The Cuban flag. Photo: cubadebate.cu.
By Bruno Sgarzini – Feb 16, 2026
The Gaza-ification of Cuba, in order to starve millions of people, is unfolding before our very eyes, as if the will of its people were the only thing that could establish limits to enduring the pain of a life decimated, precarious, and animalized by the lack of food, daily energy supplies, and transportation. The Donroe Doctrine fills the geopolitical vacuum in Latin America and the Caribbean due to a lack of political will to limit the United States. Cuba, for example, is being driven to total collapse of food, energy, transportation, and services, while one of the largest countries in Latin America, Brazil, refuses to do anything more than issue a photo-op condemnation. Trump advances because there is not much on the other side.
Mexico is one of the recipients of criticism for its difficulties in sending oil to the island, as it is almost the only country in the region attempting, on its own, to do anything: send food and medicine on humanitarian aid ships. Venezuela, Cuba’s main supporter in recent years, cannot send an oil tanker without the US maritime deployment in the Caribbean stopping and confiscating it. Colombia, on the eve of a presidential election, is trying to quell Trump’s threats, while the rest of Latin America passively watches an economic and humanitarian strangulation that reduces Cuban victims to mere statistics on the news.
The Caribbean is becoming an occupied region where Washington can kidnap a president and create a famine with impunity. The imperialist playbook dictates, in its menu, extreme actions of the same modus operandi: Cuba and Venezuela are subjected to force to teach them a lesson, Honduras (and Colombia?) to threats of sanctions against their electoral system and democratic legitimacy, and Mexico to a complex web of security negotiations and tariffs to avoid being bombed under the pretext of fighting the cartels. Right-wing governments, like those of Milei and Noboa, applaud this as they exercise carte blanche in their countries to dismantle and commodify everything public.
The region seems to be witnessing a numbing of rebellion and a stark acceptance of geopolitical “reality”—as if each country were worth more acting alone than united as a bloc with a common agenda. The biggest gamble lies not in individual or collective action, but in the speculation that a poor midterm showing for Trump in the United States will so weaken him that he abandons the most imperialist pillars of his “Donroe” doctrine. This wishful thinking sidelines the urgent task of resolving the political vacuum: forging a shared regional destiny in an increasingly savage world. What we are witnessing is nothing less than the definitive burial of political, economic, and cultural unity beyond the margins dictated by global powers.
A reality where Latin American peoples are pawns in a chess game that is defined elsewhere.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/JB/SH
Bruno Sgarzini
Bruno Sgarzini is an Argentinian analyst, writer and researcher part of the Mision Verdad team
