Washington Is Starving Cuban Babies So Trump's Cronies Can Cash In

Let us stop pretending. What is being done to Cuba right now is not diplomacy. It is not statecraft. It is murder by spreadsheet, a slow strangulation calculated in a Washington boardroom, and the corpses it leaves behind are small enough to fit in a shoebox.

The Trump administration has taken the almost unheard-of step of blocking all oil shipments to a country it is not at war with. No fuel means no trucks. No trucks means the food aid rots at the port while shelves in the bodegas go bare. The children of Havana are not hungry because of socialism. They were eating fine before Washington slammed the valve shut.

The United Nations does not mince words. Infant mortality in Cuba has doubled to 9.9 deaths per 1,000 births. Childhood cancer survival has collapsed from 85 percent to 65 percent. Essential medicines sit at roughly 30 percent of normal supply. Read those numbers again slowly, because behind each one is a mother in a dark apartment pressing her palm to a fevered forehead, praying to a God who apparently answers only to the Treasury Department.

The Darkness Is The Point

The blackouts stretch for days now. The public power company is fighting to deliver even a few hours of electricity. In the high-rises, people cook over charcoal in their living rooms, sucking down carbon monoxide, gambling their lungs against their empty stomachs. Some of them will not wake up. Mosquitoes swarm the standing garbage that no one has fuel to haul away.

I have walked those streets. Not long ago the taxis sat idle waiting for tourists who never came. Restaurants killed the lights mid-dinner and served nothing but apologies. And that was the good old days. It has gotten worse since, on purpose, by design, because a source close to the talks whispered to Politico that the Cubans are proving tougher than expected.

Tougher. As if surviving a siege were an act of insolence. As if a poor island refusing to hand over its bones were a provocation that justified starving its kids.

Then came the largest sanctions expansion in decades, punishing any foreign firm that dares trade with Havana. Visa and Mastercard fled. Hotel chains bolted. A Russian tanker carrying a lifeline of fuel turned around and sailed away, after Moscow had sworn it would never abandon the Cubans. Two shipping companies that move 60 percent of the island's imports simply stopped taking orders. Watch a nation drown in real time.

Follow The Money To Trump's Friends

You want to know what this is actually about? Look at Sherritt, the Canadian mining outfit that operated in Cuba for over thirty years. Threatened with sanctions, it announced it was pulling out. Then it reversed course overnight. Why? Because it agreed to sell a 55 percent stake at a discount to Gillon Capital, the money office of the Washburne family. Ray Washburne, you may recall, was handed a top overseas investment post by Trump in his first term.

That is the whole game in one sentence. Do business in Cuba and die, unless you sell yourself for pennies to the president's pals. El Pais reports Airbnb and Marriott are already crouched at the starting line, ready to swallow the tourist economy the moment Washington waves the flag.

The former Canadian ambassador to Venezuela named it plainly: the United States is turning into an extractive predator. We saw the trailer already. In Venezuela, the fossil fuel donors wrote the checks, and Trump answered by kidnapping the president to fling the oil fields open to American drillers.

This is not new. This is the family business. Forty-plus US-backed coups scarred this hemisphere in a single generation. Two hundred thousand Maya butchered in Guatemala. Thirty thousand disappeared in Argentina. In Chile, the palace burned so a general could balance a banker's ledger. The bodies pile up and the boardrooms bill it as market access.

Pay The Slaveholders Or Starve

Here is the detail that should make your teeth crack. Among Washington's demands is that Cuba, one of the poorest nations in the region, pay Miami businessmen billions to compensate them for property nationalized after 1959.

If that sounds familiar, it should. Haiti was forced to pay France reparations for the enslaved people who dared to free themselves, a debt that beggared the country for a century. Cuba is now handed the same bill. Pay us back, they say, for the sin of treating your railroads and cement factories as belonging to your people rather than to a handful of exiled aristocrats.

One of those exiles, a bitter heir photographed by the New York Times, stood proudly before a whiteboard scrawled with his plans for the Cuba transition. His family lost a sawmill, a shipyard, a grand estate. He wants it all back, and he has drawn a map.

Call it transition, reform, reconstruction, democratization. The result is identical. Cuba will not grow freer. It will grow profitable, for the same men who lit the fuse.

They know the electricity being cut will kill children. They escalated anyway. There is no more grotesque arithmetic on this earth than a rich man murdering a baby to nudge up his net worth. And we may not have seen the worst of it yet.