Donald Trump extended the TWEA’s authority over Cuba until 2027. Photo: Resumen.
By Rosa Miriam Elizalde – Aug 27, 2026
Some laws have been around for a long, tedious time.
On August 20, Donald Trump once again invoked legislation dating back more than a century by extending the provisions of the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA) applicable to Cuba through September 14, 2027. The executive order did not impose a new sanction. It did something worse: it kept in place a legal exception dating back to 1917.
Wayne S. Smith, former chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, called the law “ridiculously obsolete.” Not because all old legislation is necessarily absurd, but because of the gap between this instrument and the reality to which it still applies.
The Trading with the Enemy Act was enacted by the U.S. Congress on October 6, 1917—almost 109 years ago. It grants the head of state the authority to restrict trade with so-called “hostile” countries to a minimum and to dispose of the “enemy’s” property on U.S. territory.
The legislation was so literally war-oriented that it went so far as to define when a war began and when it ended. The beginning depended on a declaration by Congress; the end, on a peace treaty.
It regulated telegrams and wireless messages, required English translations of certain articles published in foreign languages, and granted jurisdiction to courts in the Philippines and the Canal Zone, then under Washington’s jurisdiction. These are not museum curiosities, but the coordinates of the world for which it was conceived. That world disappeared long ago, but the exceptional treatment applied to Cuba has not.
In an article published in the Michigan Law Review in the midst of World War II, attorney Samuel Anatole Lourie argued that the law was already outdated by 1941 and considered it preferable to pass an entirely new TWEA rather than continue patching up the 1917 version.
Even those who advocated expanding these powers recognized the problem of applying them in peacetime. Their argument was that a modern war could begin economically before the first soldier fired a shot. It was an understandable explanation while Rommel was fighting in Africa and German submarines were patrolling the Atlantic. In other words, the legislation that the United States continues to invoke against Cuba in 2026 was already described as outdated 85 years ago, when Franklin Roosevelt was in the White House and Hitler still ruled Germany.
That legal relic was given a new lease on life with Cuba. The 1962 embargo decreed by John F. Kennedy prohibited trade; what remained was to control the flow of money.
A year later, Washington invoked the powers of the TWEA to freeze Cuban assets and subject financial transactions to authorization. The paradox was set: legislation conceived for war provided the legal machinery for an economic war against a country with which the United States was not formally at war.
In 1977, Congress itself recognized that the emergency economic powers accumulated by the presidency needed a new framework. It passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA)—which Trump has now invoked against Iran—and once again restricted the TWEA primarily to the realm of warfare. But it left a door ajar: existing programs could continue through annual renewals. Cuba, China, Vietnam, and North Korea passed through that door. Over the years, those exceptions gradually disappeared.
All but one: Cuba remained the only country still subject to a legal authority created for wartime emergencies.
Here, the word “emergency” must be placed in significant quotation marks.
When an exceptional mechanism persists for generations, perhaps what is extraordinary is no longer the threatened danger, but rather the continued existence of an instrument that has demonstrated no effectiveness whatsoever, except as a means of punishing a people.
Because, as everyone knows, the succession of harassment and the entrenchment of U.S. politicians have proved futile, beyond merely multiplying the hardships.
The Cuban Revolution is still standing more than 60 years later, but for decades the regulations stemming from this framework have affected banking operations, travel, academic exchanges, remittances, and business decisions that rarely appear in the solemn prose of a presidential executive order. For a Cuban family, geopolitics can take on far less abstract forms: oil tankers that never arrive, 20-hour power outages, a food supplier that pulls out, a medication that becomes difficult to obtain, a patient who needs hemodialysis and doesn’t know how long they have to live because their catheters are inside a container held up at a port.
The discussion, therefore, extends beyond the island.
It speaks to something both ancient and contemporary: the ease with which exceptional powers outlive the circumstances that gave rise to them. Washington is often more effective at declaring emergencies than at ending them.
Trump’s 2026 signature fits on a single page, but behind it lie two world wars, Hiroshima, the defeat of fascism, a revolution, a Cold War that ended decades ago, and nearly half a century of legislative emergency powers that have outlived all but one of their original members. And the question, so many years after this “ridiculously obsolete” law, is elementary: What war is the United States waging against Cuba that requires the annual renewal of a power created to administer the enemy’s assets within its own borders? And I emphasize: What assets? What enemy?
(Resumen Latinoamericano – English)
Rosa Miriam Elizalde
Rosa Miriam Elizalde is a Cuban journalist who was First Vice President of the Union of Cuban Journalists (UPEC), a founder of Cuba Debate and a writer of several books. She is also a regular contributor to La Jornada.
