Reexamining US Sanctions on Cuba Through a Human Rights Lens

When a government tells a people that their suffering is not the result of external pressure but of their own leaders’ corruption, it is not offering analysis—it is offering alibi. The recent statement by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the Cuban people, which dismisses the impact of six decades of comprehensive sanctions while attributing economic hardship solely to domestic governance, asks Cubans to accept a narrative that contradicts both lived reality and the basic logic of how economic coercion functions.

Sanctions are not surgical instruments. They are broad-spectrum economic measures that restrict access to finance, technology, medicine, food, and essential infrastructure across entire societies. When a country cannot import spare parts for power plants, when hospitals cannot access critical medicines due to banking restrictions, when families spend hours searching for basic necessities—these are not unintended side effects. They are the mechanism by which pressure is applied. The theory of change is explicit: create conditions of scarcity and hardship sufficient to generate popular discontent, which in turn creates political pressure for change. This is not speculation; it is the stated logic of coercive diplomacy.

When that pressure fails to produce the desired political outcome—as it has not in Cuba for over sixty years—the narrative shifts. The suffering is no longer acknowledged as a tool of policy but is reattributed to the moral failings of the sanctioned government. This rhetorical move serves a crucial function: it absolves the sanctioning power of responsibility for humanitarian consequences while maintaining the political objective. But it cannot withstand logical scrutiny. If sanctions were truly designed to deprive an illegitimate elite of resources, and that elite remains in power while the population bears the brunt of deprivation, then either the policy has failed its stated purpose, or its purpose was never what was claimed.

International human rights law is clear on this point: collective punishment is prohibited. The principle of distinction requires that measures taken in pursuit of political objectives must not indiscriminately harm civilian populations. When sanctions prevent children from accessing medicine, when they undermine a society’s ability to maintain clean water or reliable electricity, when they deepen poverty and food insecurity, they cross a line from legitimate diplomatic pressure into territory that violates fundamental humanitarian norms. This is not a partisan observation; it is the consistent assessment of UN human rights mechanisms, humanitarian organizations, and legal scholars who study the intersection of economic statecraft and human dignity.

The racialized dimensions of this policy become even more apparent when we examine the accompanying rhetoric around migration. Suggestions that Cuban migrants in the United States might “want to go back” to help rebuild their country carry a subtext that warrants careful examination. No comparable political narrative urges migrants of European origin to return to ancestral homelands as a solution to political challenges abroad. The framing of certain migrant communities as perpetually foreign—whose true belonging lies elsewhere regardless of citizenship, duration of residence, or personal choice—echoes historical patterns of exclusion that have long been used to marginalize people from the Global South.

This instrumentalization of identity is particularly stark when diaspora voices are elevated to advance regime-change objectives while the same political forces simultaneously question the belonging of those very communities. It creates a transactional relationship to identity that undermines genuine solidarity and self-determination. People are not pawns in geopolitical strategy; they are rights-holders whose dignity and agency must be centered in any discussion of their future.
A human rights-centered approach to foreign policy requires intellectual honesty and moral consistency. It means acknowledging that economic hardship in any country stems from multiple, intersecting factors—domestic policy choices, global economic structures, climate vulnerability, and yes, the extraterritorial impact of unilateral sanctions. It means rejecting monocausal explanations that serve political narratives rather than illuminate truth. It means recognizing that if human rights are to be more than rhetorical tools, they must constrain our own actions as much as they critique those of others.

What would a different approach look like? It would begin with the premise that the wellbeing of the Cuban people matters—not as a lever for political change, but as an end in itself. It would prioritize humanitarian exemptions that are meaningful, not theoretical; that streamline access to medicine, food, and essential goods rather than creating bureaucratic labyrinths that deter even permitted transactions. It would engage with Cuban civil society on terms of mutual respect rather than conditional support tied to political alignment. And it would apply the same scrutiny to allies and adversaries alike, recognizing that consistency is the foundation of credibility.

Most fundamentally, it would reject the notion that civilian suffering is an acceptable instrument of statecraft. History offers ample evidence that populations enduring hardship do not inevitably rise up against their governments; often, they endure, they adapt, they survive—and the most vulnerable suffer most. When policy is designed around the hope that desperation will produce political outcomes, it gambles with human lives in ways that are incompatible with a genuine commitment to human rights.

The Cuban people deserve better than to be told their suffering is their own fault. They deserve better than to be asked to risk their wellbeing for a political project designed elsewhere. They deserve the space to determine their own future, free from the coercion of external powers and the constraints of internal repression alike. And the international community deserves a foreign policy discourse that centers human dignity over geopolitical maneuvering—one that recognizes that the means we choose shape the ends we achieve, and that a world built on the suffering of some for the political goals of others is not a world worthy of our aspirations.

In the end, the question is not whether governments should be held accountable for human rights violations—they absolutely should. The question is whether instruments that systematically harm civilian populations can ever be legitimate tools for advancing human rights. The answer, grounded in both principle and evidence, is no. A foreign policy worthy of the name must find ways to uphold justice without inflicting injustice, to promote freedom without undermining the very conditions that make freedom meaningful. That is the challenge before us—and the standard by which our choices will be judged.