Cuba: The Hour of Reckoning ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

La Tizza Editorial

“La hora de la resistencia: del orden muerto a la independencia definitiva,” a La Tizza Op-Ed, appeared first in its Spanish original on 12 May 2026. What follows is the English translation of an edited version of the said text. La Tizza is an autonomous Communist digital magazine produced in Havana, Cuba.

Where is the people’s Axis of Resistance in Latin America, Europe, or even within the United States?

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“Let no one be under any illusion: we would not have reached the present point without the genocide in Gaza. There, amid the barbarity broadcast live, a new global state of emergency was inaugurated. The so-called international community has passively accepted if not condoned the perpetration of genocide against expendable lives without any legal or political consequences whatsoever. It took even those standing in solidarity with the Palestinian cause some time to realize that in Gaza international law was not being violated; a new order was being established instead, one in which barbarism is a public and televised spectacle. And that is the order under which Cuba is now being threatened with the deployment of an aircraft carrier just a few yards from its shores.”

— La Tizza

Del orden fenecido a la independencia definitiva

The earth,
they want to snatch away from me,
the water,
they want to snatch away,
the air,
they want to snatch away,
and only fire,
and only fire will I give.

Silvio Rodríguez, “The Pale-Faced One Harasses Me

I

If there is anything to be welcome about Donald Trump’s language and behavior, it is how stark they are, how they lay themselves bare. The former does not hide behind euphemisms; the latter does not resort to diplomatic circumlocutions. The threat to station an aircraft carrier right off the coast of Cuba and take over the Caribbean island once the Empire’s job in Iran is done is no campaign hyperbole, nor just another example of Trump’s chaotic mafia-style negotiating tactics, nor an improbable imperial after-dinner joke. It is the unvarnished declaration of a policy that was never anything other than ongoing preparation for the final blow.

For decades, broad sectors on both sides of the Straits of Florida have been anachronistically torn between reform or continuity of the status quo, between tactical concessions or gestures of goodwill to make or strategic realignment to undertake, between hope for reasonable negotiation or cold calculation of how much to yield to appease the beast. With a stroke of the pen Trump has destroyed all belief in the likelihood of such scenarios and has helped us like no other before—we must admit—to lift the veil on that absurd mirage.

Anyone who, with extreme naivety, has bet in recent months on the possibility of some scenario of good-faith negotiation on equal footing between Cuba and the United States has gone in for wool and come home shorn. Trump was never interested in negotiating with Cuba, but in buying time. With his language and behavior, he has spared us the pains of interpretation: it is no longer necessary to read between the lines; now we can read the writing on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

The less time we waste trying to decipher the frenzied dynamics of Trump’s and Rubio’s  back-and-forth, attempting to set aside the timing and the nuances of their rhetoric and entreaties while we indulge in the futile exercise of imagining the potential blessings of a full deployment of Cuba’s actual capacity for dialogue without betraying its core principles, or obsessively debating what concessions we might make to alter the enemy’s policy toward Cuba, the less time we will be giving away to those who have already made up their minds in Washington and Miami and its networks of branches—from Madrid to Paris to New York to Mexico to Buenos Aires—, with the growing and ever less discreet complicity of the so-called democratic international Left—both in its liberal and self-importantly “radical” strains—which continues to give credence or even voice in their media to the morally, politically, intellectually, and one might even say aesthetically, unpresentable “Cuban” anti-Cuban regime-change blood-thirsty herd. The only possible and realistic scenario today is to prepare without delay and with absolute responsibility for a full-scale asymmetric war.

II

The nakedness of imperial language reveals, however, something even deeper and more definitive. It is not that the imperial bully of the moment despises the international order; it is that this international order, which supposedly guaranteed minimum conditions of security and dignity for countries and peoples, is dead, even as some—including within our own ranks—persist in checking the vital signs of a corpse that has long since begun to rot.

Cuba is a founding member of the Non-Alignment Movement, an associate member of the BRICS, a signatory to the vast majority of the agreements that anchor it within the global architecture of the United Nations, and for decades has deployed a full range of selfless forms of aid and solidarity toward the Global South, making it morally deserving of a privileged place of respect and reciprocity in any international order that claims to be just or simply civilized. And yet, the announcement by Trump that an aircraft carrier will drop anchor off the Cuban coast does not trigger any urgent Security Council meeting, nor the adoption of any preventive sanctions, nor even a credible counter-narrative (let alone counter-threat) of multilateral diplomatic isolation. It provokes silence. It provokes petty calculations by large and small countries—many of which, until just yesterday, were “friends of Cuba”—that delusionally believe themselves to be safe. It provokes, at best, lukewarm statements that no one fears and that no one will take into account when deciding where to turn their gaze when the unthinkable—and the secretly salivated upon—happens: the destruction of that burdensome, not least of it as an example, Cuban Revolution.

We must go further: what Trump is doing is not decreeing the demise of the international order, but laying bare the shamelessness of how it actually functions. What has died is not that order, but the precarious harmony among the parties that created and enforced such order’s not-so-declared rules. Alongside the expendable lives of always, the hegemon par excellence—the United States of America, “the greatest enemy of humankind,” as Ernesto Guevara put it—is this time also sacrificing the supporting actors of the international order who now stand in the way of its offensive against competitors who are no longer external to capitalism but emerge from its own cultural and ideological framework.

When competition arose against what was presumed—or at least perceived—to be “anti-hegemonic”—even if such opposition was more imaginary than real, as ultimately proved to be the case with the USSR—that international order required counterweights,  checks and balances, and a backdrop of legitimacy—however illegitimate—for its hegemony. The same is true of the international order as it is of classical liberalism: when the State’s capacity for accommodation and co-opting ceased to be useful for absorbing the energy of popular struggles and demands, capital gave birth to the Washington Consensus and the neoliberal restructuring of Latin American dictatorships.

Let us, then, spend less time trying to revive an order that is already dead and devote all our strength to building a new one at gunpoint. An order in which security guarantees do not stem from the dead letter of yet another treaty or convention deposited in Geneva, but from the certainty that every inch of land will be defended and that this defense will be the founding act of an insurgent international law, born of the weapons of truth and not of the Empire’s notarial deeds or the delusional ramblings of a madman.

III

Let no one expect, however, a seventeenth State to come to Cuba’s rescue. The bitter reality has confirmed that isolated gestures of aid or declarations of intention of assistance—whether from Russia or Mexico, China or the European Union—have been nothing more than a temporary window, negotiated with the Empire itself. There is no alternative geopolitical bloc today with the structural capacity and the real will to defy Washington and alter the architecture of exception imposed on Cuba. That is the blunt reality of Cuba’s isolation and solitude. Accepting it is not defeatism: it is the first step in the forcibly only right direction at our disposal and our only possible winning strategy.

There is another fact that Trump and his fascist cohort are trying to ignore with the arrogance of those who can read nothing but kilotons and nuclear warheads: the enormous lesson of Iran and the Axis of Resistance, of the newly mobilized Iraqi forces, of the Yemenis who managed to overwhelm Saudi logistics, of Hezbollah’s resilience in the face of persistent attacks by Israeli troops in southern Lebanon, even in the midst of a so-called “ceasefire” that, as always, has been observed only by the victims. These forces of resistance had no aircraft carriers, no Security Council to protect them, and no geopolitical bloc to save them either. What they do have is a doctrine. And what they have been and continue to be educated in is a pedagogy of resistance that the Empire has never been able to decipher.

Imperialism can capitalize on surgical strikes, it can kidnap presidents, assassinate generals, destroy infrastructure, and stage the shock-and-awe spectacle of its unrivaled air power.

But there is one variable that eludes all its algorithms: attritional resistance. Prolonged asymmetric warfare bleeds budgets dry, shatters domestic consensus, devours parliamentary majorities, and turns every tactical military victory on the ground against the imperialist aggressors into a potentially strategic political defeat for them.

Resistance is certainly more costly in lives, but it is infinitely more effective politically than submitting to preserve a life that, without sovereignty, is no longer—as Cuba’s national anthem states—but “living in affront and opprobrium.” Choosing resistance is not an act of suicidal heroism; it is the rational calculation of those who have understood that life under occupation is death deferred and that the only bargaining chip to have the Empire sit down to negotiate is the unacceptable cost that a people is willing to bear and inflict upon it.

IV

The recent executive order signed by Trump is the concrete expression of this new state of affairs. This is not just another instance in the tightening of the criminal blockade against Cuba: it is the written formalization of a total state of emergency. Any gesture toward Cuba, even the most timidly humanitarian one, is thus completely prohibited. The aim is to precipitate internal collapse through suffocation, without inconvenient witnesses, without aid workers, without food, without medicine, without electricity. War as the continuation, by other means, of the inability to engage in politics.

To justify its offensive, the Empire maintains a constant game of dual narrative that must be dismantled with urgency and precision. On the one hand, “Cuba is on the verge of collapse,” “Cuba is next,” “Cuba is a failed State” that needs nothing more than a final push to crumble. On the other hand, Cuba is an “unusual and extraordinary threat to U.S. national security,” to such an extent that it is necessary to station an aircraft carrier off its coast, presumably to convince the Cuban people that the only wise course of action is to surrender and to avoid a war the Cuban people cannot win.

So which is it? If we are a threat capable of inflicting damage of such magnitude, how is it that we are on the verge of collapse? If we are on the verge of collapse, why does the United States need to declare a total state of emergency and threat Cuba with deploying its naval power off Cuba’s costs as a first step before deploying its air power?

The answer is simple: neither of these statements is true. They are interchangeable cogs in a propaganda machine designed to justify the unjustifiable. What, then, is our duty as Cuban revolutionaries? To become specialists in decoding underlying, surreptitious, invisible discourses? Everything, however, is in plain sight to see. Those who do not wish to see it should not expect to cure their presbyopia with the sight of an aircraft carrier off the coast of Cuba.

