On June 30, 2025, the US regime of Donald Trump published a presidential memorandum (NSPM-5) which tightens the noose of the economic blockade against the Cuban Revolution. The aim of these measures is clear: to starve the people of Cuba into submission and achieve regime change. This is a naked act of imperialist aggression which the Revolutionary Communist International rejects and calls on the world’s labor movement and all consistent democrats to campaign against.
[Originally published on Marxist.com]
In practical terms, the memorandum, which is accompanied by an even more scandalous document under the title of “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Strengthens the Policy of the United States Toward Cuba”, restores National Security Presidential Memorandum 5 of June 16, 2017, issued by the first Trump administration, but amends it partially in order to make it even more restrictive.
The memorandum is published in the language of “national security”, which is the height of hypocrisy, as it is US imperialism which has for over 120 years undermined, threatened and interfered with the national security of Cuba and the right of Cubans to decide over their own future.
The 2017 measures by the Trump administration were designed to exert maximum pressure on Cuba and represented a 180-degree turn from Obama’s policy of reestablishing relations with the island. Obama’s measures were not motivated by any feeling of respect for the right of self-determination of the peoples, but rather by the realization, after more than 50 years, that the policy of frontal assault against the Cuban Revolution had failed to achieve its aims. The intent of the Obama regime was to achieve those very same aims (the overthrow of the Cuban revolution) by different means: the destruction of the planned economy through the penetration of capitalism under a friendly mask. In other words, to “kill them with kindness”.
During his first presidential mandate, Trump implemented 243 separate measures to tighten the economic blockade, which has been in place since 1962, first introduced by the Kennedy administration. While Obama had allowed some US tourists to visit Cuba, Trump banned them altogether. Now he is moving to curtail even visits for educational purposes. There will be a general audit of these, and anyone engaged in them must “keep full and accurate records of all transactions” for five years. Some of these measures were implemented just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit the Cuban economy particularly hard, depriving it of any income from tourism, one of the main sources of much-needed hard currency.
The 2017 measures by the Trump administration were designed to exert maximum pressure on Cuba / Image: public domain
The list of “prohibited officials of the Government of Cuba”, with which it is illegal to have any links or relations, has been further widened to include not just top officials, but a long list of people all the way to editors and subeditors of newspapers and other media outlets. The list of companies and entities with which it is illegal to have “direct or indirect financial transactions” has also been massively expanded.
Other parts of the memorandum deal with policies which are already in place, for instance, “opposing measures that call for an end to the embargo at the United Nations and other international forums”.
It is worth noting that the Biden regime did not make any substantive changes to Trump’s policies towards Cuba. In a disgustingly cynical manner, Biden only remembered Cuba six days before Trump’s inauguration when he decided, for purely propaganda reasons, to remove Cuba from the “countries sponsors of terrorism” list—which Trump promptly reinstated.
US imperialist aggression against the Cuban Revolution has been a bipartisan policy for the last 60 years and continues to be so. The 1992 Torricelli Act, sponsored by a Democrat, backed by Bill Clinton, and signed by George W Bush, reintroduced the blockade for subsidiaries of US-based companies and prevented ships that had docked in Cuban harbors from docking in US ports for 180 days. The even worse Helms-Burton Act of 1996 was initiated by Republican representatives and signed into law by Clinton.
Scandalously, the new memorandum is couched in the language of “freedom and democracy” as well as “respect for human rights”. This is hypocritical nonsense coming from the same regime which backs all sorts of dictatorial and repressive regimes around the world, as long as they toe Washington’s line. The US is currently backing, funding and supplying Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Furthermore, Trump is trampling upon freedom, democracy and human rights in the United States itself, by arresting and threatening to deport those who speak out for Palestine, and using masked armed federal agents to carry out immigration raids without any regard for due process, etc.
If the US were really worried about respect for human rights in Cuba, it could start by closing down the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, where prisoners are kept in indefinite detention without charge and without trial.
The real reason for the US’s hostility towards the Cuban Revolution is not any concern for freedom and democracy, but rather the fact that the US ruling class cannot countenance the fact that a country, 90 miles from the most powerful imperialist power on earth, dared to abolish capitalism. This is expressed in Trump’s Memorandum when it says: “My Administration will continue to… foster free markets and free enterprise… in Cuba”. Amongst the aims of the Memorandum is “encouraging the growth of a Cuban private sector independent of government control”. Here you have it, from the horse’s mouth, what US imperialism wants in Cuba is… to restore capitalism!
There is another reason for Trump’s anti-Cuba memorandum. His policy of scapegoating immigrants includes the termination of the parole program introduced by Biden, through which half a million Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans entered the US legally. At the beginning of June, they were told by the Department of Homeland Security that their permission to live and work in the United States had been revoked and that they had to leave the country. This has created a lot of discontent amongst the politically powerful Cuban community in the electorally crucial state of Florida. Trump calculates that his anti-Cuba posturing in the memorandum might appease them.
According to the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the cost of the blockade in 2023–24 was US$5bn.
The restoration of capitalism in Cuba would not mean “freedom and prosperity” / Image: Bryan Ledgard, Wikimedia Commons
The Cuban Revolution is facing a particularly acute crisis as a result of the combination of factors: the fall of tourism which never recovered its pre-COVID-19 level, high prices of energy on the world market, the long-term deterioration of its infrastructure, etc. This has led to a sustained worsening of living standards as well as an increased social differentiation stemming from the government’s pro-market measures.
The conquests of the revolution, in the fields of housing, education, health care and national independence, have been severely undermined and are under threat.
The isolation of the revolution on a small island with limited resources and the fact that the state and the economy are run and managed by a bureaucracy which is moving in the direction of capitalist restoration, puts the gains of the planned economy in danger.
The restoration of capitalism in Cuba would not mean “freedom and prosperity”, but rather a further collapse in living standards for the majority and the destruction of what remains of the conquests of the revolution. The future for a capitalist Cuba is not a Scandinavian welfare state (which itself no longer exists), but rather, the capitalist barbarism we see in Haiti.
The fate of the Cuban Revolution will be decided in the arena of the international class struggle. To defend the conquests of the revolution, its isolation must be broken through the struggle to overthrow capitalism and imperialism in the US, across the Latin American continent and beyond. In Cuba, the restorationist course of the bureaucracy must be defeated through the struggle for workers’ control and workers’ democracy.
The Revolutionary Communist International wholeheartedly rejects this new act of imperialist aggression against Cuba and calls on workers and youth around the world to redouble their efforts against the blockade and in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution.