Trump’s Numantia and a stain that will never wash away

The United States has invaded Venezuela and now besieges Cuba. Europeans and Canadians must find the courage to say: This must stop, says Stephen Wilkinson

In June 1992, as the Soviet Union’s collapse was driving Cuba into economic catastrophe, the Spanish archaeologist and historian Alicia María Canto wrote an extraordinary article in El País comparing Cuba’s predicament to that of Numantia, the ancient Iberian city besieged by Rome in 134 BC, whose citizens chose collective death over surrender. For ten years, the greatest military power on earth had failed to conquer the small hilltop settlement. When the Romans finally surrounded Numantia with trenches and palisades, cutting off all food and water, the inhabitants did not capitulate. Rather than surrender, they burned their city and themselves within it. Rome won, but no one disputed that victory came through starvation and brutality, not legitimacy or reason.

Canto’s article was prompted by the US at that time, which was then doing as Trump has done now, tightening the economic noose of the embargo and, knowing that the Cubans would behave like the ancient Numantians, her warning was instrumental in provoking the then Spanish government under the Socialist Felipe González to step in and aid the island. But hunger and blackouts caused problems in Cuba that led to the 1994 balseros crisis when some 35,000 Cubans took to the Florida Straits on makeshift rafts. That crisis prompted other countries with Caribbean interests to step up. The UK then under John Major’s government set up a trade initiative and the EU and Canada invested in Cuba to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe – Cuba endured.

Now, thirty-three years after Canto’s article, we are witnessing something far worse. And the context has changed dramatically. A few weeks ago, the United States invaded Venezuela, conducted airstrikes on Caracas, captured President Nicolás Maduro, and transported him to a federal detention centre in Brooklyn. Trump announced that America would now “run” Venezuela. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the architect of Washington’s Caribbean policy, who as a boy dreamt of leading an invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro, has already threatened Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia with similar treatment. The United States has bombed seven countries in the past year. It has withdrawn from sixty-six international organisations. It has threatened to annex Greenland from a NATO ally.

This is not normal statecraft. This is not even the usual American interventionism that Latin America has endured for a century and a half. What we are witnessing is something that Europeans, in particular, should recognise: the behaviour of a fascist state.

I use the term deliberately.

Consider what the United States is doing to Cuba against the standards of international law that it itself helped to craft after WW2.

Article 2 of the United Nations Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. The United States maintains an economic blockade explicitly designed to create hunger and deprivation among Cuba’s civilian population in order to produce regime change. This is collective punishment—prohibited under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Article 54 of Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions prohibits attacks on objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, including foodstuffs, agricultural areas, and drinking water installations. The US embargo deliberately targets Cuba’s ability to import food, fuel, and medicine. The State Sponsors of Terrorism designation, which even American officials privately acknowledge Cuba does not merit, has caused international banks under threat of fines to refuse transactions with the island, blocking even humanitarian shipments. Ships carrying food are turned away because no financial institution will process the payments. Oil shipments from Venezuela are literally stolen by the US and the contents sold with no accountability of where the money is going.

Consider that the UN General Assembly has voted to condemn the US embargo every year since 1992. Last year, the vote was 182 to 7. The international community has spoken with near unanimity. The US is wrong.

The humanitarian consequences are staggering. Since 2020, Cuba has lost nearly 2m million people to exodus. The population has collapsed from 11.3 million to 9.6 million. Between 2021 and mid-2024, over 860,000 Cubans reached the United States alone, more than the 1960s wave, the 1980 Mariel boatlift, and the 1994 rafter crisis combined.

Those who remain now face a systemic humanitarian emergency. Blackouts lasting over thirty hours. Water shortages extending for weeks. Hospitals unable to function. Schools and universities closed for long periods. The UN World Food Programme has received an unprecedented request from Cuba for nutritional aid.

No government on earth could provide adequately for its people under these conditions. Cuba imports eighty percent of its food. When the financial system refuses to process your transactions, when ships will not call at your ports, when spare parts cannot be purchased at any price, these are not failures of governance. These are the intended consequences of a policy designed to produce exactly this suffering.

The Trump administration believes that sufficient pressure will cause Cuba to collapse. Rubio and the Cuban-American hardliners in Miami, who drive this policy, have believed this for six decades. They have been wrong for six decades. But their error is not merely strategic, it is morally bankrupt.

What is being done to the Cuban people is not a policy. It is a crime against humanity conducted in slow motion, with full knowledge of its consequences. When millions of people are deliberately denied food and medicine, when children cannot access milk, when hospitals cannot function, when the explicit purpose is to create such misery that the population will overthrow its government, this is not sanctions policy. This is siege warfare.

