors internationally, eliminated illiteracy, and improved many social indicators despite immense external pressure. While these facts are historically significant, they do not explain the hostility itself. To believe they should have protected Cuba from American aggression is to fundamentally misunderstand the relationship between morality and power under capitalism. Empires do not invade because another society is immoral; they invade because another society threatens material interests, ideological legitimacy, or geopolitical dominance. Indeed, history repeatedly demonstrates that states and movements are punished not for failing morally but for succeeding outside imperial control.