But let’s take seriously just for a moment the adversary’s logic. If the Cuban government, on last May 1st, “forced” half a million people to march from Revolution Square to the U.S. Embassy in Havana in the midst of the worst multipronged crisis in the history of the country, if that government “compelled” more than six million Cubans to sign a declaration against the policies of the Empire and committing themselves to the defense of the homeland, then we are facing a “regime”—the Cuban one—with superhuman coercive power, capable of mobilizing wills on a scale that the Empire itself could not match. If that power is real, then the Empire should think twice before attacking: how to deal with a country that controls its population in such a way?

If, on the contrary, those marches and those signatures were not the product of any coercion but instead arose from a genuine desire to assert one’s own dignity by defending the country of one’s birth against an unjust, unequal, immoral, and criminal war—if they were the free gesture of a nation and a people who do not need to be forced to want to defend what is theirs—then the Empire should think about it even more. Because what the Empire is facing is not a failed State nor a whole population that will welcome them with flowers, but a cohesive popular majority, willing to resist at any cost and by any means.

In either case, the conclusion will be the same: invading Cuba would be the costliest mistake in the entire imperial history of the United States.

V

We did not arrive at this point by spontaneous generation. The attack on the Twin Towers served as a pretext for the establishment, through the Patriot Act, of a state of emergency within the United States. That state of emergency was later extended to the entire world with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: any legal framework ceased to matter. The internal needs of a world order defined and delimited by Washington became the sole rule. Trumpism is neither an accident nor an anomaly, it is the return of the repressed: the neoconservative project that had remained unfinished.

Let no one be under any illusion: we would not have reached this point without the genocide in Gaza. There, amid the barbarity broadcast live, this new global state of emergency was inaugurated. The so-called international community passively accepted if not condoned the perpetration of genocide against expendable lives—lives that could be taken without any legal or political consequences whatsoever. It took even those standing in solidarity with the Palestinian cause some time to realize that in Gaza international law was not being violated; a new order was being established instead, one in which barbarism is a public, televised, and tolerated spectacle. And that is the order under which Cuba is now being threatened with the deployment of an aircraft carrier just a few yards from its shores.

Geopolitically, if not ideologically, Iran may be today what the USSR was yesterday: the only power with a will not to yield and instead to alter the current balance of power in its confrontation with imperialism. However, the question burning in the throats of us Cuban revolutionaries is another: where is the people’s Axis of Resistance in Latin America, Europe, or even within the United Sates? It is urgent to establish it, and to do so the State logic will not serve us well. From within the State logic comes nothing but calls for dialogue, for respect for a defunct international order, and appeals to a multilateralism that reeks of death before it has even been born. It comes also the unacceptable insistence in placing a wedge between the Cuban people and the only State and government able and willing to represent and defend them against the Empire, as if the only problem and the root cause of the present situation in and around Cuba was the “Cuban regime.”

The war in the Persian Gulf has shown that in an asymmetric scenario, control over strategic routes and resources is decisive. Therefore, it is necessary to warn in no uncertain terms that all U.S. bases in the Western Hemisphere would de facto become legitimate targets, including those in Florida and along the U.S. coastline that could serve as supply points, as will the cargo transit zones used by the United States. Any Caribbean country that lends its territory for troop movements against Cuba, or that allows its waterways to be used for the transit of aircraft carriers, or its airspace for the passage of U.S. aircraft and drones, will place itself on the battlefield.

This is not mere trench-warfare bravado. It is the technically accurate description of what a prolonged asymmetric war would entail against an Empire logistically dependent on a hemispheric network of bases, maritime routes, and support points. The enemy forces the targets of its aggression to think in terms of total war. We must do so with all the cold-blooded determination and all the fervor of those defending their own existence.

All groups in solidarity with Cuba, all movements committed to the greatest possible measure of internationalism in action, must prepare to unleash scenarios of resistance within their own countries. Only organized international resistance will allow us to shift the balance of power. It is not merely a matter of defeating this new scenario of aggression that the Empire is imposing on Cuba and the entire region. It is a matter of dealing imperialism a strategic defeat.

Trump, without knowing it, without even imagining it, offers us today the historic opportunity to unleash a crucial phase in the struggle for the definitive independence of our peoples and to help bring ever closer to an end that nefarious chapter of human history that is the unrestrained deployment of the ever aggressive and rapacious nature and logic of the Empire.

We do not ask permission to defend ourselves. We do not appeal to an order that no longer exists. We do not seek the protection of institutions that have validated unjustified and unequal wars of aggression and genocide. We tell the Empire, with the calmness of those who are risking things far more sacred and life-defining than capital flows and investment opportunities, that every aircraft carrier deployed, every base used, every drone launched, every supply ship to set sail, will be met with a response at times, in places, and in ways of our choice.

The moment of reckoning has come: cowardly complicity or organized resistance, permanent servitude or definitive independence. Those are the only choices.

We Cuban revolutionaries have already made ours.