The invasion of Venezuela has laid bare the savage truth. Trump announced that the United States would “run” Venezuela and exploit its oil. Defence Secretary Hegseth boasted that America could now access “additional wealth and resources” without “having to spend American blood.” Secretary Rubio, when asked whether the operation was legal, replied that it was justified by “the iron laws that have always determined global power.” Might makes right.

This is not democracy promotion. This is not human rights advocacy. This is fascism, the use of overwhelming military and economic power to dominate smaller nations, extract their resources, and punish any resistance.

While China and Russia have spoken out to defend Cuba, Europeans and Canadians have watched this unfold with inadequate alarm. There is a tendency to view American excesses as temporary aberrations, to hope that institutions will constrain the worst impulses, to trust that the arc of history bends toward justice. This is wishful thinking. The United States under Trump has withdrawn from the international legal order. It recognises no constraints on its behaviour. It has stated explicitly that it will use military force to reshape the Western Hemisphere according to its wishes.

The entire world must respond. And it needs to start at home. The UK and the European Union should refuse to comply with secondary sanctions that punish European companies for trading with Cuba. Canada should expand humanitarian assistance and diplomatic engagement with Havana. The international community should invoke every available mechanism to document and condemn what is being done to the Cuban people. Most importantly, our leaders must find the courage to say plainly what is happening: the United States is behaving as a rogue state, and its actions are incompatible with the international order that has maintained peace since 1945.

Cuba will not surrender. Anyone who knows the Cubans knows that they have a saying: “Aqui no se rinde nadie” (Here, no one surrenders). Their revolutionary slogan since the 19^th Century has been “Patria o muerte” (Homeland or death).

A collague on the island recently sent me this, which sums up the mood poetically:

We don’t feel like it. Period

“There are phrases that aren’t just words; they are condensed history, cries of dignity that traverse generations. “We don’t feel like being a Yankee colony” is one of them. It’s not an ephemeral political slogan, it’s the visceral expression of a principle that has cost blood, sweat, and tears to forge on this island.
To understand it, you have to look back. Cuba was born into the republic not from a clean birth, but with the shadow of the Platt Amendment and the boot of foreign intervention stepping on its newly declared sovereignty. Even then, the seed of resistance against Washington’s domination or tutelage was planted. What came after – decades of interference, support for dictatorships, Bay of Pigs, brutal economic blockade – only watered that seed until it grew like an oak tree in the national heart.
Today, that phrase summarizes the collective response to a pressure that reinvents itself. It’s not just a financial and commercial blockade, it’s also a media war that distorts, subtle destabilization campaigns, and the constant promise that if you give in, “relief” will come. The underlying message is clear: “Your destiny must pass through our permission.”
And yet… the response is a “no” that resonates from Havana to Maisí. A “no” that isn’t always easy, that is paid for dearly in daily life with unimaginable shortages and sacrifices for many. But it’s a conscious “no.” It’s the decision of a people who, having known dependency, value sovereignty above comfort. Who prefer the difficult path of building with their own resources, rather than the “easy” path of surrendering their national project.
This resistance isn’t uniform, nor is it free from criticism and discontent. Life in Cuba is complex. But amid that complexity, a deep, almost instinctive consensus persists against subjugation. It’s the same spirit that rose up in the independence struggles, and which today translates into enduring, creating, inventing, and persisting.
To honor that resistance is not to deny internal challenges. It’s to recognize the fundamental right of a people not to be subdued by external force, to choose their path, however difficult it may be, and to defend their right to exist as a free nation.
This is the essence. This is the ideological trench that, for better or worse, defines a fundamental part of being Cuban. A trench that isn’t taken with weapons, but with consciousness and historical memory.”

For sixty-five years, the United States has attempted to break this small island nation through invasion, assassination, terrorism, and economic warfare. This is the latest and most brutal attempt.

The cost will be enormous. People who are hungry, who are sick, will continue to flee in numbers that dwarf every previous exodus. The 1994 balseros crisis, which caused political panic in Florida, involved 35,000 people. The current exodus has already seen nearly one million Cubans reach the United States through various routes. With legal pathways now sealed shut, the Trump administration has terminated every humanitarian parole programme for Cubans, the pressure will find other outlets. Cuban rafters are already arriving in Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, Brazil. If this continues the Caribbean could be destabilised for a generation.

When the Trump era finally ends, however it will end, will our leaders look back and ask how they allowed this to happen? Will we find that European nations, cowed by fear, failed to speak the truth?

The truth is simple. What the United States is doing to Cuba is a crime. It violates international law, the UN Charter, and the Geneva Conventions. It is sustained not by any legitimate security interest but by domestic political calculations and ideological hatred. It is, in the precise sense of the word, an atrocity.

The Cubans will not surrender. But neither will history forgive the country that tried to starve them into submission, nor those who looked away.

Stephen Wilkinson is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Buckingham and Editor of the International Journal of Cuban Studies. The views expressed inb this article are his own and not necessarily that of the Institute nor the Journal.