Gunboat diplomacy vs human rights

Written by Mark Arnold, Country Coordinator for Cuba

On May 1st, Cuba held its official International Workers’ Day celebrations under the slogan ‘The Homeland Must Be Defended’, amidst reports of preemptive detentions, selective communications blackouts and harassment of anti-government activists. The same day, President Trump signed an executive order tightening sanctions and stated that the United States would be “taking over” Cuba “almost immediately”, threatening that warships returning from Iran could take aim at the island and force a change of government. Gunboat diplomacy, plain and simple.

Meanwhile, the Cuban government is currently releasing thousands of prisoners, framed as a humanitarian gesture for Holy Week without acknowledging any direct link to negotiations with the US. However, Cuba has a documented history of treating prisoner releases as diplomatic bargaining chips. In any case, pardons have notably excluded anyone convicted of ‘crimes against authority’ and no political prisoners are currently set to be released.

Trump’s threats are emblematic of his attempted revival of the Monroe Doctrine, which asserts the United States’ unilateral right to intervene in the domestic affairs of its Latin American ‘backyard’ to maintain hemispheric and global dominance. Recent months have seen over 200 extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, along with the forced abduction of the sitting Venezuelan head of state, in flagrant violation of the UN Charter and international human rights law. Between the recent surge in US surveillance flights around Cuban waters, the indictment of Raúl Castro for conspiracy to murder, a strategic intelligence leak about Cuba’s drone arsenal, and a continued build-up of US naval forces in the Caribbean, it appears the US may be gearing up for further unprovoked aggression.

The redesignation of Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism on Trump's first day back in office once again isolated the country from international banking and trade. UN experts called it “a regressive step… for the human rights and well-being of the people in Cuba, with the most devastating impact on vulnerable groups, including women, children, older persons, and persons with disabilities.” Since January, the US has imposed a de facto oil blockade on the island, which human rights monitors have warned may amount to collective punishment of a civilian population.

Long before these latest escalations, the view from Havana was dire. Since 2022, over a tenth of the population has left the country. In June 2024, UNICEF included Cuba in its global report on child food poverty for the first time, finding that fewer than one in ten children had access to basic nutrition. In July 2025, only 30% of essential medicines were available. By September, the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights estimated that nearly 90% of Cubans were living in extreme poverty. October brought Hurricane Melissa, which devastated the lives of over 2 million people.

Now, UN relief efforts are severely hampered by lack of fuel. More than 100,000 people, including 11,000 children, are waiting for surgeries that cannot be performed, while newborns dependent on incubators and ventilators are at risk during blackouts which last more than eighteen hours a day. Millions lack reliable access to food or water. Schools and businesses remain closed, and uncollected refuse risks fueling deadly outbreaks of dengue fever and other mosquito-borne diseases.

UN Special Rapporteurs referred to the situation as “energy starvation as a coercive tool”, noting that “[b]y depriving a population of the energy required to run essential services, [the oil blockade] is obstructing Cuban people’s right to development and undermining their rights to food, education, health, and water and sanitation”.

While the US tightens its stranglehold on Cuba's economic infrastructure, the Cuban government has tightened its grip on dissent. Political repression is pervasive and systematic. Over a thousand political prisoners remain in detention, denied medical care, subjected to beatings and solitary confinement. Opposition activists, artists, intellectuals, students, journalists and human rights defenders are relentlessly surveilled, persecuted, and either banned from leaving the country or forced into exile. Women human rights defenders face gender-based abuses, including threats against their children and stigmatisation based on age, appearance or sexual orientation.

All human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated. Nowhere is this more evident than in Cuba. As the US piles misery on misery through sanctions with the aim of tearing apart the social fabric, the Cuban government responds to unrest with arbitrary detentions, unfair trials and disproportionate sentences against those who speak out. Both governments must immediately, unilaterally and unconditionally cease violating the rights of the Cuban people, whether they be to food, health and education or to freedom of thought, expression and assembly. Human rights are non-negotiable.

Amnesty International continues to demand that Cuban authorities release all those detained for political reasons and end systemic repression, but the Cuban government’s violations of democratic rights do not justify indiscriminate sanctions which harm civilians or armed intervention by the United States. Cuba’s future must be decided by the Cuban people.

International legal specialists have described the US’ use of extreme coercion targeting Cuba as “part of a disturbing trend of lawlessness and contempt of multilateralism and the UN Charter”, highlighting that “[t]he normalisation of coercion and threats of regime change undermines the integrity of the entire international legal order.” Recently, Amnesty’s Secretary General has warned that the rules-based global order is under sustained attack from “voracious predators”, and that most governments in 2025 chose appeasement over resistance. How the UK responds to the human rights crisis currently unfolding in Cuba will be a test of whether it has the courage to choose otherwise.

The UK must call on the United States to lift the energy blockade and back UN humanitarian efforts on the island. At the same time, it should press the Cuban government to release all political prisoners, grant those in exile the right of return, and end its repression of peaceful dissent.

I am launching an Activist-Led Campaign calling on the US to lift sanctions on Cuba and cease all threats of armed intervention, while pressing the UK to adopt a principled response to the crisis that rejects collective punishment and defends human rights.

Contact me at [email protected] to find out how you can help, and sign up to the community platform and follow the North America and Caribbean page for updates: https://community.amnesty.org.uk/c/countrycoordinators/namcar/167